About That Coffee Button

No login. No paywall. No newsletter waiting to ambush you three paragraphs into a map. No cookie banner, because I am not collecting anything worth warning you about. You can zoom the floor of Lake Erie until your laptop fan sounds like a leaf blower and nobody will ever ask you for an email address.

What there is, down in the corner of most pages, is a small button that says Coffee.

Where this came from

I make maps and tools and other useless stuff. One of them shows how far you can get from the nearest road or trail in the Adirondacks. Somebody went looking, found a rail line running straight through country the map had shaded as empty, and pointed it out.

They were right. My sources were the DEC trail and road layers and the Census road file, and a rail grade is in none of them, so the map was quietly calling a set of steel rails untouched wilderness. That is a real hole. Please keep telling me things like this. Half of what is any good here came from a stranger writing in to say a lake was in the wrong spot.

What stuck wasn't the correction. It was the part after it, which I'm paraphrasing because I no longer have access to the original:

You're going to ask for coffee and you can't even figure this out?

Paraphrased, and I cannot go check the wording, because I blocked him. Which I recognize does slightly complicate the section below where I explain how relaxed I am about all this.

The meaning was clear enough, though: the button in the corner had bought you a warranty. Having once asked for three dollars, a map I made on a Tuesday night out of public data now owed you completeness.

I have thought about that more than a grown man should. This page is what came of it.

For the record, the railroads are going in. Not because a comment demanded it, but because a map that calls live track wilderness is simply wrong, and being wrong bothers me considerably more than being talked to does. It took a while because I am one guy with a laptop and a bedtime, and the list is long.

The receipt, then

In the spirit of full disclosure, an itemized accounting of where a coffee actually goes.

The part about my wife

I do this because I love it. I would do it anyway. I have done it anyway, for years, at a rate of return best described as deeply negative.

But the money is real, and it leaves a real household account, and that account has a second person attached to it. There is a nonzero number of times I have had to explain what a terrain tile is while somebody stares at a line item and waits.

So when a page asks you to buy me a coffee, understand that it is not a business model. It is a marriage-preservation device.

Every few dollars is one fewer conversation that begins with the words “what is this charge.” That is the entire pitch. I am not building a startup. I am not growing an audience. I am trying to make the hobby roughly break even so it can quietly continue in the corner of the house where it lives.

If that bothers you

Some people find the button tacky. Some would rather I plaster ads over everything instead. Some believe a person who makes free maps for strangers should do it silently, forever, at a loss, and never mention it.

Fair enough, honestly. Nobody is obligated to fund my hobby, and if the ask puts you off, this probably is not the place for you, and I am not going to chase anyone down the driveway about it. Close the tab. No hard feelings. The maps still work.

There is exactly one exception to the no hard feelings policy. Quietly closing the tab is free. Coming to tell me about it, in a comment, out loud, at length, is a block. I know this works, because I have already used it once. That is how we got here.

Nothing personal. It is triage. I get maybe two usable hours in an evening, and I would rather spend them on the bottom of a lake than in a thread with a stranger about whether a guy who makes free maps is allowed to want three dollars. The block button is also free. It may be the only thing around here that costs me nothing.

If it doesn't

But if you have ever found the one dark eye at the bottom of Lake Erie, or figured out the furthest you can physically get from a road in the Adirondacks, or watched a hundred years of USGS surveyors disagree about the same mountain, and thought huh, neat ...

Then welcome. You are exactly who I built all of it for. Stay as long as you want, use every bit of it, share it with whoever would like it, and never feel obligated to give me a cent.

And if you ever do feel like it, the button is right there.

One time, whatever amount you feel like, no account and no follow-up. You will never hear from me again unless you want to.

The recurring kind

There are also two memberships, both five dollars a month, and I want to be upfront about the difference. One of them gives you something. The other deliberately gives you nothing at all.

If you are weighing the two, take the print room. At least you get a poster out of it.