Feedback and suggestions would be massively appreciated by the way!
The blog (http://blog.dripfeed.co/) is looking a bit forlorn (full of Lorem Ipsum at the moment).
I got the the blog via the link at the bottom of the main page.
ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#12How do you handle the legal side of things? Aren't you, in most countries, considered operating as a bank in this scenario? And therefore tied to a whole load of regulations?
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#13Does this pay no interest?
Right now, no. I know that sucks, but we're looking into ways to leverage savings to earn more interest than a bank would typically give you for a small, short-term goal. Part of the reason I started working on Dripfeed was because my interest rate went down to about 0.08%, which is effectively nothing on say a £500 phone.
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#14I think its a really good idea. It would be cool if you could have an on/off switch to make pausing more difficult. For instance, I know that for myself, as soon as I wanted to spend that money I was saving, I would just pause the service. But if I could make it harder to do that (I.E. make it so I have to do several prompts to pause it, answer some math problem or something that would take me more than 5 seconds to…
Good point, I went into building it with total ease of use in mind, maybe I should build a 'protect me from myself' feature into the settings :P
You could set up security questions for yourself. Like you have to input an answer to "Why do I want this MacBook", and, "Why is this MacBook more important than a latte this morning".
Lol
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#15Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#16First, sounds like you're solving a major problem that most people have - sweet! However, this is my constructive negative feedback - I don't think it will work because of this one piece here: Pause if you know you'll have less money this week, deposit a bulk amount if you'll have more, even let friends and family deposit. I tried doing this in a rather "manual" fashion by setting up a recurring monthly deposit into…
We're looking into a whole bunch of ways to stop charging fees as soon as we can - it was kind of the lazy way out for the short term. We're looking into referral fees, as you suggested, as well as earning interest. We also had an idea that, since we know what a user is saving for, and roughly how long it'll take for them to save for it, we could put the item up to tender and hunt down cheaper deals so the user can save money. Just an idea, but there are so many interesting things we can try when we have that kind of data.
Re: pause - I totally didn't consider that, and smurfy brought it up too, so I'm probably going to build out a 'protect me from myself' feature to do just that
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#17How do you handle the legal side of things? Aren't you, in most countries, considered operating as a bank in this scenario? And therefore tied to a whole load of regulations?
We're aggressively pursuing FCA regulation in the UK since we're pretty compliant with their policies already. Suffice it to say, we're doing everything we can, we really don't want to screw this up.
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#18The site looks nice, however I'm slightly puzzled. What do I gain from Dripfeed over the current standing order that transfers a fixed amount per month from my current account to my savings account?
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#19The site looks great, and I think a lot of people would want something like this. You've mentioned in other comments that you're hoping to get some kind of interest going. That, with what you've already got, is enough for me to signup.
Re: ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook
#20The site looks nice, however I'm slightly puzzled. What do I gain from Dripfeed over the current standing order that transfers a fixed amount per month from my current account to my savings account?
Very good question: Banks generally don't award much interest for small, short savings, they're really geared towards saving for cars and houses, not small goals.
We, on the other hand, are designed to help you save for the small things in a much nicer way, and we're working on ways to make your money work in ways that banks really just don't care about.
Case in point - in the next few weeks, we're rolling out a feature that finds cheaper offers for the item you're already saving for (since we know what you're saving for and roughly how long it'll take to save for it), we can leverage the fact that you're saving for something to encourage a supplier to offer the product cheaper in return for the money right now. That's just one of the ideas we're working on right now.