We’re Joseph, Aleesha, and Jijo, the founders of Buy Me A Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com). We make it super easy to accept contributions and recurring memberships from your audience.
A bit of backstory - Joseph and I grew up in India. When I was 12, I started making a little bit of money from my blog, and it had a huge impact on my life. I got to buy books and gadgets, pay for web hosting, none of which I could’ve afforded otherwise. We built our first product in 2010. It was an ad network for bloggers called AdIndigo. There were a bunch of Adsense alternatives doing well at that time, and it grew to serve 6 million impressions at its peak. We later had to shut it down because of the expenses. Buy Me A Coffee is our third (and only successful) attempt at building for the creators.
When we started working on Buy Me A Coffee as a side project, it was a quick way to spin up a page or a button to accept one-time contributions. For artists, OSS developers, and YouTubers, it was an unobtrusive way to monetize their work. They appreciated the simplicity and friendly branding and started requesting more features. Some even noticed that they’re getting more contributions compared to a Patreon or PayPal button. It’s probably because of the no-signup-required payment flow. Supporters also get to leave a note after the payment, and it ends up becoming this ‘wall of love’ for creators.
Today, you can do a lot more with Buy Me A Coffee. You can accept recurring payments and give rewards in return. For e.g. Maria Shriver is using Buy Me A Coffee to monetize her newsletter ‘The Sunday Paper’ (https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/) with a link in the footer of every edition. Slowly (https://slowly.buymeacoffee.com/) is a self-funded team using Buy Me A Coffee to accept contributions and feedback from their users. We also built Widgets that allow you to accept payments right from your website. Built-in email features let you share updates and rewards with your audience. We’re also working on a community feature to create a group chat with your supporters. Creators are already doing this with Discord and Slack, and we're excited to build something more focused.
We believe anyone, anywhere in the world who creates something that people find useful or entertaining, should have the option to get paid for their work.
We’re excited to hear all your questions and thoughts about Buy Me A Coffee :) Thank you!
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)?
This is also a bit dated policy. I've reported bugs on Patreon before that involved looking at the source code and modifing it, but it did not cross my mind that they'd reserve the right to ban users for doing so. I think this is a case of copying TOS sections from other places which are not a good fit for this service.
That said, Patreon has destroyed their user interface in the past year, profiles on desktop barely contain any information above the fold, so we need competition in this space.
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.
Yes, Buy Me A Coffee is available to creators in almost all countries. Here is a breakdown of all accepted countries: https://help.buymeacoffee.com/en/articles/3314992-countries-...
>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?
None of these are against the terms AFAIK. We unpublish creators who promote explicit pornography or nudity. Broadly speaking, we abide by the content restrictions of the vendors and payment processors we work with. More on that can be found here: https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses
How can this be AFAIK? Aren't you one of the founders? If you don't know what your site allows, who does?
At the end of the day, someone has to make the final decision over whether to ban an LGBTQ+ activist. Who is the person who will make that decision on BMaC?
I get that you're beholden to your vendors, and to a certain extent there's nothing you can do about that. But I also assume you're not planning to just forward literally every content decision you have to make to Stripe's legal team for their input. So if a vulnerable person starts using your service, they need a better guarantee than "dunno, we'll have to flip a coin and see." You're still one of the people who are going to be enforcing this, you're still one of the people who have the power to decide how this will work.
I'd strongly recommend trying to clarify "chemicals" and "plants and seeds" as those are incredibly broad categories that encompass many use cases that stripe does not find objectionable as per the restricted-businesses list you linked. "Pharmacologically active, explosive or poisonous chemicals, plants, or seeds" may be suitably restrictive for your needs.
The "weapons" restriction would also be great to get some clarity on: a large proportion of makers do projects related to cutting tools, replica weapons for cosplay, etc. I think showing how they make blades/saws (that can be used as weapons, but often intended as tools or decoration) or replicas or sporting equipment are not necessarily something that Stripe would find objectionable.
I suspect that stripe does not restrict content related to the discussion of these items, but rather the use of these funds towards the purchase of these items. "build journals" may be permissible, but perhaps more of a grey area. I think their chief concern is the sale of these items. Ex. showing how you built an archery bow and tested it on a sport target seems quite distinct from selling the bow itself. Explaining and demonstrating the chemistry of exothermic reactions is very different than selling firecrackers.
Some clarity would make me more interested in using your service, but I currently am not inclined to sign up as a contributor or recommend your platform as it seems you could somewhat-arbitrarily decide to exclude ~90% of my favorite creators without warning after they have cultivated contributors on your platform.
Lack of clarity can be really disruptive for creators: as getting kicked off of a platform and disrupting an income stream they've come to rely on can be very disheartening - and I've seen this happen to a half-dozen creators on various platforms. Vague terms can lead to many makers to exist in a grey area with the threat of removal at any time, which I think is somewhat harmful.
That said, we're big fans of all creator monetization companies like substack, patreon, ko-fi, etc.
Why on Earth would I need a mobile app to use this? What does it provide that a well-designed mobile site doesn't?
See here: https://i.imgur.com/MClWgIX.png
on Desktop, Firefox 70.0.1. 1440p monitor.
EDIT: happens on Chrome as well.
Nice idea though. You could have a Buy Me A Coffee link on your own site for those who like the idea but aren't customers.
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?
I don't want to speak for YC, but the partners want you to iterate and succeed. Many of the successful YC companies (Reddit, Brex) got accepted for a completely different idea.
Our insight after getting into the audio space was that podcasters are relatively happy with monetization. This is obviously not a popular opinion, but that's what we saw first hand. Ad rates are pretty good, and unlike other content types, listeners enjoy host-read ads. Meanwhile, Buy Me A Coffee started getting a decent amount of traction even among podcasters, so we wanted to go all in and build it out :)
That'd be Brew [0]: 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 (AI for SMS inboxes) did that recently and pivoted to https://khatabook.com (Credit/Debit Book Keeping app for Indian SMBs) [2].
Of course, 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
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16484040
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.
Several questions:
1. Which payment providers specifically?
2. What do you mean by "hosting", and what are the rules?
3. Do I understand it correctly that adult content creators can use your service as long as their actual buymeacoffee.com page does not show "adult content"
3a. If so, it would be better if you clarified this with a <see more> link after the "no adult content" blurb.
4. Since the restrictions come from payment providers, you would be better off telling what the restrictions are and where they come from to avoid confusion.
- They appear to be forthright with this information. (That's certainly better than terminating users.)
- Aren't they at the mercy of the payment processor?
If the demand still stands for a "buy-me-a-coffee-for-erotic-content", then couldn't anyone else create that service? I empathize with your frustration, but I reject the sentiment that Buy Me a Coffee has intentionally done anything wrong.
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.
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?
I try to regularly draw attention to the fact that payment processors are systemically disenfranchising people who produce adult content, and that payment platforms are implicitly cooperating and encouraging that disenfranchisement by silently going along with the processors without even speaking up or openly questioning the standards. But I'm not super-surprised when I see those bans, because pretty much every platform has them.
On the other hand, a ban on violent content is something I haven't seen a lot of, and that makes me question who this service is even designed for. Does that mean anyone producing a comic or writing a book would need to make sure it's the violence equivalent of PG or below? Why would any creative use a platform with that kind of restriction?
Again, there's no hard line describing what that means. You just have to make sure that anything you produce is relatively tame.
It's very, very weird to live in a world where culturally people almost universally celebrate the artistic value and entertainment value of shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, while simultaneously building platforms where that kind of content just can't exist. It's an almost absurd cultural disconnect that only seems to exist to lock any non-establishment creators out of building meaningful stories that stretch boundaries or challenge viewers.
With marijuana businesses, the issue is that the bank could potentially lose access to the federal system for knowingly issuing a bank account to a business that is violating federal law. This would basically shut the bank down, from what I gather.
My assumption is there is likely a similar mechanism in place poisoning the entire payment system for adult content. If I wanted to work on the issue, I would dig until I found the root cause, which is very likely legal/regulatory and very likely at the federal level in the US. Then put resources into addressing the actual root cause instead of fussing at the payment processors.
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.
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
EDIT: The word "free" is tossed around so frequently on 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.
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.
In what way does the existence of BuyMeACoffee stop anyone from using your solution? There's a reason someone does choose BuyMeACoffee instead of Fosspay. What you suggest is removing options for the creator, in what way is that good for them?
> You will need a number of things set up before you start:
> 1. An approved Stripe account
> 2. A mail server
> 3. A domain name and an SSL certificate
> 4. A web server to host fosspay on
Are you going to give theses creators the mail server, the domain name and the web server for free? Are you going to offer the maintenance of theses servers for free too? Let say they find a managed server for 10$ per month (which would be amazing), they would need to make more than 200$ a month in donation for it to be equivalent to 5%.
> It isn't worth whatever valuation we're fetching and it doesn't justify making us rich while creators gratefully accept their pittance.
Then they shouldn't take the offer... BuyMeACoffee doesn't own the market, they doesn't seems to have any monopoly tendencies, Fosspay will keep existing while BuyMyACoffee is there.
Why don't you start offering a platform for free to artist? Maybe do it for 2.5% instead, there not that many artist that can make 400$ of donation a month! If you believe that the valuation of 5% is that outrageous, it's because you believe the same can be done for much cheaper, than do it for much cheaper and offer it!
One way to look at it is the % of additional revenue they earn because of Buy Me A Coffee.
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.
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
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.
The other is that they seem to hate the idea of batching transactions. For me the biggest draw of Patreon is that I can have 10 $1 pledges and only pay one credit card fee each month. But they keep messing with the backend and they've forced new creators into a completely different system that does separate charges. According to them they don't even make more money off this, so why are they so stubbornly insistent on charging these pledges a 40% overhead?
Overall they don't listen very well, and they grabbed this big pile of VC cash to do god-knows-what with and motivate them way too much to increase fees.
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.
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?
edit: now that I think about it, I would imply that one is better than the other. Because if you are just a UI/UX improvement on paypal/stripe, then you would be out of the regulatory umbrella of FinCen I believe.
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.
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.
Their pricing page claims the fee is only 5%. Is this not true?
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.
We designed the 'pay what you want' model on Buy Me A Coffee to tackle this problem.
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
Profiles look like this: 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.
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.
edit: and somehow make it not awkward, cumbersome, or time-consuming
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.
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.
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.
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).
Thanks again for the feedback, and thank you for your blog!
[1] https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar/status/1202111712264163328
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?
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/
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?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-is-how-yo...
Well done.
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.
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!!
I'm at jijo@buymeacoffee if you have any questions while setting up your page.
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?
If you don't mind me asking, What makes Buy Me a Coffee different from setting up a Patreon or a go fund me?
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
Hope that helps and keep kicking asses!
Awesome work guys! Thank you team BMAC !
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.
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?
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.
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?
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)
I'm mostly interested in payment workflow discussions. I actually don't care about sales/marketing possibilities.
If you hurt us in any way you are liable for damages
If we hurt you: f.. off, tough luckSo a donate button from paypal is equivalent but the creator can save 5%?