14 ms·

Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

• dragthor 7y ago
  Nice. A lot better than alcohol.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    well, users can also use buymeabeer.com if they like :)
    • tunesmith 7y ago
      that's pretty funny. :)
      • agustif 7y ago
        as a creator myself I would be interested in a buymeamacbook.com platform
        • jijosunny 7y ago
          lol ok i should add this to feature requests - https://building.buymeacoffee.com/feature-requests https://building.buymeacoffee.com/feature-requests
        • reaperducer 7y ago
          Can't you do that with an Amazon Wish List?
  • mc3 7y ago
    "But me a coffee" isn't literally coffee. It's a way of asking for $5 or so but making it sound more palatable as "well you are just buying a mate a coffee" which people normally do rather than "you are transacting $5 on the internet to a stranger" which people might be more reluctant to do. But the money won't be spent on coffee, otherwise the influencer will OD. "Buy me a chance to escape the rat race" might be a more accurate title.
• fredley 7y ago
  How do you differentiate from https://ko-fi.com/ https://ko-fi.com/? My partner has been using this for a year or so, and hasn't had much revenue.
  • jes5199 7y ago
    it's literally the same idea
    • herenorthere 7y ago
      I bet Google's founders are glad they didn't consult you first when they were creating a search engine.
      • s17n 7y ago
        They had a pretty easy to understand value proposition - “our results are more useful than existing search engines’”. “We have a different pricing model” is a lot less compelling. But it has worked before!
        • herenorthere 7y ago
          I'd respectfully disagree that that is the only difference. I've been through the BMC payment flow and would much prefer to use theirs over the competitor mentioned above. I wasn't even referring to the pricing model, although you're right, that is another difference too.
      • jes5199 7y ago
        we'd all be better off if Google didn't exist, and you know it
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Buy Me A Coffee is more than a simple donation button/link. We help creators set up memberships, publish members-only content, website widget and more. You can read the full comparison here - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ko-fi-alternative https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ko-fi-alternative That said, we're big fans of all creator monetization companies like substack, patreon, ko-fi, etc.
• adim86 7y ago
  Hi great story! I have been watching Buy Ma Coffee for a couple of years now and I had no idea it was a side project. How do you monetize Buy Me a Coffee? Do you just take a cut from the contributions made? or do you have a different model?
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    thank you! Yes, we take a 5% cut like Kickstarter.
    • alasdair_ 7y ago
      >thank you! Yes, we take a 5% cut like Kickstarter. So if someone donates $1, I would receive 95c in my bank account? How do you make money on this when Stripe is likely charging you quite a bit more than 5c in transaction fees?
      • Wouter33 7y ago
        They charge 5% besides any Stripe or Paypal fees. The users connect their own Stripe and Paypal accounts and Buy Me a Coffee charges a platform fee.
• NonDescriptName 7y ago
  This seems like a great service! I will definitely be setting up an account to cover the cost of running my podcast. If you don't mind me asking, What makes Buy Me a Coffee different from setting up a Patreon or a go fund me?
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    awesome - we'd love to have you on the platform! technically, the biggest difference is that you can also accept one-time payments using Buy Me A Coffee, and not just memberships. We see more than half of the payments from one-time contributions. More comparison here - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/patreon-alternative https://www.buymeacoffee.com/patreon-alternative
• ben_jones 7y ago
  The community feedback and rewards features are really interesting and remind me a lot of the Twitch model which is wildly successful. How do you plan to bridge the gap between user's eagerness to donate to a twitch streamer versus their historically poor record of donating to a blog via a donate button? I think its definitely possible but the form-factor of the content (video w/validation through a strong emotional reaction by the streamer versus the abyss of blog comments/email) really matters.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Twitch partially inspired many of our features. In fact, a big chunk of our active users are YouTubers who don't have a viable alternative to monetize directly (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=buymeacoffee.com https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=buymeacoffee.co...). Same with Instagram influencers and Podcasters. Our goal is to help them connect with their "superfans" through shout-outs, rewards, and exclusive content. To answer your question, we have seen that users are more eager to pay when creators host their best work on the platform. Here's an example - https://freebird.buymeacoffee.com/ https://freebird.buymeacoffee.com/
    • ben_jones 7y ago
      Appreciate the reply, and I do think this idea has legs if grown thoughtfully and realistically. Hope to be a happy user some day!
• OJFord 7y ago
  No pricing information before sign-up? It's not likely that this is a novel idea to anyone signing up, so the number one thing they want to know (surely?) is 'how much are you skimming'. Personally I'm not willing to sign-up first in the hope that maybe more 'how do I actually use this and what does it cost me' information is available afterwards.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    sorry for the confusion. It was there until we recently redesigned our homepage to focus more on our creators and less on the features. We're planning to add an FAQ section on the homepage.
    • flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
      >we recently improved our homepage to focus more on our creators and less on our features. I would reconsider that move imho. I doubt many contributors are going to browse the homepage and try to contribute. They will most likely only visit the subdomain of the contribution page they are trying to donate to. New registrants on the other hand, who are interested in your service and it's features, will most likely visit the homepage first.
      • jijosunny 7y ago
        >I doubt many contributors are going to browse the homepage and try to contribute. I agree. Our goal was to showcase the most common use-cases and types of creators who use us, and not for discoverability.
    • mfkp 7y ago
      So... what is the pricing?
      • jijosunny 7y ago
        We charge a 5% platform fee. This is on top of the payment processing fee charged by Stripe and PayPal.
• pryelluw 7y ago
  You really need to optimize tge landing page for mobile clients. Im using a powerful android phone and it struggles to load. Just shows a blank page. You should also remove the letter by letter animation on the headline. I don't have time to read all of nouns you have listed. Just cycle through whole words using a faster tick speed. And better yet, turn this landing page into a static one without any JS. Conversion numbers will be more reliable because people wont be quickly bouncing while waiting for the page to load.
  • RussianCow 7y ago
    > Im using a powerful android phone and it struggles to load. I'm on a powerful 8-core desktop with a dedicated GPU and the page really stutters while scrolling. I'm not sure what the deal is since there really isn't anything super graphically intensive on the page.
    • wizzwizz4 7y ago
      I don't use JavaScript and the page scrolled fine. No links worked, but it scrolled smoothly.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    We do! Sorry for the bad experience. It's a fairly new design implementation and we have a lot of work to do to optimize the homepage.
    • jijosunny 7y ago
      Fixed!
  • petters 7y ago
    Broken for me in latest mobile Chrome.
• liamcardenas 7y ago
  Congratulations on your announcement, I’ve been following you and Buy Me A Coffee for a while. If I remember correctly, you got accepted to YC with a different idea — some sort of podcast app. Can you explain why you decided to pivot back to Buy Me A Coffee?
  • ignoramous 7y ago
    > If I remember correctly, you got accepted to YC with a different idea That'd be Brew [0]: https://brew.com https://brew.com As for the pivot, I'm not sure it qualifies as a pivot since buymeacoffee.com predates brew.com. Separate businesses, and it seems to me they're simply re-announcing buymeacoffee again [1] and possibly shifting focus to make it the main product. Another YC company https://kyte.ai https://kyte.ai (AI for SMS inboxes) did that recently and pivoted to https://khatabook.com https://khatabook.com (Credit/Debit Book Keeping app for Indian SMBs) [2]. Of course, https://brex.com https://brex.com famously did the same, too (not launch with the idea they applied / did YC with) [3]. [0] https://www.ycdb.co/company/brew-com https://www.ycdb.co/company/brew-com [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16484040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16484040 [2] https://www.ycdb.co/company/khatabook https://www.ycdb.co/company/khatabook [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813
    • liamcardenas 7y ago
      Yes, which is why I said “pivot back”. It doesn’t seem like Brew is still a focus — and I’m curious /why/. Is it simply because BMAC already had adoption and a new podcast app is a hard sell? Is Brew still in development?
  • huangc10 7y ago
    Agreed. This is a little weird. I wonder if they got YC's "OK" to use the Launch HN tag with (YC W19) for a product that was not actually within the batch. It's a little deceiving.
    • liamcardenas 7y ago
• VarunNair 7y ago
  I have always made sure to recommend to my fellow influencer friends about Buymeacoffee and they are thanking me for a wonderful product you have implemented! Awesome work guys! Thank you team BMAC !
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    that's awesome - thank you so much!
• mdszy 7y ago
  So you've made ko-fi.com
  • cr3ative 7y ago
    But with VC funding!
• fasicle 7y ago
  I'm getting about 90% whitespace on the home page (using a Pixel 2). I have to scroll loads to get to the bottom 5% of content. Just an FYI
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    fixed -- thank you for taking the time to report this!
• emilsoman 7y ago
  Love the feature where creators can message their supporters. Congrats on the HN launch!
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    thanks - glad you like it! :)
• sarbaz 7y ago
  I am looking for a service that will allow me to directly pay creators at the same price as an ad impression, paying per page view. So far ways to pay creators are almost always based on dollar increments, but I would have much more use for a service that lets you pay in increments of $0.001. Today this is basically impossible because payment fees make direct payments of this scale impractical, but it could theoretically be solved the way the ad industry does - by paying a lump some once a month.
  • Wheaties466 7y ago
    Have you seen BAT and Brave? Seems like exactly what you're describing.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    Flattr did exactly this.
• _raul 7y ago
  The implementation looks pretty slick to me! If you're taking care of most/all the technical details, the only blocker that would prevent me from this kind of service is the unknown legal/compliance work I'd need to do in order to start taking this kind of money and have access to those users' data - is that something you can provide guidance on?
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    thank you, raul! yes, we have spent a fair bit of time to tackle these for our creators. Please drop me a line at jijo at buymeacoffee. We'd love to get you started!
• heymijo 7y ago
  > unobtrusive way to monetize their work I have seen this movie before and I know how it ends. [waves at Patreon] Help me understand why this a venture scale business and not a non-profit, a benefit corporation, a co-op or some other model I am unaware that does not demand venture-scale returns.
  • ambernightcrush 7y ago
    By connecting creative economy types online and across the globe with their audience so that they can more easily engage in transactions/commerce is the definition of "venture scale". The only thing that separates business from non-profit is the tax designation, and how much ROI you plan to make for yourself/funders/public.
    • heymijo 7y ago
      I see you getting downvoted, but I am fine with taking your comment at face value. Here's the problem. Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, etc are another middle man between creators and supporters. That's another mouth to feed on top of Stripe/PayPal and possibly a Credit Card Company. There is a very good reason PayPal has for eternity pushed/prodded and dark patterned users to death trying to get them to pay via bank transfer instead of credit card--credit card fees are business killers. Now, why does this matter? Even at venture scale, a Patreon/Buy Me a Coffee is the 2nd or 3rd middle man to the game. That means they need massive volume, but it's not enough. The perverse incentive cat is out of the bag and the good natured startup that just wanted to empower "creative economy types" starts doing all sorts of things that are in the company's best interest and not in its users' best interests. Here is an HN thread from 18 days ago discussing the Patreon's CEO view that "the company's generous business model is not sustainable." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550645 So I asked OP, in frustration because this seems like a failure to learn from history (very recent history at that!), but also in earnest--why should Buy Me a Coffee be a venture-backed business and not some other model.
  • Kiro 7y ago
    What's wrong with Patreon?
• herenorthere 7y ago
  Being in YC, I assume your plan is to be headquartered in the US, or at the very least, do business with US customers/entities. I notice your team doesn't involve any compliance people. As you probably already know, you are a MSB in the US, do you have plans to expand your required compliance policies? Does your team already file on any potential BSA/AML concerns? Or is this like a "when we get to that bridge we will cross it" type of thing? As you grow larger, regulators will inevitably take notice. And I know this is probably a super boring question for mist people here, but as someone who works in BSA/AML compliance for a tech startup MSB -- I am very interested to hear what you have to say regarding this! Love the site btw, the simplicity of the payment flow is A+. I could see this taking off.
  • seibelj 7y ago
    I’m sure they use a third-party payment processor who handles AML for them.
    • herenorthere 7y ago
      yeah good point. especially since they don't have a sign-up, makes me think they're more non-custodial in concept, which eases their AML requirements
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    first off, thank you for the kind words! Payment fraud and AML - we're a PayPal and Stripe Partner and do not hold the money that we process. We use their marketplace products to handle payments, fraud and compliance so that we can focus on the product.
    • alasdair_ 7y ago
      >Payment fraud and AML - we're a PayPal and Stripe Partner and do not hold the money that we process. We use their marketplace products to handle payments, fraud and compliance so that we can focus on the product. If someone pays with paypal, can I still get the money in my stripe account? If not, what's the main benefit over using your service versus just using paypal and stripe directly? Do I still need to create a paypal account and a stripe account to use your service?
• ronilan 7y ago
  I’ve been following Buy Me A Coffee since it publicly launched (not today) and it’s great to see that a side project can get support from YC. It’s not an easy space. I work winters as a snowboard instructor. Over a typical winter I’d teach literally hundreds of people. Every once in a while I’d get a gift card, if guest is American, I might even get a cash tip, but generally, it’s Snow School pay. So, I thought something like Buy Me Coffee might come handy... Being the summer software developer that I am, I ended up building something from scratch. It has a slightly different “flavor” than Coffee, mainly trying to make it work better in real-life interactions. But it’s in the same problem space. It’s here: https://www.feedback.land https://www.feedback.land Profiles look like this: https://www.feedback.land/ronilan https://www.feedback.land/ronilan I run the experiment last winter. I’d have printed “business cards” with QR codes in my pocket (app makes a printable version for you) and I’d hand them out at the end of lessons (mittens snowflakes and all). Bottom line. Got some feedback. That’s it ;) Might give it another try this winter, but I’m generally off to other interests. If anyone has interest in the product/software (node/Mongo/react) contact is in HN profile.
  • herenorthere 7y ago
    cool idea. I always thought it would be awesome to figure out IRL non-cash tipping edit: and somehow make it not awkward, cumbersome, or time-consuming
    • coachtrotz 7y ago
      There's a company called Mezu which does this - you'll never reveal your identity or personal info the people you tip and vice versa. https://www.mezu.com/ https://www.mezu.com/
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    love it! and thank you for being an early user!
  • ronilan 7y ago
    To the stranger who left me feedback with an astute observation (but no email). The box Abe is building won't work. He's got it wired wrong. And if they fix that I’ll start actually taking pieces out of it. It's just a gimmick. It doesn't work anymore. Your double will say they have to move on to something else. And mine will agree. They're friends. It’s been a decade.
• spike021 7y ago
  If Patreon were to add a feature to do one-time, no sign-up required contributions to any of the orgs currently using it, would this be survivable for you? Do you have ideas of ways to increase value to make using your service over others more worthwhile or is the one-time, no sign-up required contribution process the primary feature right now?
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    that's a great question! broadly, I think it's an overkill for certain types of creators (say an Instagrammer or Twitch streamer) to launch a Patreon. Buy Me A Coffee is a far more casual and friendly way to accept contributions from your fans. We also differentiate from Patreon in a lot of ways. For e.g., creators love that we're putting fans/supporters in the front-and-center (like Twitch), which also encourages more contributions.
    • rvnx 7y ago
      A copy of Patreon to encourage your favorite creators to get addicted to a substance that has very negative side-effects when you quit it. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-is-how-your-brain-becomes-addicted-to-caffeine-26861037/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-is-how-yo... Well done.
• hluska 7y ago
  Holy shit, you folks have gotten a lot of negativity out of HN today. I don’t have anything negative to say. Congratulations on making it into YC and getting to launch! You’ve got a great story. I’m about to launch something that could use this. I’ll sign up in a few days. Best of luck and congratulations on your launch!!
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    haha, thank you so much! I'm at jijo@buymeacoffee if you have any questions while setting up your page.
• mrwebmaster 7y ago
  Been using it for a while and like it so far. A downside for me is that from every $3 coffee paid by supporters, I only receive $2.39 in my Paypal account :(
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    True, the payment processing fee for micro-transactions is pretty high. PayPal and Stripe charge a flat $0.30 + 2.9%. We designed the 'pay what you want' model on Buy Me A Coffee to tackle this problem.
  • alasdair_ 7y ago
    >Been using it for a while and like it so far. A downside for me is that from every $3 coffee paid by supporters, I only receive $2.39 in my Paypal account :( Their pricing page claims the fee is only 5%. Is this not true?
    • ryanmercer 7y ago
      From what I've read in this thread it sounds like: Donor $ -> PayPal/Stripe, subtract Coffee's taste with Coffee never touching the donor's money per their comments in this thread -> Creator's PayPal/Stripe minus any PayPal/Stripe fees. I'm guessing that's just PayPal taking their cut from the creator on top of Coffee taking their cut. It looks like they had an idea, got into YC, then were like "eh, let's just be Patreon 2: Electric Boogaloo." and then did the payment processing the simplest way they could. This effectively makes it: "Don't pay the creator via PayPal/Stripe, instead let us act as a pseudo-affiliate and go ahead and keep 5% of that for ourselves and then we'll tell PayPal/Stripe to pay the donor for you. In exchange we'll tell people that visit our website that you supported the creator". It appears they add no value to the transaction that can't already be obtained from Patreon. They're just a much smaller outfit, with a horribly buggy website with partially baked features and apparently consistently unpleasant mobile experience.
    • jijosunny 7y ago
      We charge a 5% platform fee. This is on top of any transaction fees charged by PayPal or Stripe.
• alasdair_ 7y ago
  How do the instant payments work? Is my paypal going to get shut down for months due to a "fraud" alert being triggered from having tons of random payments sent to me? This seems like a great way to quickly cash out stolen credit card numbers to a bank account - how do you differentiate between something like that and simply a creator that got to the front page of Reddit and had a huge spike of legitimate traffic? If you fall over in the latter case, I'd be extremely pissed. (And if your answer is to rely on Stripe's fraud detection, it's very likely they will block exactly this kind of spike in usage from an otherwise unknown account). Finally, can you actually make money from a credit card payment of $1 when you only charge a 5% fee?
• 0xCAFCAF 7y ago
  Hey, just wanted to let you know your developers page is not working: https://developers.buymeacoffee.com/ https://developers.buymeacoffee.com/
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Hey there, thanks for letting me know. Developer features are in beta -- I have removed the link from the footer.
• tomaskafka 7y ago
  > Membership-only content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs :)
• securingsincity 7y ago
  I've been a user for over a year. It has worked well for people to use as an alternative to github sponsors and open collective. When i joined i got a single letter vanity page... https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j probably not what they would have intended...
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    :) yeah, we stopped accepting usernames with less than 3 chars, but thank you for being an early user!
• amerine 7y ago
  Nice! I tried something similar with pint.me a long time ago with some friends in Bend.
• interactivecode 7y ago
  What is your motivation of doing YC now? and how do you plan to scale your market share?
• ankeshk 7y ago
  This hits me with nostalgia. I had made the first buy me a beer / coffee plugin for the wordpress ecosystem back in 2007. People consistently were earning more from donations than from adsense through the plugin. The idea wasn't originally mine. Paul Myers on the warriorforum used to have "buy me a beer" in his signature. I just ported it to wordpress. Its amazing to see you guys doing well.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    whoa, it's great to hear from you. I'm pretty sure I've used your plugin on one of my blogs. thank you!
• danShumway 7y ago
  When I click the signup link, I get a message that by signing up, I agree to your terms. But I don't see a link to those terms in the message, and I can't find a link to those terms anywhere else on the main page. I also can't find your privacy policy. A couple of questions on that front: - Do your terms include mandatory arbitration agreements for creators? - Do your terms include mandatory arbitration agreements for tippers? - Your signup link mentions that you ban adult content. Do you have a clear definition somewhere of what adult content is, or is this following the "know it when we see it" model of platforms like Patreon and Steam? On the privacy policy front: - What personal information do you require on signup (for creators and tippers). Can I tip someone without providing them my address/phone number? Can I create an account without providing you my address/phone number? On the general feature front: - The site mentions that I can create webhooks, but doesn't mention whether there's a general API for things like adding posts, updating pledges, etc... This is my biggest personal problems with Patreon -- their interface isn't particularly great, and I can't automate any of the stuff I need to regularly do, so as a result I mostly ignore it or try to handle all of my reward tiers outside of the platform. But on a wider, less personal level, it's also a way to make it harder to migrate between funding platforms and to increase lock-in.
  • smeyer 7y ago
    Mousing over the word "Terms" in "By signing up, you agree to our Terms." on the sign up page linked me to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/terms https://www.buymeacoffee.com/terms .
    • Stratoscope 7y ago
      Mousing over doesn't work on mobile, of course. But "Terms" is a link, so tapping it on mobile works. But... The link is styled identically to normal text, both on desktop and mobile! There is no way to know that it is a link until you actively interact with it.
  • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    > Your signup link mentions that you ban adult content. Do you have a clear definition somewhere of what adult content is, or is this following the "know it when we see it" model of platforms like Patreon and Steam? It's a little dismaying that so few -- quite possibly zero -- mainstream creator-payment platforms like this are comfortable with adult content. Patreon seems to still be trying to thread that needle, but there's a near-annual ritual of "OMG Patreon is cracking down the porn" panic. Ko-Fi explicitly (ahem) changed their policy to disallow NSFW content and BMaC here seems to be starting with SFW-only in place. And, yes, I know the fingers are always pointed at the payment processors here, but that just shifts the question as to why payment processors do this. We're not talking about 1-900 numbers or adult video stores in the divey-ist parts of downtown that are going to face chargeback after chargeback as a cost of doing business; is there truly a good business case for Stripe and PayPal policing somebody's patronage of risqué catgirl comics or what have you?
• elietoubi 7y ago
  Awesome stuff ... looks great! Tiny bug when I go to: https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/ https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/ and I press the burger icon and explore creators then I get a 404. Hope that helps and keep kicking asses!
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    noted, thank you!
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  Does "buy me a coffee" support, or plan to support, the option to send money directly to charities rather than creators? I feel like this would make both the creator and the consumer feel their money is doing the most good, as it's both thanking the creator and helping someone in need at the same time. Part of that could be to create a new class of payee, and then add an integration so that a creator can internally redirect payments to a particular payee. As part of the redirect you register something separate from a "payment" that you would display for the creator's page ("N people have donated Z dollars to Y on behalf of X"), and then the final payee would also have its own independent "payment" register ("N people have donated Z dollars to Y"). Don't know what the tax implications (if any) would be.
• cwkoss 7y ago
  Reading https://www.buymeacoffee.com/terms https://www.buymeacoffee.com/terms These potentially seem like some fairly onerous restrictions, and would potentially exclude nearly all of my favorite youtube channels. What is your definition of "creators who involve with:" - does this only cover content posted on your site, or any content the creator makes across any publicly available service? To what extent can creators discuss these topics if they don't actively manufacture/promote/distribute them? Could you be more specific about creators that are "involved in weapons" - is this anything that can be used as a weapon or specific to military/semi-military applications? Would Joerg Sprave's slingshot channel be prohibited? What about someone who makes videos about forging/sharpening knives? Are creators who discuss war journalistically or historically disqualified? Non-miltary RC drone hobbyists like Tom Stanton? "Chemicals" seems pretty vague. Does this preclude all chemistry and biochem related content? I'm a big fan of channels like NileRed, CodysLab and ThoughtEmporium, would they be prohibited? Would videos which discuss water treatment or concrete chemistry or metallurgy be disqualifying? "seeds or plants" - are creators who discuss gardening or farming disqualified? Cooking vegetables? Primitive Technology-style makers which discuss creating objects from plant materials? How do you define "adult" content? Does this include creators working on LGBTQIA activism? Does this include creators who create instructional content while showing non-nipple cleavage? Does this include creators involved in sex-ed/harm reduction campaigns? Also, are there any geographic restrictions? Can creators outside the US use your service (in countries which are NOT on the US OFAC sanction list)?
  • el_dev_hell 7y ago
    > Can creators outside the US use your service (in countries which are on the US OFAC sanction list)? It looks like both payment processor integrations (PayPal and Stripe) are US based, so I think it's safe to assume there will be restrictions on sanctioned countries.
    • cwkoss 7y ago
      Oops, dropped the NOT when rephrasing for clarity, thanks - fixed.
  • 7y ago
• romwell 7y ago
  >We do not allow adult content I just expressly wanted to un-thank you for this. Sincerely hope you would either change this - or fail. It's 2019, and "adult" content creators could do with less of this nonsense. Erotic content creators (let's call things what they are) drink coffee too.
  • HatchedLake721 7y ago
    I don’t believe it’s up to them, but their payment processor. E.g. if you would use Stripe for adult content, you wouldn’t be able to process any payments at all quite quickly.
  • Babiker 7y ago
    No, it's ok, we've had enough of your filth. I, on the other hand, would like to thank them for this.
    • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
      > your filth That got personal, I like selling adult books like Don Quijote, Brave New World and 1984... but keep getting banned on other platform.
    • munmaek 7y ago
      Why such a puritanical view? When payment providers rescind access at whim, nobody wins.
    • romwell 7y ago
      >No, it's ok, we've had enough of your filth 1. Who is "we"? 2. What my filth? 3. Game of Thrones, until the unfortunate last season, has been one of the most successful ever, and it was notorious for "adult" content (read: sex and violence). It is mainstream. So please get off the high horse, there is clearly enough demand and acceptance of "adult" content in mainstream culture. Individual artists would benefit from the ability to get paid in the case they don't luck out and get HBO to back them, though.
    • serf 7y ago
• FpUser 7y ago
  Among the other things their terms say something in tune of: If you hurt us in any way you are liable for damages If we hurt you: f.. off, tough luck
• kerkeslager 7y ago
  I really hope this is the way content creation funding goes in the future.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Connecting with the audience directly is always a great outcome for creators!
• yosefzeev 7y ago
  I'm not sure "useful content" should be the only metric. Think of all the things you learn in school that you think are useless until later.
• primitivesuave 7y ago
  I did a similar project for a hackathon several years back, we made a service that let you buy someone a drink (presumably alcoholic) at a bar near where they live. Creators would choose the bars and patrons would sponsor a beer/wine/etc at a particular bar. We would recover payment processing fees from bars which would sell us drinks at a significant discount (so the $5 beer you bought for someone cost us $2 - $3). We incentivized bar owners by pointing out that most people would only be redeeming one or two drinks, after which they would likely pay for additional ones. Thankfully none of us quit our day jobs to pursue the idea - aside from personally receiving ~$200 of free drinks at an SF bar where we knew the owner (presumably funded by hackathon participants who enjoyed our presentation), we couldn't get bars to sign up - nobody wanted to train their bartenders on how to accept our virtual drink coupons, especially without a guarantee of a large audience. We did sign up a couple content creators, which is how we learned that even a large following doesn't translate to much patronage.
• mikekchar 7y ago
  As someone who will eventually have to deal with this, is there an advantage to using "Buy Me A Coffee" over just implementing a Stripe/Pay Pal interface for myself (assuming I have the skills and time to do so)? I'm mostly interested in payment workflow discussions. I actually don't care about sales/marketing possibilities.
• st3fan 7y ago
  Does this work in Canada? I like coffee.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Yes!
• emptysongglass 7y ago
  Creators are already getting nickel and dimed. One of my big things when I was managing musicians (really my friends whose work I loved) was I continually refused to step into the that thick miasma of profiteering others in the industry practiced. Many musicians, for example, make less than 50 percent on distribution deals with their labels. I'm leading with this because 5 percent on top of CC payment processors' 30 cents + 2.whatever% is completely unethical from where I'm standing. You can integrate Fosspay [1] with fewer bells and whistles but totally free except for CC processors' cut (exorbitant as that in itself may be). We need to stop inserting ourselves between creators and their money. It isn't worth whatever valuation we're fetching and it doesn't justify making us rich while creators gratefully accept their pittance. [1] https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay EDIT: The word "free" is tossed around so frequently on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ko-fi-alternative https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ko-fi-alternative I feel I have to re-check my own reality of what free means. The service is very much not free when the price is being extracted from every purchase a customer makes.
  • mgraczyk 7y ago
    This is essentially a Luddite argument. This particular product isn't going to be "inserting" itself anywhere, it's just a new way for creators to get paid. Over time, products like this expand the number of "creators" who actually get paid and make it easier to scale to bigger audiences. Nobody is stopping you from putting your hat out on the street or signing with a huge label like you'd likely have to do a few decades ago.
    • Semiapies 7y ago
      And nobody's going to help money get from consumers to creators for free.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Hey, this is Jijo from Buy Me A Coffee. Thanks for the feedback! We believe 5% is a reasonable fee to build and maintain a platform that allows creators to connect with their audience and generate more income. One way to look at it is the % of additional revenue they earn because of Buy Me A Coffee.
• mr_puzzled 7y ago
  I came across your twitter profile a couple of times, wasn't it called brew before? It was initially something like a patreon clone then became a podcasts app if IIRC and now it looks like you're back to buy me a coffee. Can you talk a little about the journey of what you learned through the different pivots and what you learned along the way? Can you also talk about your experience in YC? Good luck.
• teamigo 7y ago
  There are already two "buy me a coffee" websites - Open Collective and Patreon - for any project other than (or used by) Webpack and Babel.
• tomcooks 7y ago
  I cannot find any info about rates, or how expensive this is
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    We charge a 5% platform fee. So if you earn $50 on Buy Me A Coffee, we'll take $2.5 as our cut.
• Mojah 7y ago
  I've been using this for a few days now on my own blog [1], but so far it isn't "catching on". That is to say, the revenue I seem to be making from a donation system like this is still many times smaller than a traditional advertising system or promotion of reflink services. This isn't an issue with Buy Me a Coffee, I think it's a fundamental issue with how we perceive value of things we read & ingest online. It's hardly ever apparent how much time the author spent on a piece and the consumption of it might only take 2 minutes. Most people don't value online content to be valuable - after all, anyone can do it - right? In my case, with ~10.000 pageviews/day (mostly helpdesk-style articles) I get about 1 coffee donation per day. Detract any costs by CC processor and the service itself, and what's left is about 0.70€ (that's 70 cents). [1] https://ma.ttias.be/blog/ https://ma.ttias.be/blog/
  • BilalBudhani 7y ago
    Nice personal site. I like the design.
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Hey, I just came across your tweet [1] and wanted to say that we think about this a lot. The most effective way to attract more contributions is to offer something extra or exclusive. Obviously, this is not possible for everyone, so we designed Buy Me A Coffee in a way that every supporter and their comment gets featured on the top. We then notify the creators and encourage them to reply. This way, the act of supporting itself becomes the reward. Thanks again for the feedback, and thank you for your blog! [1] https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar/status/1202111712264163328 https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar/status/1202111712264163328
• fabstei 7y ago
  Buy Me a Coffee tells exactly the kind of story that DLT (blockchain) startups often tell - connect creators with their fan base etc., just the "let's cut out the middlemen" is obviously missing. I totally get why you'd go for Stripe to build a mature, scalable product open to as many users as possible. But just out of curiosity: did you spend some time thinking about DLT to cut out middlemen, did you actively decide against it, are you experimenting with it - what's your stance?
• zyx321 7y ago
  Okay, deep breath, this will be unpleasant. 1. Do you ban creators for "hate speech"? 1b. If yes: What is "hate speech"? 2. Will you ban creators for content published outside your platform? (e.g. erotic content published on other platforms but not mentioned in their BmaC profile) 3. Will you ban creators for content completely unrelated to your platform? (e.g. drunken Twitter rants)
• gaoryrt 7y ago
  Great work, thank you!
  • jijosunny 7y ago
    Thanks!
• chrshawkes 7y ago
  5% fee + "Payment processing fees charged by PayPal and Stripe are also applicable." So a donate button from paypal is equivalent but the creator can save 5%?