BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries, and nobody cares

Summary

Silent changes in payment methods on big creator funding platforms raise some unpleasant questions. UPD Aug 13, 2024: The kind-of-official reply from BuyMeACoffee, and my response to it. UPD Aug 14, 2024: A support email to one of the users gives BuyMeACoffee’s reasons, and also they blocked me on X (Twitter). What happened Recently, many Ukrainian creators have reported problems with payouts from BuyMeACoffee, a creator funding/crowdfunding platform. At first, the reported support answers were typical corporative “we are sorry that we don’t care,” citing “compliance” and “policy updates.” Those reports were widely shared, and our predominantly feeling was “shocked but not surprised”: it is not the first time when a big platform has decided that they are too busy to try to distinguish non-occupied parts of a large country with a 30+m population from occupied parts, and decided they don’t care. Just recently, for example, the Mercury payment system just blacklisted the entirety of Ukraine alongside Iran and North Korea. But in a few days, it turned out (again, from support messages shared on Twitter) that BuyMeACoffee just dropped support for Payoneer (which works in Ukraine), leaving Stripe (which doesn’t) as the only payout method. Did they, though? Currently BuyMeACoffee’s support page simply states: Buy Me a Coffee supports payouts to creators in several countries, facilitated through our payment provider, Stripe. According to the Internet Archive, in February, there was another link to a page that listed Stripe and Payoneer, while May’s snapshot already has only Stripe-related links. So, the change in the documentation happened somewhere between February (that’s when I personally used it for the last time) and May: Internet Archive doesn’t provide other snapshots between those two dates. So, at least the support’s private answers were aligned with the documentation. At the same time, there are a couple of funny facts about this deprecation. First, I know for a f...