Buy me a coffee

I have a Patreon link on my blog, but I was actually trying to implement a donate button. Not a "become a patron" button. As I explain in my last post,  my attempt to use Paypal to implement a button like this didn’t come to anything because Paypal reserve this functionality to campaigns and charities, and with the best will in the world, a site full of sci-fi musings and my stabs at book promotion hardly counts as either.

I decided not to give up, however, because I thought that even though a donate button wasn’t possible, I might be able to implement something like a “buy me a coffee” button. Nobody would mistake that for charity giving, after all. Pretty sure that there must be some solution out there on the interwebs, I started to Google.

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A Message from the Author

I write sci-fi novels that belong to a series called Dark Galaxy, which starts with Galaxy Dog:

What starts as an ordinary invasion of an alien planet brings to light an ancient archeological site of huge importance. A young man called Knave makes a life-changing discovery there and rises from a lowly position as an infantry trooper to become a player among the powers of the galaxy.

The entire series is available to buy from Amazon.

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Almost immediately I came across a site – the top Google result – that seemed to be a swift and easy route to getting a “buy me a coffee” button on my site. The site I found is even called BuyMeaCoffee.com, but something about the simplicity of the front page gave me pause. It just didn’t “feel” right. Sure enough, I went looking for reviews, and what I found was not encouraging.

For example, James of Trustpilot said: Avoid. Avoid! You won't get your money. I created my Buy Me A Coffee page late November 2018, collected about $60 from donations which I requested a payout from on Dec 12th. The website says payments should be processed within 7 days. But it's now February and it's still "pending". Tried to contact support several times with no response.

So I kept looking, and I found Ko-fi.com, which seemed to be more “legit” from my quick Google searches. Many people seem to be using it, and there are Medium articles and Quora pages with people discussing its pros and cons. From what I read, it has the direct, instant payments I was looking for, though you can also build a monthly revenue stream, in a similar way to Patreon, with Ko-fi Gold. Reassured, I went to their site to sign up.

I was signed up and came away with the code to put a button on my site within an amazingly short period of time. I doubt it was even five minutes from start to finish. It has made a very positive first impression on me, and the button is pretty, too. Let’s hope it remains a good option over the long term.





Despite my new “buy me a coffee” button, as ever the best way to support this blog is to buy one of my books. Simply go over to Amazon, or Kobo and get one.