“Hello, This is Patreon’s Trust & Safety Team. Your Patreon features material that falls outside the bounds of our Community Guidelines and has been removed. Offering works promoting inauthentic initiatives including, but not limited to tutorials for engaging in illegal activities, third-party services that artificially inflate metrics, or access to piracy software, is not permitted on Patreon. Using Patreon to host or distribute, malicious or destructive software is also not permitted. Additionally, infringing on the intellectual property rights of others is prohibited on Patreon. Please find one or more examples of violations that contributed to this decision below: Post: “Iribitari Gal – 03 (English Subtitles)”, January 30, 2026 Post: “Sister – 03 (English Subtitles)”, March 1, 2026
Outstanding funds related to prohibited projects will be refunded to fans as appropriate.
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What this ultimately means is that we have lost all of the funds that were collected through Patreon. Since we never withdrew any money from the account, the entire balance accumulated since the very beginning of this project will now be refunded to supporters. In practical terms, this means that every bit of support that had been building up over time has effectively been erased overnight.
To be completely honest, this decision is deeply disappointing. Patreon presents itself as a platform meant to support creators, yet in situations like this it can completely wipe out months of accumulated support in a single step. Regardless of the effort, time, and work that went into maintaining the project, all of that support can simply vanish due to a unilateral decision.
For me personally, this is a huge setback. The project required a significant amount of time, effort, and dedication, and the financial support meant a lot and was a great motivational factor. Seeing everything removed and refunded like this is incredibly discouraging.
At this point, it is clear that Patreon is no longer a viable platform for this project going forward. We will have to reassess our options and consider alternative ways (?) If you have any suggestions for alternative platforms or ideas for other ways to fund the project, I would genuinely appreciate hearing them.
upd. https://www.patreon.com/SharingAnimes is gone too, meaning the patreon team was aware of our existence and just suddenly decided to ban us all in one go.
I get why you’re frustrated, it really does suck to put in that much work and have the rug pulled out from you. But I want to gently push back on something, because I think there’s a slight disconnect here that, if addressed, might actually make things less stressful for you in the long run. You call it a “fansub” project, and I know you’ve poured time and heart into it. However, the traditional spirit of fansubbing is “by fans, for fans” it’s a gift to the community, born out of love for a show. When releases are locked behind a paywall for a week before going public, it starts to feel less like a gift. Seeing the return of legendary SakuraCircle has been a breath of fresh air for a lot of people precisely because it feels like a return to that classic, community-first priority. The time and skill you put in are real, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting that effort to be recognized, or even with accepting donations to offset costs. But if the financial support was the major motivational factor, to the point that having those funds pulled back makes the project feel like a “setback” rather than just an annoyance, it might be time to consider whether this path is is fueling your passion or slowly draining and breaking it. You do great work. Just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons for you, because the moment it becomes about the money, the hobby starts to feel like a job, and jobs come with way more headaches.
“When releases are locked behind a paywall for a week before going public, it starts to feel less like a gift.”
I think you are misunderstanding on how AmateurSubs operates. Not a single finished hentai release is behind a paywall, we post WIPs on Patreon, which require QC and fixing. Once it gets QC (usually done by me or prima), it gets posted to Nyaa and this website. Free.
The reason we post WIPs on Patreon is to reward those that were paying, but again, they are unfinished, they are drafts. It’s to show what we are working on.
“But if the financial support was the major motivational factor…”
Again, we got zero from Patreon during a whole year of operation. We wanted to use it to buy shows ourselves, the ones that are indie (incl motion ones), old DVDs for dvdrips, and the ones with web-releases that are being gate-kept. We know that people are into fast releases over slow and carefully crafted releases. We are a fansub group spending a lot of hours on these, we care about quality, but the majority of users prefer machine-translated releases, or fast human-made releases with mistakes that require QC. We are a team of unpaid fansubbers, and quite honestly, we are “niche” because the audience for “quality subs” is very small, and we just so happen to be the only one doing subs on hentai so that the audience for “fast human releases” are with us. But now that another fansubber joined the scene, the audience for “fast human releases” is fading away, which is why this funding is very crucial to us, because we always had the option to buy indie/dvd/motion hentai and do the things we like at our own pace, but now our funding is gone for that.
For comparison, in the anime community, a lot of fansub groups died because Crunchyroll did fast day-0 subs. It’s fun to do subs, but it’s not fun to do subs when most users aren’t interested and don’t show support. The fansub sites that were filled with many comments started to have no comments, and then almost no audience. Eventually the torrents die and become lost forever. You then start to wonder if these silent website visitors are human or bots.
We never know what can happen next year, maybe people stop watching our subs and our team (all volunteers) lose interest completely. We had many people come and go, and each is extremely good at something, while not so good at other things, making them dependant on team members. Fansubbing isn’t just translating after all.
Each member has their own motives, and none have been paid so far, meaning no one is money-driven, it’s all a hobby. But some are team members-dependant and others are feedback-dependant. After all, we sub shows that we personally like, and then some that the community likes. All done in our free time, with zero donations in our pockets.
All this to say that, we had a Patreon page just like SakuraCircle, and even though we were getting less monthly than Sakura, and none in our pockets at all, we kept going for a year. We are also a team of many volunteers, not a single individual.
“Seeing the return of legendary SakuraCircle has been a breath of fresh air for a lot of people […]The time and skill you put in are real, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting that effort to be recognized, or even with accepting donations to offset costs. But if the financial support was the major motivational factor, to the point that having those funds pulled back makes the project feel like a “setback” rather than just an annoyance, it might be time to consider whether this path is is fueling your passion or slowly draining and breaking it.”
… and this is the kind of recognition we get for our effort. “We are money-driven and not doing it out of passion” when we got nothing out of it, and our side-project is gone, at the time when we are losing our “fast human releases” audience. I didn’t write this blogpost, but this is indeed a huge setback.
– Oceania
I think if that’s been made clear on a post it would have helped perception how the project has been going since as far as alot of people are concerned people working on this were being paid.
When everyone has been used to SakuraCircle putting out high quality subs for free within few days of a new release for over 5+ years the change to waiting a week+ for it ( I seem to recall this was in a old post ) doesn’t sit well.
“Amateursubs” as a name doesn’t help with the perception ether it gives off the impression you guys aren’t doing a good job no matter good it is.
Might I suggest you give yourselves a small change to your name and post a SHORT description of where the money is going and why it matters, I think you’ll find people more willing to help out once they understand.
Subscribestar, OnlyFans, pixivFANBOX, and Itch.io, are the other adult creator payment sites I know of.
Yeah, not really sure why anyone with 2 functioning brain cells thought Patreon was the way to get paid for committing anime piracy.
You can couch it in any warm fuzzy positive terms you want, that’s what it is. No different today than it was 30 years ago. Except then there was real effort – costs of time, labour and actual money to produce subtitles, and duplicate and mail video tapes around the world.
If patreon had problem with piracy, then they should have removed your account on day 1. Not after funds have been accumulated for quiet some time. A very insidious practice & shameful.
Maybe SubscribeStar or Ko-fi, I think those are usually the places creators usually choose after they get fed up with Patreon. Also, some creators do more than one platform simultaneously, you don’t technically have to choose just one platform to post on and get subscribers on. Either way, whatever you choose, I’ll keep supporting you. Hope you keep doing thy holy work and thank you for everything you’ve done so far!
Thank you for your kind words!
If crypto was the only option, would it be hard for you guys? We could suggest a list of platforms to use and/or some tutorials.
Not sure about other people, but personally for me, crypto is a bit of a hassle. I don’t really use crypto anymore, so for me it means buying crypto especially, which is something I rather not do, unless I really have to.