Support this site

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 the generous support of users like you, partially from adverts 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.

There are two options: You can join the loyal userbase who make Make me a cocktail possible month in month out and become a Sustaining Patron with an automatic monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch:

£3 / month
♥♥ £5 / month
♥♥♥ £7 / month
♥♥♥♥ £10 / month
♥♥♥♥♥ £25 / month

Start now

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...OR, you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation of any amount:

Give now

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We work in British pounds old chap, but the numbers are roughly the same for dollars...

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 (see some tech updates here). However some of our direct running costs can be seen below and what it costs us as a base to keep this site alive every month.

Name Costs / month Type Notes Website
Server £1,000 Infrastructure Amazaon AWS, load balancers, EFS, multiple big servers, big database instances. Amazon SES and more ... aws.amazon.com
People per hour £45 Copywriting For some of the blog postings and to ensure we keep on top of interesting articles peopleperhour.com
Adobe fonts £10 SaaS We've got some custom fonts on the site and use Adobe Fonts to serve them adobe.com
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 cloudflare.com
Mailchimp / mandrill £50 SaaS We use Mandrill as our drip emails when actions happen (although we're moving over to SES) mailchimp.com
GSuite £5 SaaS Mostly to deal with the @makemeacocktail email address' gsuite.google.com
Yearly total £13,524

Advertising

For 10 years I kept Make Me A Cocktail an ad free experience. Unfortunately when it grew to 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 advertising, and as such you now see the adverts at the top and bottom of the pages. This helps me sustain the site and keep it online and alive.

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.

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We take security seriously. Seriously, we do. All transactions are carried out securely and safely through Stripe - and they're like one of the top dogs in payment security. We don't store any credit card numbers on our servers, or do anything evil or underhand.

Thank you - success

Your payment was succesful and you're on your way to a higher existential plane of living. But seriously .... thank you. I really mean it - thanks so much. Your money gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that the thousands of hours I spend are all worth it.

Now go forth, drink a nice cocktail and enjoy yourself.

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