In a Moon vs Buy Me a Coffee

Buy Me a Coffee made it easy for people to support creators with a simple idea: if you appreciate someone’s work, then buy them a coffee. What a great idea!

In a web without recognition, this small gesture of thanks is a welcome change from the status quo. It’s a way to say “I see you, and I value what you do.” This simple idea helped normalize something important on the internet: creators deserve our support.

But everyone these days is a creator. Everyone is a consumer. And everyone needs to pay for lunch. So the question becomes: if we’re living more and more of our lives online, how do we support the entire ecosystem of people who make the web valuable for you?

Said another way: what if you wanted or needed to thank everyone?

That’s where In a Moon takes a different approach: Rather than manually deciding who to thank (who to buy a “coffee” in Buy Me a Coffee terms), In a Moon automatically observes those whose work you’re using, and creates your own personalized memory of the people that made your web this month. This means that each person ends up with a smaller portion, but you acknowledge more people and help support the web’s center. Those whose contributions span more people earn more, as presumably their value is greater globally. More on this in a second, let’s try to summarize Buy Me a Coffee vs In a Moon.

Buy Me a Coffee

Buy Me a Coffee is a direct support model.

simple one-time payments, similar to buying a friend a “coffee”
monthly or yearly memberships
creator pages can offer perks like downloads
allows adult (NSFW) content with payment processor rules
content primarily lives on the platform, although can embed buttons on your site.

The mental model is simple:

supporter → pays → creator

If someone values your work, they stop and send you money directly.

This works great if you can get your supporters to stop and pay you. It’s somewhat like passing a busker in the street: not everyone stops to drop a coin in the hat, but everyone benefits from the music.

In a Moon

In a Moon is built around attribution-based, ecosystem-wide rewards.

Instead of asking users to stop and pay, it records the people who make your experience as you navigate the web.

In a Moon is built with a different model of support, one called “kudos” which has two phases:

recognition - tracking the attributions embedded in the content you consume
reward allocation - deciding on value later, based on the distribution created in phase 1.

Instead of asking users to stop and pay, In a Moon uses the kudos system which automatically records the people that make your web. It then allocates a weight based on the importance of that person’s contribution in the context of others on the page you’re looking at. Then we add up all the contributions over a month, and use that weighting to pro-rata reward the individuals.

The In a Moon model looks more like this:

supporter → budget → points → distribution to contributors

A Simple Analogy

Buy Me a Coffee is like tipping a busker.

In a Moon is like keeping track of every musician you heard during the month, then splitting a set budget between them based on how much they contributed to your experience.

If you saw two performers, they split it. If one appeared more often, they receive more.

Now apply this same idea to all of the creators that make your web: all of the emails you encounter, all of the tweets you read, all of the Pinterest pins you see…all of the creators on all of the platforms that form the modern web.

What’s Different

Buy Me a Coffee:

direct, intentional payments
rewards the visible creator
requires a decision in the moment

In a Moon:

continuous, automatic recognition
rewards networks of contributors
defers the decision to support monthly

Is In a Moon a Micropayment System?

You may have heard of the “mental transaction cost” problem with micropayments: even is something is “near zero” in cost, economists tell us that we’ll still try to evaluate if it’s worth it. Imagine having thousands of these micro-interruptions throughout your day and you can see why micropayments didn’t take off immediately. If you’re interested Clay Shirky has a nice essay on micropayments. We don’t exactly consider In a Moon a micropayment system but it does share at least one desired outcome: to compensate creation beyond the fame motivations propping up free content today.