Dear god I missed that. What the hell? What happens if the site doesn't hit its goals like 3 months in and that guy still paid the 7,500$ upfront or 3 payments of 750$?
What should happen? An invitation to Pachter's has no real value (as in: you aren't actually causing any significant costs by visiting Pachter), so I'd assume that those people would get invited regardless. I doubt Pachter is the kind of jerk who'd say: "Nope, you only paid $2.000 before we closed the Patreon, no invite for you!"
I wonder what happens if you've got to stop your contribution halfway through, though. Being left with nothing after you've already paid several thousand dollars would be pretty bad -- I don't think using Patreon to pay something in installments is a smart idea, honestly.
The Patreon goal is insanely discouraging, and makes it feel like pledging is essentially throwing money into a pit (even though I know they usually don't charge upfront.) I also feel like the insane delay between the SOS call and this random Tuesday launch was a really bad mistake, but I'm not an expert by any means.
I don't quite understand what people expected. People told Shane for months that he should use Patreon as it's supposedly a great platform for this sort of thing. Now he's started a Patreon and all of a sudden people are surprised that running a proper business costs a ton of money? Well, duh.
They apparently bleed money for a long time, so instead of setting an unrealistically low goal, they should focus on a goal that actually pays the bills. If they can't reach that, it's probably more reasonable to abandon this project for good, before the people involved drown in debt.