I built my own Buy Me a Coffee because I was tired of platform fees and Stripe gatekeeping

Shorya — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:30:06 +0000

I wanted a supporter page. Simple enough.

Except every tool that does this well: Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi,
GitHub Sponsors- runs on Stripe. And Stripe isn't available in
a big chunk of the world. India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh,
most of Southeast Asia, invite-only at best, flat out unavailable
at worst.

So what do developers do instead? They cope.

They paste a UPI ID in their README. They share a Razorpay link
in a DM. They put a PayPal button that eats 5% and confuses
half their audience. It works, barely, but it feels janky and
more importantly it doesn't scale. You can't build a supporter
relationship on a UPI ID buried in a README.

I got tired of seeing that. So I built something better.

What Buy4Chai is

A self-hostable supporter page you fork, configure in one file,
and deploy in 10 minutes. It sits on top of whatever payment
gateway actually works where you are.

No platform. No middleman. No fees.

You fork it → edit chai.config.js → deploy to Vercel → paste
a badge in your README. Done.

What it looks like

Two column layout. Left side tells your story: bio, gallery,
pinned projects. Right side is a sticky support card. Modal
checkout with currency toggle (USD ↔ your local currency).
Full dark mode.

Not a janky form. An actual page you'd be proud to send someone.

Who this is for

Honestly anyone who:

Can't access Stripe
Doesn't want to give 5-10% to a platform
Is tired of sharing payment links in DMs
Wants to own their supporter experience end to end, maybe hack their experience
Just wants a clean page that doesn't look like a Google Form

The tech

React 18 + Vite + Tailwind + Framer Motion. Fully static.
Deploys free on Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages.

Ships with Razorpay, Dodo Payments, UPI direct, and manual
payment links out of the box. Swap gateways by changing one
line in your config. Add a new one by creating one file.

There's also a 6-step setup wizard built into the app so
non-technical creators can configure it without touching code.

Try it

Live demo: buy4-chai.vercel.app
GitHub: github.com/vassu-v/Buy4Chai

If you've ever felt locked out of the creator economy because
of where you live or which payment processor your country
supports — this is for you.

And if you want to contribute, we just opened issues for new
gateways, UI features, and docs. First contributor already
jumped in this week.

Guys your support would mean a lot, either as pr, discussions, forks or enhancement ideas.