Hi HN!<p>We’re Joseph, Aleesha, and Jijo, the founders of Buy Me A Coffee (<a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.buymeacoffee.com</a>). We make it super easy to accept contributions and recurring memberships from your audience.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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’ (<a href="https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/</a>) with a link in the footer of every edition. Slowly (<a href="https://slowly.buymeacoffee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slowly.buymeacoffee.com/</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>We’re excited to hear all your questions and thoughts about Buy Me A Coffee :) Thank you!
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.<p>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.
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.<p>A couple of questions on that front:<p>- Do your terms include mandatory arbitration agreements for creators?<p>- Do your terms include mandatory arbitration agreements for tippers?<p>- 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?<p>On the privacy policy front:<p>- 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?<p>On the general feature front:<p>- 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...<p>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.
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay</a><p>EDIT: The word "free" is tossed around so frequently on <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ko-fi-alternative" rel="nofollow">https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ko-fi-alternative</a> 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.
How do you differentiate from <a href="https://ko-fi.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ko-fi.com/</a>? My partner has been using this for a year or so, and hasn't had much revenue.
> <i>unobtrusive way to monetize their work</i><p>I have seen this movie before and I know how it ends. [waves at Patreon]<p>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.
No pricing information before sign-up?<p>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'.<p>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.
Reading <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/terms" rel="nofollow">https://www.buymeacoffee.com/terms</a><p>These potentially seem like some fairly onerous restrictions, and would potentially exclude nearly all of my favorite youtube channels.<p>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?<p>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?<p>"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?<p>"seeds or plants" - are creators who discuss gardening or farming disqualified? Cooking vegetables? Primitive Technology-style makers which discuss creating objects from plant materials?<p>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?<p>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)?
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.<p>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?<p>Or is this like a "when we get to that bridge we will cross it" type of thing?<p>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!<p>Love the site btw, the simplicity of the payment flow is A+. I could see this taking off.
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.<p>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?<p>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).<p>[1] <a href="https://ma.ttias.be/blog/" rel="nofollow">https://ma.ttias.be/blog/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I’m about to launch something that could use this. I’ll sign up in a few days.<p>Best of luck and congratulations on your launch!!
Congratulations on your announcement, I’ve been following you and Buy Me A Coffee for a while.<p>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 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.<p>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.
The implementation looks pretty slick to me!<p>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?
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... <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j" rel="nofollow">https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j</a> probably not what they would have intended...
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?<p>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).<p>Finally, can you actually make money from a credit card payment of $1 when you only charge a 5% fee?
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?
This seems like a great service! I will definitely be setting up an account to cover the cost of running my podcast.<p>If you don't mind me asking, What makes Buy Me a Coffee different from setting up a Patreon or a go fund me?
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.
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.
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?<p>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?
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.<p>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.
Awesome stuff ... looks great!
Tiny bug when I go to:
<a href="https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thesundaypaper.buymeacoffee.com/</a>
and I press the burger icon and explore creators
then I get a 404.<p>Hope that helps and keep kicking asses!
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.
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.<p>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?
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 :(
Okay, deep breath, this will be unpleasant.<p>1. Do you ban creators for "hate speech"?
1b. If yes: What is "hate speech"?<p>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)<p>3. Will you ban creators for content completely unrelated to your platform? (e.g. drunken Twitter rants)
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)?<p>I'm mostly interested in payment workflow discussions. I actually don't care about sales/marketing possibilities.
Hey, just wanted to let you know your developers page is not working: <a href="https://developers.buymeacoffee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.buymeacoffee.com/</a>
Among the other things their terms say something in tune of:<p><pre><code> If you hurt us in any way you are liable for damages
If we hurt you: f.. off, tough luck</code></pre>
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.
5% fee + "Payment processing fees charged by PayPal and Stripe are also applicable."<p>So a donate button from paypal is equivalent but the creator can save 5%?
>We do not allow adult content<p>I just expressly wanted to un-thank you for this.<p>Sincerely hope you would either change this - or fail. It's 2019, and "adult" content creators could do with less of this nonsense.<p>Erotic content creators (let's call things what they are) drink coffee too.
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.<p>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...<p>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.<p>It’s here:
<a href="https://www.feedback.land" rel="nofollow">https://www.feedback.land</a><p>Profiles look like this: <a href="https://www.feedback.land/ronilan" rel="nofollow">https://www.feedback.land/ronilan</a><p>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).<p>Bottom line. Got some feedback. That’s it ;)<p>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.
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!<p>Awesome work guys!
Thank you team BMAC !