The only site that works for Indian Creators to sell things and receive donations

Stripe, GumRoad, and Many others don’t work in India

Dr Sakthitharan Subramanian
2 min readFeb 15, 2024

Everyone is using GumRoad to sell their digital products.

Some use Ko-Fi to collect donations from fans on the internet.

And there are too many options for creators without borders.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

But it looks like, India has a thick border on the internet. Too many regulations, complicated rules, and government policies to transact money inside and outward of India.

Any services like GumRoad, Ko-Fi, and whatever you know use Stripe.

Any service that uses Stripe is a NO-NO. Because,

Stripe doesn’t work in India

It only works if you transact in INR.

For foreign currencies like USD, GBP, and others, it won’t work.

You need a registered business in India (with the headache of filing GST often) or a sole proprietorship along with the so-called IEC code to get an international currency account on Stripe.

That’s why Medium is still unable to extend its MPP to India.

In short words, it is outside the reach of a common man who is pursuing some side hustles online.

PayPal?

It partially works. But it doesn’t work with services that take some commissions on transactions.

In other words, it is not supported by the services we need.

The final option is

👉 BuyMeACoffee

Why?

It supports wire transfers to your Indian bank account.

For credit card and foreign currency transactions, it works like an intermediary and collects the money on our behalf.

Later (after accumulating a minimum payout amount of $10) they can drop it to your bank account (Indian bank account).

All you need to give is a PAN, IFSC, Account number.

Trivia: BMC is an Indian-origin company.

It also supports PayPal transactions.

Additional values

It has features that are enough for most of the needs of a creator.

After so many searches and trials, I found that BMC is the only solution.

Whether it’s the best one or not, it is the only available option — for now.

I just now started with it. Try yourself. Follow me for more.

In case you wonder, here’s my new BMC page.

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Dr Sakthitharan Subramanian
Dr Sakthitharan Subramanian

Written by Dr Sakthitharan Subramanian

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