Michaelson already mentioned in another thread he was getting really busy and was having to up his time for unlocking support from just 2 days to almost 5 days a week. Plus inks giving is not that far away na d he always seems to get a lot busier before then.
Also I want to say that the whole thing depends on if people get their ink free from ads(which is paid for by by the companies advertising- so prob oney a transfer fee is needed to be taken), Ad rev (which every website service will take their share) or if a reader buys it. And that the staff prefer to take it off the back end (or creator side) when it's done since they have transfer fees and the like to pay out.
Assuming I'm remembering it correctly, it makes more sense to take it off the back end (Like, I should mention Ko-fi, Pateron, and other services do). When a customer is buying stuff online, at the most they'll pay a dollar or two "convenience fee" to do this easily. If customers have to pay a charge for it plus tax for their area to get the ink, most won't want to do it and sales go down because they will feel ripped off. Meanwhile, it's accepted practice on most support programs that the creator will not get 100% of the cash that's been given. We are supposedly getting $12 a month on ours with Pateron (for example), but in reality? We get about $9ish bucks a month because of fees. Plus we lose a bit for transfer fees.
Most likely the way the money transfer is happening is like this. The money that is collected from readers when they buy ink goes into accounts payable because it's money they have to pay out, they don't get to touch that money yet because they don't know who it is going to. Once they know, they track where the ink came from (ad rev, free ink, or paid) and deposit it into the creators account. Most likely they use up whatever was bought last first (last in first out procedure), and then use the newer stuff. Once they have that sorted, they figure out the rate based on how you got it and take their share at that time.
So why inconsistency? Well some of us only do the free ink or paid ink. There are those, however, who do both. So, lets say it's 1/3 for paid and we don't know the free/earned ink yet so lets say it's 1/10 for the moment. Their deposit slip, if they had one, might look like this.
paid 200 (left over from giving to someone else)
earn 50
Paid 1600
earned 1000
So if they donated all that to one creator, the amount might look a bit different than say if someone had 2850 of just paid for or just earned ink.
To make this more complicated, I believe I heard there was a difference if they buy through the app vs on the computer. Why? Well tapas also has to give a cut to Apple and Microsoft for letting them use their platform (same goes for ad rev). Why else would those companies allow free to download but with micro transactions apps on their site. They get a cut of the ad rev and everything too,
Which, by the way, if we recall the Tapas staff is not allowed to say certain contract things between them and the app store. So Michaelson ma also be checking what he is ALLOWED to say under current contract terms concerning this issue.
There, said my piece and theory about this.