I just did something completely unnecessary: I made my own DIY Patreon alternative for my music project 🤪

Why? There are a million creator tools out there that solve this problem. You might argue this was a waste of my time.

You also could name a bunch of possible reasons, including
💰 not wanting to pay increasing fees to creator platforms as my audience grows
🗜️ minimizing the number of tools I use as a creator
✊🏻 exercising greater control & flexibility over my web presence
☺️ aligning myself ethically with the platforms I use (though tbh, I still love Bandcamp and respect a lot of what Patreon is doing!)

But mostly I wanted to see if I could, and without AI helping me.

There’s something I continue to find invaluable: my desire to tinker. I love learning new things, and the pull of AI to magically render things for me is compelling, but I’ve always gravitated toward wanting to see if I could build things on my own.

And through this process, I’ve learned so much about the world of open-source/libre software, entered a whole new community of like-minded artists, sharpened my own skillset around building with the tools out there on the web, and improved my critical thinking around what could make such a seemingly silly endeavor be exciting for me and the (tiny, fledgling) group of fans of my music.

For those curious, here’s how it works:

• I used this amazing open-source toolkit called Faircamp to build a little music site to host all my releases as an artist
• I hosted it in Backblaze’s B2 service, and created a worker to serve it as a website using Cloudflare
• I wired up Faircamp’s built-in RSS feed to my newsletter (powered by Buttondown), such that anytime I release something new, my subscribers automatically hear about it
• I also wired up Stripe to Buttondown/Faircamp so I could take paid subscription payments, which automatically unlocks exclusive email sends to my paid subscribers

And now all of my music is transparently available online, with an easy low-stakes way for fans to directly support me as an artist and get exclusive access to certain things. Plus I don’t lose 10-15% of every sale to a platform, and can customize every nearly aspect of this to my liking.

But mostly it was fun!

What are you tinkering with these days?
What’s something that you’ve been curious about setting up and haven’t gotten around to?