Many artists and makers rely on donations to make ends meet and use PayPal’s “Donate” button to make collecting money from their fans as painless as possible. However, according to PayPal’s Terms of Service, the “Donate” button is only intended for fundraising. In their own words:

If you are not raising money for a cause, please choose another option. Nonprofits must verify their status to withdraw donations they receive. Users that are not verified nonprofits must demonstrate how their donations will be used, once they raise more than $10,000.

What’s more, many bloggers have had their PayPal accounts suspended before reaching the $10,000 limit simply because they were using the “Donate” button in a way that PayPal did not intend.

To overcome these limitations, artists have switched over to what is generally called a “Buy me a beer” button: a PayPal “Buy Now” button with a fixed dollar amount, usually between $2 and $10, so that fans can still give money without expecting something tangible in return.

The “Buy me a beer” button has taken on many different forms depending on the personality of the person receiving the money (“Buy me a coffee”, “Buy me subway fare”, etc.) and generally works very well, but it has a severe limitation: only fixed dollar amounts are supported. Many people add a drop-down list of various dollar amounts in order to give fans some flexibility, but they are still values that were prescribed by the author. To give fans ultimate flexibility, and make sure makers don’t miss out on people wanting to support their work with big bucks, the Support My Work widget was born.