The past month or so has been an intense and difficult time for the business, When we started the restoration it was much easier however things change. Also when we were starting out on YouTube it was something that was new and fun to do. Back when it started there was no Membership offers so we turned to Patreon for membership to aid the income and boost the community.
We have been using Patreon since 2018 to create a community and support us, In this time there has been a lot of changes to the platform making it a much better platform to share and create content on. Then we got membership on YouTube and we decided to run these side by side.
At first to create member only content we would have to unlist it and post links to Patreon which was a massive pain, This a few years ago was a cause for us wanting to stop Patreon as it was a fuss to do, Then we gain YouTube membership which then required us to either upload it twice or make it hard for members on YouTube to access the video which at the time YouTube had the feature to list the video only for members. This would show the video for everyone but without a YouTube membership it would keep it locked.
This lead us again to wanting to stop using Patreon as it became an even bigger pain, But as we was deciding this Patreon came out with the ability to upload content directly to their platform making life a little easier but was still requiring us to upload content twice to two different platforms.
Over this time the numbers on Patreon has fallen due to the lack of activity on the platform even though we posted every week the content writing and making additional content was a problem and when we did it could easily be missed by our members.
In June 2025 with just 6 paid members on the platform supporting us we decided to host a poll asking if members would consider switching over to YouTube membership if we was to close Patreon membership. 3 of the 6 members answered this poll which might show how many of our 6 was truly active on the platform. All 3 members said Yes.
This sealed the fate for Patreon, after a meeting within our directors and other parts of the backend team that helps create the content. It was decided that for the ease of content creation and engagement with the community we are able to turn to YouTube only and the post that we use to do on Patreon we can switch to Discord which is a basic benefit to post text and image updates there would be very little loss to us. What we would loose we would gain in the ability to spend more time creating content and focusing our time in one place rather than spreading ourselves over many different platforms.
This is something we are working on and improving as we are going on. Our aim is to create a brilliant community and membership that is cheap and affordable.
Many want to help with bus preservation and want there own but unable to afford it as it really isn’t cheap. Our cheap membership allows members to have a input into saving the history of vehicles without the massive headache.
We will just use this as an example, YouTube and Patreon at the time of setting up recommends the cheapest tiers should be around £5 we don’t follow this and the lowest tier is 99p and highest at just 4.99 in some places you can’t even get a cup of tea for 99p.
A downside to this choice however is 1. YouTube unlike Patreon take a larger cut of the membership. 2. Patreon offer to payout any amount but YouTube is min £60. So we have to have a lot more members to get that amount. Our choices in the tier prices also reflect the amount of content we post and do.
So in short we regret to inform that from July 1st 2025 Patreon will be Closing down and all memberships will be though YouTube. Most text updates and images will be posted via discord which you can join using Discord.mancbuses.com this contains the invite. If you are a member you should auto be enrolled into the roles to allow access to extra parts of the chats. If this isn’t the case you can ask in Help or send us an email and we can sort it out.
We hope this clears up some answers but you are free to ask questions and we will respond.
Jordan