Experimenting with Buy Me A Coffee

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Whenever I can, I try to support bloggers and creators by buying their books or paying contributions. Hoping someone appreciates my writings and work, I set up a Buy Me A Coffee donation button on my blog and a link in my newsletter.

Buy Me A Coffee is a creator support and crowdfunding platform similar to Patreon.

Buy Me A Coffee home page
The Buy Me A Coffee home page.

Although it’s a smaller and younger startup, Buy Me A Coffee has some interesting advantages over Patreon. For example, it accepts one-time payments, not just membership subscriptions, and it doesn’t require an account for supporters. As a Google user there are a couple more Buy Me A Coffee features I like such as signing up with Google and supporting Google Pay via Stripe. I connected both supported payment processors, PayPal and Stripe.

Creating a Buy Me A Coffee account is straightforward. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes, even to someone like me who obsesses over tweaking and playing with settings.

Connecting Buy Me A Coffee to Stripe is a bit more involved as you need some information for creating a Stripe account. Be sure to have a street address, an email address, and a phone number you feel comfortable sharing. Stripes requires that you provide contact details to supporters in case they need technical help.

My Buy Me A Coffee page is mostly a placeholder, an early draft to experiment with the options such as goals and posts.

I added the contribution button to my blog only a few days ago and traffic is still limited, so I have got no payments yet. But I found an interesting Buy Me A Coffee review by freelance writer Michael Brockbank who shared his encouraging early experience. Here’s what the Buy Me A Coffee button looks like:

Buy me a coffeeBuy me a coffee

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