I Need To Get Real With You for A Minute

I need your help to keep BrokeAssStuart.com going.

I don’t think many readers realize how expensive it is to run BAS. We pay thousands of dollars a month but our income is never consistent. Some months we have lots of advertisers, and some months there are none. On top of that, our Beer, Wine, and Coffee Passports don’t sell nearly as well as they did before the the Pandemic.

So I’m hoping at least 100 of you will join the BAS Patreon at $6 a month or more.

Here’s a breakdown of what my average monthly costs are just to give you an idea:

Writers and Editors: $3500 a month
Website Maintenance: $600 a month
Legal and Accounting: $350 a month
Technology (Mailchimp, web hosting, etc): $1100 a month

That’s over $5000 a month! And all that is before Alex and I get paid $2500 a month each. Yup, we both work full time doing BAS and can only afford to pay ourselves $2500 a month. Thank goddess for rent control.

Currently we’re bringing in just under around $5,000 a month from Patreon and our supporters on PayPal. This is fantastic and I am SO grateful to everyone who supports us. But as you can see, that’s only 50% of the $10,000 we need to survive each month. If we get a couple bad months of no advertisers, then we’re totally fucked.

Spreading the word about social justice issues doesn’t pay the bills. Neither does helping raise the rallying cry when your favorite bar or restaurant closes down. Listing your event on our calendar to make sure it’s successful is something we do for free.

One of the many perks of the BAS Patreon is that I send out weird postcards like this a few times a year

I get that this is the cost of doing business, but the flip side is that nearly all media, from music to writing to photography, is now expected to be free. The traditional business model has failed, and the only sustainable one going forward is for readers to support the publications they love and rely on.

Nearly every single media outlet you read is either funded by venture capital or owned by a media conglomerate. Broke-Ass Stuart is 100% independent, which is difficult, as you can see from the numbers above.

So wanna help this thing survive? Please join the BAS Patreon. If every single person who got this email kicked in $6 a month, I’d be able to hire full time journalists, be able to expand to a bunch of cities, and never have to run an ad again. Hell if even 10% of my readers kicked in at least $6 a month we’d be able to focus way more time on creating amazing content and less on chasing ad dollars. But for now, let’s just see if we can get 100 of you to join.

Thank you SO much for considering becoming a supporter. Seriously, thank you.