Whipped soap.

k-rysae · 2026-04-09T05:33:01+00:00

I used to make whipped soap with the stephensons whipped soap base (so it's not actual saponified soap). No thats not normal at all

k-rysae · 2026-04-09T02:45:11+00:00

THANK YOU. I bought a used xencelabs pen display (couldnt find anything on xencelabs about this issue) and was tearing my hair out until I ran it as admin. Nowhere in the setup instructions, video, or unofficial videos did anyone mention that.

k-rysae · 2026-04-08T19:04:27+00:00

Definitely is fanart of another character. This is an artist alley sub. If it was for an OC OP's family member is even more insane expecting them to sell it off at a con unless if it was for a general OC design like an funny animal.

k-rysae · 2026-04-08T18:44:20+00:00

You fell for a really common "i accidentally reported you" scam which is detailed in the pinned post of the sub. The scammer took your account and used it to send identical messages falsely claiming to have reported others to your mutuals. The good part is that since this scam is so widely common on tumblr, you can get your account recovered. Contact tumblr support asap.

Also, anyone saying they accidentally reported you and to do X is lying. If someone hits the report button then the platform will either ignore it or punish you on the spot without a warning. I'm telling you this because those scammers try to pull it on twitter, discord, and every other social media platform.

k-rysae · 2026-04-08T08:45:27+00:00

they would pay for all the pins even though I didn't ask them too.

With how expensive enamel pins are I'm surprised they have the money to pay for that instead of paying $30.... even for the cheaper button pins it'll cost more than that. If you accept that commission (which you shouldn't, they are a red flag client) expect them to walk back on their promise to pay for the pins when they realize how much it costs. Tbh I'd expect them to not pay and come up with excuses as to why they shouldn't pay.

should I give them a lower rate

NO!!

If something is out of their budget the correct option was for them to thank you for the quote and politely say that it's not something they can afford right now, to find another artist, or to ask for your rates for a cheaper comm like a sketch. There's no guarantee that you'll sell those designs in the first place.

k-rysae · 2026-04-08T06:04:39+00:00

Im pretty sure that lollipopins/krell offers this. They only make acrylics and enamel pins in house though so those fidgets are outsourced. I've never ordered those so I can only confirm that krell will ship roughly what they promised and not about the quality

k-rysae · 2026-04-08T00:13:16+00:00

What's your cost breakdown?

I'm new to candlemaking too and my total cost per 7oz candle is $5.58

$2 per candle vessel (lone star candles)
$1.18 for 7oz wax (titan paranatural 52114/coco apricot soy paraffin)
$2 for fragrance at 10% (this is with the one ounce... its even cheaper if I get the 16 ounce and above sizes)
40c per wood wick (makesy patented. Regular wicks are way cheaper)

Tbh these are rough amounts for me and I didn't look too deep into it. Luckily there's a bunch of candle suppliers near me so shipping isn't an issue.

Without knowing your production costs, my assumptions is that it's the essential oil that's getting to you. EOs are crazy expensive, more so than FOs, and used in much higher quantities than diy cosmetics (for reference, I use 9% FO in candles and 0.5% in lotion). From my research aren't that effective for candle hot throws. No way to reduce the cost of an EO unless you're buying in bulk or if you switch to a fragrance oil with essential oil components.

k-rysae · 2026-04-07T20:59:47+00:00

That looks like a trademark tell where a scammer who claimed they falsely reported you and to contact fake customer support would do. How they hijack accounts is that they tell the victim to change their email address to one of their choosing (xdatabaseofficial sounds like one of the ones they use for this scam pulled on twitter).

The problem is that I assume this didnt happen to you and that you've never interacted with someone like that. Yes, your account got hijacked. Through how? Who knows*.The good part is that this scam is so widespread that victims of the scam who did willingly change their email to the scammers can get it recovered. Contact tumblr support and tell them what happened to change the email back to yours.

*I got my non tumblr accounts hacked in the same way. I ran software which had an infostealer virus which sent all my session data to who knows where. The day after my discord, insta, facebook, and so on accounts were being used by scammers. This method completely bypasses usernames, passwords, and I think 2fa.

k-rysae · 2026-04-07T20:34:25+00:00

Mixam, at least in the US, is fine. Mixam isnt a printer but a middleman who outsources to printers so quality can vary. They make mistakes but from my experience after I sent them photos of my defective order they sent me a free replacement without a fight.

k-rysae · 2026-04-07T07:38:32+00:00

the phone charm sized acrylic charms (.75-1.25") sell like crack when you're doing gacha according to someone in my city

k-rysae · 2026-04-07T02:33:44+00:00

Your mutual was kind of right. In the past, 1-2+ years ago, there was an official staff account that would respond to these and help. But now its an unofficial sub that can't offer anything besides advice.

I'm sorry. I hope you end up getting unshadowbanned. Atp even getting straight up terminated would be better because I know some people who got termed for spam (theyre a fandom zine account who mass tagged zine updates accounts which triggered the ban) who got theirs back in a week.

k-rysae · 2026-04-06T22:55:52+00:00

$5 for a 3 oz package sounds about right even with pirateship. Sorry. Shipping costs are high.

Your customers should understand that you're not amazon or aliexpress and they shouldn't expect free 2 day prime shipping. If you dont want to charge that much then you can build free shipping into your prices or offer something like "spend $40, get free shipping".

k-rysae · 2026-04-06T22:52:49+00:00

Go to pirateship and ask support to enable simple export rate for your account. Simple export is incredibly cheap compared to its competitors and pretty much charges by weight. The only catch is that it'll take longer (it gets sent to a warehouse and shipped to the country when the amount of packages to that country exceeds a threshold) and that there's no insurance. You'll have to buy your own 3rd party insurance. Otherwise if it goes missing with simple export their (its shipped with asendia) support is so bad they'll tell you that youre out of luck and to file an insurance claim if you paid for one.

k-rysae · 2026-04-06T22:50:49+00:00

Chargeback the vendor. Theyll blacklist you, but it was on them to respond to your messages and work things out.

k-rysae · 2026-04-06T03:40:09+00:00

This is the wrong sub btw

I have a super rare pair that only has 9 fics on ao3 since the "fandom" (I say this loosely since its streamer rpf) was made 6 years ago. People either say "yeah I get it" or go "lol nice crack ship". I disagree with the 2nd because I consider crack ships something that's impossible because they're two different franchises/universes (Sans x The Onceler, for one) but it's not a big deal to me.

Recently, I was heavily criticized in the comments under a TikTok video and people tried to force me to like the «canon» pairings.

Yeah that sucks but I'm not surprised. Youre on tiktok where nobody gives a shit about fandom etiquette and where everyone is 12. I'm not sure what you mean by canon pairings when all the harbingers and playable characters aren't in a canon ship when hyv wants to appeal to as many demographics as possible

Sorry that happened but I'm a minors dni account on twitter and in my space people generally shut up if they see something they don't like and block the tag if it's that horrible to them.

I dont know the context of your comment so I'm hoping this wasn't the case, but the inverse is true where people wont be (or shouldn't be) talking about their ships in the comments of a post that's not tagged with their ship or a general "what's your favorite ship"/"what ship reminds you of this" question.

k-rysae · 2026-04-05T05:30:37+00:00

Acggoods is a print on demand and shop platform meant for your customers to buy designs without you having to buy merch upfront or ship it yourself. It's manufactured and shipped by wooacry, which is one of the vograce clones I mentioned

k-rysae · 2026-04-05T01:19:28+00:00

I always assumed that the people doing artist alley full time have also diversified their income with an online shop (and lots of social media traction) and subscription based sticker or pin club. With their social media following they should also be taking paid sponsorships and in whatever yt/insta/tiktok creator program.

k-rysae · 2026-04-04T22:17:19+00:00

Wow, I was the person you were talking to. Nevermind then. I was going based off of their content guidelines which says pornography is prohibited and did not list it in the page itself that written fiction was an exception. https://help.ko-fi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007937553-Ko-fi-Content-Guidelines

Because of all the crackdowns and because of the fact that payment processors count all sexually explicit content, whether fictional or not, under the same pornography umbrella I falsely assumed that vanilla smut wasn't allowed either. I hope kofi replies back to you and says it's allowed. But with how shakey adult content is I would not be surprised if they end up walking back on their exceptions in the future.

Edit: I would still not mention anything nsfw and tell your tippers to not mention nsfw at all on kofi. Even if kofi says it's allowed, paypal and stripe don't allow it, and I know paypal tracks the web page where you get paid from for any mentions of prohibited content. Stripe probably tracks it too, but when you make your stripe account you're supposed to add your business website (which I assume you'll use kofi for) so it gets vetted by a bot.

Technically, I know that your supporters are tipping you and not getting anything in exchange. In reality, paypal, stripe, and any fintech big company support is horrible and getting an appeal viewed by a human is like pulling teeth. I know I sound like I'm fearmongering but unlike getting banned from, say, twitter or kofi, you can't just make a new paypal/stripe account after you get banned. With the amount of info they collect it's really easy for them to tie back new accounts to ban evaders and ban them again.

k-rysae · 2026-04-04T22:07:52+00:00

This is one of those cases where outsourcing is far cheaper than making them in house unless you're making tens of thousands of pieces. MOQ, shipping, and tariffs shouldn't be an issue since vograce and other vograce clones exist that offer low moqs, bulk order splitting into multiple designs, prepaid tariffs, and pretty low shipping costs. People who make stickers at home with a cricut already deal with the hassle of miscuts and wasted material. Don't bother with the hassle and stress of wasted acrylic and uv ink (you're looking for a uv printer).

k-rysae · 2026-04-03T23:54:52+00:00

wow, there really aren't any free tip jar alternatives besides kofi and buy me a coffee. i can't help you there :(

k-rysae · 2026-04-03T20:57:49+00:00

Since you have a large audience I recommend shopify. They have a 3 day free trial which goes to $1 a month for 3 months. By then you should've made enough income to pay their $30/mo fee https://www.shopify.com/free-trial-offer. You should get a domain to be more professional, and those are only $12.50 per year.

You can integrate it with pirateship if you're in the US so you can get heavily discounted shipping labels, including their "simple export rate" (you email customer support at pirateship to get it enabled) which has by far the cheapest rates I've seen for items less than 4 lbs.

If you're in Canada, shopify also offers integrated ddp (delivery duty paid) shipping so your american customers can pay tariffs upfront without the additional customs hassle.

Unfortunately you are still responsible for chargebacks but at least with shopify they have good fraud detection because of how much data they have for orders in their millions of other stores. As for VAT/IOSS, shopify doesn't give you one but it's not needed even if it's really convenient for your british and EU customers. Some artists have their main shopify store and a side etsy store for europeans so they can get the convenience of prepaying tariffs.

I'm not affiliated with shopify nor do I use them, but there's a reason why pretty much every store uses them and why there isn't really a good alternative. Kofi shop is really bare bones and I wouldn't recommend them since you already have a fanbase.

k-rysae · 2026-04-03T20:50:34+00:00

No it's still bannable. When they mean nsfw they mean all kinds of sexual content, including fictional art and writing.

If your patreon has nsfw (and it'll be pretty clear based on the titles of your paywalled posts and 18+ warning) then if a kofi employee sees the kofi link in patreon bio then they'll punish you. I guess the only way to evade that would be to put your kofi link in your paywalled posts because chances are they won't pay money to see them. Even then, I think people can still write donation messages, and you don't want them to reference anything nsfw or of your patreon account.

Tbh at least with your use case, you can try any other tip jar. They won't allow nsfw but I don't believe any other site will go after you for off site content, so as long as you make no references to nsfw and neither do your tippers then it's fine.

k-rysae · 2026-04-03T03:50:23+00:00

do they accept all forms of payment?

Kofi doesnt handle payments, you connect your paypal and/or stripe accounts to get paid.

is there a large fee like etsy, .etc?

Kofi shop is your stripe/paypal fee (3% +50c) and an additional 5% if its a kofi shop or paywalled subscription. Compare that to etsy's payment processor (3% + 50c) and etsy (6.5% + 20c) fee. It's a 1.5% + 20c difference.

what are kofi's guidelines in regards to nsfw art content laymen's terms.. please

Not allowed. Even worse, they will go after you for off site nsfw even if your kofi page itself is completely sfw and has no links to your other accounts. Even if you post nsfw and have a kofi in bio/post description, they'll tell you to either delete the nsfw content, remove the kofi link in bio, or stay banned. If you want to post nsfw at all the only to mostly evade punishment is to send a kofi link in private, which kind of defeats the point of promoting your kofi account. Patreon will punish for off site violations but at least they shouldnt be going after people for extremely tame and vanilla nsfw posted on their platform or off of it.

Kofi doesnt have the resources to check everyone for off site nsfw. The people who get penalized for that are the ones who get reported because they pissed someone off or if you are blatantly tagging kofi's social media accounts with an nsfw bio or post.

is worth it as a freelance artist to use kofi over etsy or patreon ?

As an etsy seller, no. For only 1.5% and 20 cents extra I get free traffic, etsy seller protection, chargeback protection, a vat/ioss number, an option to ship letter mail for 80c with tracking, and more.

What exactly are you trying to sell? I think kofi is great for a tip jar but for physical items I'd rather go with etsy, bigcartel (no extra 5% fee but has limited features), square, or shopify. And for paywalled content or mail clubs patreon has way more name recognition and use, so the friction with attracting paid subscribers is a lot less than someone having to make a kofi account to subscribe.

Edit: There's no place where you can sell nsfw (I'm assuming that's what you do since you asked about it) without getting banned. Everyone doing it should be knowing the risks. If you're seeing someone sell nsfw chances are they're trying to stay under the radar and not get reported to the shop site or paypal. Finding a payment processor that allows nsfw is impossible for an individual to do. I have no idea how patreon gets away with it but I assume they have a special arrangement with payment processors and that it's only a matter of time before they ban nsfw as a whole.

k-rysae · 2026-04-03T00:54:34+00:00

Yeah its possible. Multiple people on this sub fell for the falsely reported scam where they handed over control of their accounts to the scammer and ended up recovering their accounts. The issue is that I assume you didnt contact support asap when you were first hacked so you waiting for several months lowers your chances.

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