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Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

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Re: Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

#51

Post by herenorthere »

jijosunny wrote: post #49
herenorthere wrote: post #33

Being in YC, I assume your plan is to be headquartered in the US, or at the very least, do business with US customers/entities. I notice your team doesn't involve any compliance people. As you probably already know, you are a MSB in the US, do you have plans to expand your required compliance policies? Does your team already file on any potential BSA/AML concerns? Or is this like a "when we get to that bridge we will…

first off, thank you for the kind words! Payment fraud and AML - we're a PayPal and Stripe Partner and do not hold the money that we process. We use their marketplace products to handle payments, fraud and compliance so that we can focus on the product.

Ahh interesting, thank you for the response. And yes the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you're basically a non-custodial payment processor (and idk even know if you'd be considered that). What type of business do you categorize as? Are you a payment processor? Or are you simply a UI markup for paypal/stripe? Im not implying one is better than the other, just curious

edit: now that I think about it, I would imply that one is better than the other. Because if you are just a UI/UX improvement on paypal/stripe, then you would be out of the regulatory umbrella of FinCen I believe.

Re: Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

#53

Post by alasdair_ »

How do the instant payments work? Is my paypal going to get shut down for months due to a "fraud" alert being triggered from having tons of random payments sent to me?

This seems like a great way to quickly cash out stolen credit card numbers to a bank account - how do you differentiate between something like that and simply a creator that got to the front page of Reddit and had a huge spike of legitimate traffic? If you fall over in the latter case, I'd be extremely pissed. (And if your answer is to rely on Stripe's fraud detection, it's very likely they will block exactly this kind of spike in usage from an otherwise unknown account).

Finally, can you actually make money from a credit card payment of $1 when you only charge a 5% fee?

Re: Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

#54

Post by jijosunny »

spike021 wrote: post #46

If Patreon were to add a feature to do one-time, no sign-up required contributions to any of the orgs currently using it, would this be survivable for you? Do you have ideas of ways to increase value to make using your service over others more worthwhile or is the one-time, no sign-up required contribution process the primary feature right now?

that's a great question! broadly, I think it's an overkill for certain types of creators (say an Instagrammer or Twitch streamer) to launch a Patreon. Buy Me A Coffee is a far more casual and friendly way to accept contributions from your fans. We also differentiate from Patreon in a lot of ways. For e.g., creators love that we're putting fans/supporters in the front-and-center (like Twitch), which also encourages more contributions.

Re: Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

#56

Post by egypturnash »

herenorthere wrote: post #38
Semiapies wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the features you list over Ko-fi is a mobile app. Why on Earth would I need a mobile app to use this? What does it provide that a well-designed mobile site doesn't?

I have no idea, but I'd assume the mobile app would be for use of the people receiving the money. Which would be a nice add if I were a content creator. But that's just a guess. Edit: As for your notion that an app isn't necessary when there is a well-designed mobile site, I def agree. However, that's just not the case anymore, how else do you expect companies to so easily collect your personal data! /s Edit2: Id wag…

I make most of my rent drawing comics and getting via Patreon and I’ve never had any use for their app. YMMV.

Re: Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

#59

Post by jijosunny »

mrwebmaster wrote: post #52

Been using it for a while and like it so far. A downside for me is that from every $3 coffee paid by supporters, I only receive $2.39 in my Paypal account :(

True, the payment processing fee for micro-transactions is pretty high. PayPal and Stripe charge a flat $0.30 + 2.9%.

We designed the 'pay what you want' model on Buy Me A Coffee to tackle this problem.

Re: Launch HN: Buy Me a Coffee (YC W19) – Give your audience a way to thank you

#60

Post by icebraining »

sarbaz wrote: post #22

I am looking for a service that will allow me to directly pay creators at the same price as an ad impression, paying per page view. So far ways to pay creators are almost always based on dollar increments, but I would have much more use for a service that lets you pay in increments of $0.001. Today this is basically impossible because payment fees make direct payments of this scale impractical, but it could theoretic…

Flattr did exactly this.
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