Ash HN: Best Micropayment Processor?

I want to work on a project that allows for easily sharing paywalled links for the price of $1. It seems Stripe will take 30 cents (plus transaction fees) on every dollar processed, and PayPal will take 49 cents, for credit card payments. Are there any cheaper alternatives out there?

I considered a workaround to use the Venmo API because it seems they only charge 3% for credit card processing. But are there any significant cons I should be aware of before building a SaaS on top of Venmo to facilitate high volumes of $1 payments?

Both PayPal and Stripe have a separate ‘micro transactions’ pricing that they will enable upon your request. Instead of 2.9%+$0.30, they will charge you 5%+$0.05.

This is going to be unpopular here, but Bitcoin’s layer 2 Lightning Network is pretty ideal for micropayments.

Strike (strike.me) is a Venmo-like app that lets users connect their bank account and then hold a USD balance. The only difference is that users can use their USD to send Bitcoin to the other end. They’re not exposed to bitcoin’s price volatility.

On nostr, users are sending micro tips to other each other fairly successfully. The UX isn’t great right now, but I recommend trying it out- it is a functioning version of social micro payments.

I’m going to echo here what Roguelazer has already mentioned and add to it the business benefit: you will eventually not want people only making $1 payments.

A $10 account credit is probably the minimum you should consider in today’s environment. That’s plenty, and it’s not too much for low usage accounts.

To a first approximation your experience is why micropayments have never taken hold…

They seem as much like a great idea here in 2023 as they did in 1994 when I first read about the idea. I had just started using the internet.

Micropayments are infeasible because financial infrastructure has non-trivial costs. The costs are non-trivial because there the highest incentives to steal money and thus systems need hardened surfaces.

At $0.30/transaction the cost of 10,000,000 automated attacks per hour/day/week becomes real money.

And at $0.30/transaction there seems to be enough money to provide enough resources to make the system robust enough.

Anyway, charging more is an easy way to make the business viable if it is going to be viable…and if you can’t provide $10 of value it probably isn’t.

Good luck.