What Patreon had been doing up to that point was if a patron pledged more than one creator, then Patreon would submit a single charge to the payment processor for the total amount that patron owed all of the creators they had pledged for that month.
What they proposed to do instead was run a charge for each creator a patron supported. A patron who pledged three creators would be charged three times in a month.
That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is. Because the fee structure of the payment processors includes, in addition to a percentage rate, a per transaction flat fee of $0.30.
And because the average patron pledge across Patreon is less than $2.