When Nellie Mead and Teresa Espinosa conceived their daughter, they did it without sex, a fertility clinic, or medical supervision. Instead, Espinosa injected a friend’s sperm into a menstrual cup she bought at a drugstore. She then inserted the cup into Mead’s vagina in their Spring Hill, Florida home. Aliena was born in July.

“I was shocked when it worked,” says Mead, 25, who had thought her only options were “to have sex with a guy and that wasn’t happening” or “to save thousands of dollars to buy sperm.” That was until she uncovered a trove of at-home artificial insemination advice online. Mead devoured YouTube testimonials, where a search for “home insemination” yields more than 11,000 results (though some are clips of impregnating livestock).

Single women, lesbian couples, and straight couples with fertility troubles are increasingly experimenting at home with store-bought goods, in an effort to skirt expensive fertility procedures like Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) and In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF). At-home inseminators enlist friends or acquaintances to donate sperm, or procure free donor samples from dating-style portals like the Known Donor Registry, Pollen Tree, and Pride Angel. Some go a more orthodox route and purchase sperm from FDA-regulated banks, which can cost from about $500 to $1500 per cycle. In addition to saving money, many at-home inseminators say they prefer bedrooms to treatment rooms, because they can personalize the conception experience, imbue it with romance, and reduce stress. Legal experts warn, however, that inseminating at home can compromise a couple’s legal rights.

Embracing the DIY ethos, Mead and Espinosa assembled a kit of store-bought tools over the ten months they tried to conceive. Items included an ovulation predictor kit, various sized syringes (1 milliliter was the winner), menstrual cups intended to catch period blood, prenatal vitamins and herbs like Evening Primrose and Chasteberry, and Robitussin cough syrup to loosen cervical mucus and whisk sperm on their course.

Mead, who shaves the sides of her head and wears baseball caps, documented their attempts in a series of “pregnant stud updates” on YouTube, with Espinosa at her side. Their video announcing Mead’s pregnancy was watched more than 100,000 times, and now they’re selling a version of their kit on eBay.