Patreon laid off 93 employees, roughly 20% of its workforce, on July 23, according to an internal memo from CEO Jack Conte that the company also shared publicly with creators on the platform.

In the memo, titled “A Painful Update about our Team,” Conte told staff the company is making two changes at once: a workforce reduction and a restructuring of “our organizational structure and how we work,” which he described as “flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities, and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change.”

Conte was explicit that artificial intelligence was not the reason for the cuts, while also acknowledging it as a factor in how the company now operates. “To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans,” he wrote. “The more we have learned to use these new tools, the clearer it has become that they are not substitutes for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades, nor do they replace the desire for human connection that all of us cherish so deeply.” 

He added that AI “has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.”

Conte told staff the company’s underlying business remains stable, pointing to more than 300,000 creators earning money on the platform and continued growth in creators, members, revenue, and processing volume. He attributed the cuts instead to broader market conditions, writing that “the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months,” requiring the company to adjust its cost structure to “remain a stable, dependable rock for our creators.”

Laid-off employees will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, remaining on payroll through the company’s August 20 vesting date, an additional week of pay for each full year worked, healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and a $1,500 stipend to replace their company laptop, among other benefits outlined in the memo.

A Pattern of Cuts

This marks Patreon’s second major round of layoffs since it reached unicorn status in 2020 and was valued at $4 billion in 2021. The company cut 80 employees, about 17% of its staff at the time, in September 2022. It now competes for creators against Substack, Beehiiv, YouTube’s built-in membership tools, and white-label subscription apps.

The layoffs also land amid a wider round of cuts across the Creator Economy this year: creator-commerce platform LTK reduced staff in February, and Meta, Snapchat, and LinkedIn have all cut jobs in 2026.

Earlier this month, Patreon announced a partnership with Cloudflare to block AI crawlers from scraping creators’ content without permission, a move the company framed as a network-level protection for creator work.

Sources: 404 Media, Business Insider

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