Ko‑fi Tools is back with a new and improved V2 site refresh. 3 Months in the making we now have overhaled every part of the website, our API and more! Special thanks to all our Ko-fi Tools users and supporters for helping make this happen and sustaining this project!
Hello everyone!
The observent of you may have noticed we have a new website now! I pressed deploy the complete rebuild of Ko‑fi Tools just tonight. This has been three months of hard work to give the website a compleate overhall, a faster site, a sharp Neobrutalist aesthetic and an upgraded API that is so much faster.
A new coat of paint
The first thing you will notice is the design. I took inspiration from the emerging Neobrutalist movement solid blocks, fun colour choices and gave it a fun crisp comic‑book twist. I think it really fits and I had lots of fun creating this new design, which took 5 weeks alone to home in on and get right.
Live Status Page
Transparency matters when your own site depends on an external service. The new Status page shows real‑time data for the API response time. Incidents will be logged here too, and in the future you should also be able to subscribe to these.
Guided setup
Embedding a Ko‑fi widget should take seconds, not an afternoon with the documentation open in a second tab. The Setup page now takes you through a quick and easy setup before it produces a ready‑to‑paste snippet for each widget. Each option for the widgets is now easy to customise with graphical options and explains why a setting might matter, so you learn while configuring your widgets what each setting does. No more checking our documentation, or having to understand what you're doing with HTML.
Hands‑on demos
Widgets are visual by nature, and code samples rarely convey the subtleties of animation or responsive behaviour. The new Demos section showcases every widget on real data. Try entering in your own Ko-fi page URL and see the preview updates instantly so you can judge them before you add them to your own website.
Easier to run, quicker to load
Under the surface the site is now a speed machine, built with OctoberCMS V3. Fast page load times are now possable as our site now uses the same global CDN we use for our JS widgets now too. It is also far easier for me to update the site as the service evolves and is easier to maintain too, this is important so I can focus on the API and other services.
API & widget upgrade
Alongside the front‑end work the V2 API is out of beta. Benchmarks show median response times ten‑fold faster than V1, largely thanks to a new cache for API resposes so we are not harrassing Ko-fi.com for data with each request - oops, sorry about that Ko-fi! You don't need to do anything, the new V2 and the old V1 widgets are setup and ready to go with our new API!
Still on the todo list
A handful of pages are unfortunatly a work in progress. The documentation is being reorganised to match the new API structure, the contact form isn't hooked into the backend yet, so sorry if you need to reach me before this goes live, and an email subscription system is in the pipeline so future announcements land in your inbox rather than your social feed.
Sustaining the project
Ko‑fi Tools remains free to use, but the servers and domain renewals do carry a cost. If the service saves you time or helps you earn from your audience, please consider supporting development through my Ko‑fi page. Last month thanks to a generous contribution from Kacboy we reached our funding goal this year and we have covered the domain renewal! An additional thanks to everyone who uses Ko-fi Tools, who has reached out to give support, shown interest or talked to me in the Ko-fi Discord. Your support is still felt and I really appreciate it!
Thank you for using Ko‑fi Tools, for reporting bugs and for spreading the word.
Pease out!
- Catkin M
06/06/2025