ActivismNewsPoliticsSF Bay Area

How Monkeybrains Tried to Give SF a Giant Check…and Failed

The Bay's best newsletter for underground events & news

image courtesy of Monkeybrains

This article is made possible by the fine folks at Monkeybrains. Sign up with them right now and use the code “BIGCHECK” to get a free month of internet service! 


Every year or so I team up with Monkeybrains to tell you how awesome they are. Part of this is because they pay me to do so and woooo boy do we need it. But I also do it because I’ve been a customer of theirs for over seven years, and I absolutely love their service.

Here are just a few of the reasons why Monkeybrains is the shit:

  • They are WAY cheaper than corporate giants like Comcast and AT&T – they only cost $35 a month and don’t have any sketchy hidden fees.
  • They have WAY better service than those other jerks. Since they are locally owned and operated in the Bay Area, they employ local people from our local community in SF and Oakland. Plus, there are no contracts, so you won’t be on hold for an hour because your rate suddenly doubled.
  • They are Net Neutral as fuck and also won’t sell your data to third parties. That way no one has to know how much time you spend watching dance challenges on TikTok.

But what’s not talked about enough is how much good they do for the community. And that brings us to the time they tried to give a giant check to the City and County of San Francisco, and nobody showed up. 🤣

image courtesy of Monkeybrains

Here’s how it happened:

During the pandemic, the City took over a bunch of hotels, spaces, parking lots, etc for shelter-in-place, testing, and mass vaccination sites. And Monkeybrains provided gigabit internet to these sites, for free, because they give a shit about San Francisco.

As the pandemic abated, the City officially designated Monkeybrains’ contribution as a “gift in kind” of internet access service and valued it at $173,400. So to celebrate, Monkeybrains printed up a giant check and asked a bunch of city officials to accept the check at a photo op…and nobody showed up to accept the check.

The feeling was that, since Mohammed Nuru had so disgracefully taking tons of checks from random people, nobody wanted to be seen publicly accepting checks from companies, no matter what size they were. 🤣🤣🤣

So Monkeybrains did what anybody did, they took a photo anyways and sent it to BrokeAssStuart.com

I honestly love this kind of shit.

So if you want fast, cheap internet from a great company that also has a fantastic sense of humor, sign up for Monkeybrains today.

Sign up with them right now and use the code “BIGCHECK” to get a free month of internet service!

Previous post

The Little Known Queer History of San Francisco's Uptown

Next post

An Open Letter to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff


Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Stuart Schuffman, aka Broke-Ass Stuart, is a travel writer, poet, TV host, activist, and general shit-stirrer. His website BrokeAssStuart.com is one of the most influential arts & culture sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and his freelance writing has been featured in Lonely Planet, Conde Nast Traveler, The Bold Italic, Geek.com and too many other outlets to remember. His weekly column, Broke-Ass City, appears every other Thursday in the San Francisco Examiner. Stuart’s writing has been translated into four languages. In 2011 Stuart created and hosted the travel show Young, Broke, and Beautiful on IFC and in 2015 he ran for Mayor of San Francisco and got nearly 20k votes.

He's been called "an Underground legend": SF Chronicle, "an SF cult hero":SF Bay Guardian, and "the chief of cheap": Time Out New York.