For the last two years I have been offerring my readers an option to donate to this website to support me publish my essays, newsletter and more. The most popular donations have been giving £2 every month followed by a handful of one-off donations of £3–5. I have always seen this as a more practical form of encouragement. I value everything my redears do greatly: I value their visits, I value their subscriptions to my newsletter and RSSfeeds, I enjoy receiving e-mails and discussing things with them, and of course I value the donations that help actually afford the servers that run this website and more.

A couple of readers e-mailed me recently pointing to Jarrod Blundy’s One a Month club and I found the idea appealing. It helps me simplify my donation structure in a way that aligns with my own ideals and in a way that I have been looking to do for some time now.

— Venkatram Harish Belvadi, One-a-month club

I love creating tools and helping people improve and simplify their workflows so I never paywalled these things. On the other hand it’s really great to get some appreciation and a little compensation of the costs.

— Floh Gro, Joining the One a Month Club ☺️

Anyway, what I will admit is that Robb did beat me to the part where I actually tell people about the fact that I accept support (monetary or otherwise), which is something I have, up until this point, felt loathe to do, because—like, if I’m being really vulnerable for a second—there’s a lot of deep-seated insecurity and a smorgasbord of self-esteem issues boppin' around in the ol' noggin and, as a result, my default state of being is one of perpetual self-imposed devaluation. It’s hard for me to consider that what I do has merit,1 that it makes people feel something or think about things in a new way. How dare I assume that people would want to pay me money? Not to mention that I am just decidely not a fan of Capitalism as a concept. I think it’s pretty fucking gross how much we, societally-speaking, tie remuneration to someone’s value as a human being.

But, also, I gotta eat. Bills gotta get paid. I didn’t go hundreds of thousands of dollars into student loan debt for nothing.

This is a lot of words for me to just say: “Hi. If you like what I do and you want to help me in my endeavor to make art and put more good than bad into the world, I would greatly appreciate your support.”

— Keenan, Not to sound like a total hipster, but I definitely had a $1/month membership for awhile now

It is not an act of desperation to invite patronage, but a huge step in believing in one’s work. I am finding it empowering, to experience this feeling of having faith in myself and my work.

I am not selling myself out; I am asking for voluntary support for all the writing I’ve done so far and for all the writing I intend to do here on Kadambari. I’m not building a personal brand; I’m not pushing myself into people’s feeds with ads and algorithm-pandering. I’m not selling their data and I’m not asking them to buy stuff they don’t need. I’m sharing what I know, and doing so freely. And there is no shame in any of this.

— Ratika Deshpande, On the Writer’s Belief in Herself

I believe that artists, writers, and makers should and can make a living doing what they love!

For a long time, the idea of making money from my art/writing felt uncomfortable. Maybe there was a touch of imposter syndrome, low self-esteem, and not feeling in league with the high-caliber writers of such publications as Substack, etc.

But that is nonsense.

— Veronique, making a living as a writer/blogger

It’s an idea, inspired by Manu Moreale, that kindness from internet strangers can be enough to support a small web project. And that tiered membership overly complicates things. And that it’s hard enough to convince someone to pay anything to support your work, so why would you want to gate any of those fans from seeing what you’ve worked so hard on for them?

We all want writers, code wranglers, and other web artists to be able to get the monetary support they deserve while reaching the widest audience they can.

— Jarrod Blundy, One a Month Club