Support us
I love working on Make me a cocktail, trying to create new functionality for users and help them create great cocktails from limited budgets or hoards of spirits. But it takes me hundreds of hours and literally thousands of pounds a year to sustain. Keeping it a responsive, fast, healthy site means it's partially subsidised by paid members, paritally by the generous support of users like you, partially by paid blog posts, and the rest is taken out of my own pocket as my labour of love. So if you find any joy, use or help in it, please consider a modest donation - however much you can afford when it comes from the heart, it's the kind of gesture that makes me warm with appreciation.
The best way of supporting us is to register and become a premium member of the site - not only do you get to support the site but you also get a host of premium features and upgrades.
If registering isn't your bag, then there's a couple of other options: you can join the loyal user-base who make 'Make Me a Cocktail' possible month in month out by becoming a Sustaining Patron with an automatic monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Or you could become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation of any amount.
Sustaining patron
Become a monthly donator and help us keep the site alive and kicking
Spontaneous supporter
..OR, you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation of any amount
We work in British pounds old chap, but the numbers are roughly the same for dollars...
Need to stop supporting us? No problem, we're grateful for anything you've given us to help us on our journey so far. Simply email us on [email protected] from the email address you signed up with and we'll get that sorted for you.
Where does your money go?
We believe in transparency in where your money goes; most of it goes to support the site's running costs (as well as an occasional coffee, tea, cocktail and cake). Of course, most of your loving donations go to just keeping the site up to date and on the infrastructure to run a site of this size, administrating new cocktails, creating new lists and creating amazing new features. However, some of our monthly direct running costs can be seen below
| Service | Costs | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Server | ~£1,000 | Infrastructure | Amazaon AWS, load balancers, EFS, S3, multiple big servers, big database instances. Amazon SES and more ... |
| Laravel forge | ~£35 | Infrastructure | Our deployment tool and server infrastructure manager. Streamlines everything |
| Cloudfare | £17 | Infrastructure | Our CDN / gateway / host of other things of choice for not only offloading some of the files and ensuring you get your content quickly no matter where you are in the world, but also DDOS protection and more |
| OpenAI | £20 | Tools | Powers the A.I. tools on the site, various imagery, lots of background information on cocktails and more. |
| Development tools | ~£60 | SaaS | Postman, Apple Connect, Social media tools and more |
| Imagery | ~£20 | Imagery | We use a host of online stock photography sites to ensure they best quality images are used throughout. |
| Copywriting | £50 | Copywriting | For some of the blog postings and to ensure we keep on top of interesting articles |
| GSuite | £5 | SaaS | Mostly to deal with the @makemeacocktail email address' |
Paid blog posts?
For 10 years I kept Make Me a Cocktail an ad-free / paid blog post free experience. Unfortunately when it grew to a product that exploded over the internet, costs were no longer sustainable, and I was looking at being out of pocket tens of thousands of pounds a year. It was with regret that I decided the only way to maintain the site was through paid blog posts, and as such some blog posts are from paid advertisers. This helps me sustain the site and keep it online and alive. We don't like them, but we do mark all posts as such, and try to ensure that we are completely transparent in the why and how.
Affiliate products
Now and again we get some products to taste (yummy) or test (ooooo). We honestly test and review every affiliate product, and recommend only what we personally love and use ourselves! We don't make much money, but if you do see an affiliate product on the site, please do consider using the links provided - every little helps.