buy-me-a-coffee
The Cafe Archive---
title: Why I'm Moving to Buy Me a Coffee
slug: buy-me-a-coffee
date_published: 2021-01-11T23:19:22.000Z
date_updated: 2022-12-10T00:17:58.000Z
tags: personal, #mint
excerpt: Spoiler alert: because I like it a lot.
Assuming you’ve never reached the bottom of one of these blog posts (valid), I do have a Patreon and a Ko-Fi that I usually push, as a way to support me and the Café. Frankly — and at the risk of sounding like a Sports Account on Twitter — I’m incredibly blessed and lucky to get the support I do on Patreon, especially given my relative lack of reach as a creator.
All that said, I’m stepping away from Patreon and moving to Buy Me a Coffee!
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be updating my Patreon whenever I make a post, nor am I going to force everyone who already supports me into moving over — trying to convince people to use a new form of software is something I get paid to do in real life, and it’s basically impossible on a good day. But I do want any future supporters to do so through Buy Me a Coffee. I've only used it for a day or so, but I'm already enamored by it for a number of reasons:
BMAC Runs Like Butter
This is my professional opinion: Patreon runs like butt-cheeks. I hate interacting with it. Posting my blogs onto it feels like pulling teeth. Everything is so slow and clunky and archaic. Sometimes hot-links flat-out don’t work. It's a detriment to me as a creator that's got stuff to do.
BMAC on the other hand, is extremely appealing to use. Everything loads quickly, there’s not a bunch of clutter to get in the way, and the editor is as smooth as Ghost’s, give or take. I don’t feel like updating my supporters is a chore, and that owns.
Patreon Makes Bad Decisions
I won’t get into this too much because I don’t have all year, but you’re probably aware that Patreon has made some pretty terrible decisions in the past. From its changes to anyone that wasn’t already a creator on the site, to its poor handling of NSFW content, it has its fair share of issues, and if I had known I had better alternatives for a subscription service, I probably wouldn’t have used it in the first place.
As far as I can tell, Buy Me a Coffee hasn’t stumbled across these same potholes. You get a 5% transaction fee, and that's it. I appreciate the simplicity and hope BMAC continues that streak.
BMAC is Patreon and Ko-Fi Combined
Patreon offers monthly payments. Ko-Fi allows for one-time support. Buy Me a Coffee provides both both options. On top of that, you can even have supports pay you one a year — I’ve taken advantage of this feature by having a yearly subscription cost 20% less than if you supported me month to month. On top of that, BMAC allows you to create Extras for your supports, with the freedom to make whatever you want, from commissions to ebooks to consultations and everything in between. It has everything I want from these support services, packaged together into one light-weight website. Couldn’t ask for more.
Emails!!!
This is pretty specific, but it’s important to me. I’ve been wanting to start a newsletter that serves as a round up of all my posts for the month for Mint’s Café for a while now, but I didn’t want to go through the laborious process of finding the right service and asking all my supporters to sign up for it. BMAC removes this hurdle, letting me turn any post I make on the site into an email for my supporters and followers! It’s fantastic and one less thing for me to worry about so I can focus on posting important things like, oh I don’t know, probably a novella on how much I love Gravity Rush.
So yeah! I’m caping the hell out of BMAC because it’s pretty much exactly what I want from a Supporter-driven website, with an emphasis on putting creators first. If you’re interested definitely give it a try! I realize this sounds like an ad but I really do just like it that much, I am not being sponsored lol.
Are you using Buy Me a Coffee? What do you think of it? Let me know @mintplaysthings! And if you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me! Thanks for reading!
