$1 a month

In an attempt to spend less time consuming social media feeds, I started reading a lot more personal blogs. (I use an RSS reader app called Reeder Classic to do this, it’s quite wonderful and way calmer than scrolling basically any social feed app.)

I’ve separately been thinking a lot about the ways I ask my small audience to support my work. I don’t really expect much or any money, because I am lucky to have a day job I love and for which I am well compensated – but (1) I have had people ask me how they can support me, and (2) with how brutal the US economy is right now, any little bit helps. I’m grateful to have made some good side money from music I’ve released. However, I do a lot more than that: I work on Unstream, which does have a paid upgrade but the majority of its usage is free. I also write this blog, which occasionally results in a banger that quite a few musicians share via word-of-digital-mouth and some even tell me they appreciate. I’ve thought about capturing some of these bangers into some kind of e-book, but this is a whole other project.

So I’ve had this weird “support me” page on my site inviting people to optionally throw me a tip, or offer some kind of recurring patronage. I’ve gone through all sorts of different services that facilitate this in different ways (Ko-fi, Buy Me A Coffee, Liberapay, probably others). And nobody bites – which again, is fine, because I don’t expect people to, but I want to offer some way to that is minimally committal but still can accumulate to some meaningful support over a long period of time.

Enter Manu Moreale, a blogger living in rural Italy and without social media, who coined the idea of the “$1 a month club” after trying to work through the BS that is asking others for money:

But I recently realized that tiers are the wrong approach. At least for me. I believe in kindness. I believe that if you decide to support something I do, you should get all the benefits, no matter how much you pay.
I also realized that 1$+/month is the best price possible when it comes to supporting online creators. The 1$ part means you can set it up and forget about it because it’s a low enough amount that won’t make too much of a difference for the majority of people who are considering supporting online creators. The + part allows you to contribute more if you want to do so. And that’s just perfect.

This landed so well for me. I don’t want to be a bother to anyone, but I do think the ideas I put into the world are worth something, and a dollar feels extremely minimally invasive. And it turns out there are a few dozen people with blogs who agree!

I actually think $1-2 per month is perfect for a small independent artist right now, especially if you are hesitant about giving too much away of your vulnerable self. I can see an artist/creator charging more (eg. $5-10/month) in exchange for giving up more personal aspects of their lives, process and such, but not all of us want to do that.

Think about it this way, from the perspective of a listener: If Spotify costs $12.99/month as of this writing, you could directly support 13 artists you adore each month for that same amount. You can still support other artists too, by buying their stuff on Bandcamp or a dozen other platforms (cough Unstream cough), or even using Spotify, Pandora or YouTube’s free ad-based tiers which do result in some tiny fractions of pennies making their way to those artists.

This requires independent alternatives to the big platforms music artists rely on for such a thing. On the surface it’s a little ridiculous that Bandcamp won’t allow you to charge less than $3/month using their subscription scheme, but if they allowed you to charge $1/month, you’d literally lose half the transaction to fees:

$1 - 15% (Bandcamp’s cut) - (2.9% + 30¢) (Stripe’s cut) = 52¢

Using a service like Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee softeners the blow, where you get something like 63¢ for every dollar. You could also roll your own with Stripe directly, where you only pay their cut and make 67¢ per month per subscriber.

I don’t know of a way around credit card fees for an online creator, but at least having a smaller platform fee in play adds up if you accumulate supporters. 500 people paying $1/month results in $315 in actual monthly income if you’re using Buy Me A Coffee, which would be $50 more than you’d get from the same scheme run on Bandcamp. And it’s not enough to live (especially in the US in 2026), but it’s a little something to keep oneself going.