Add funds at any time

[chadwhitacre]

Currently the only way to get funds into Gratipay is to attach a credit card that we charge during our weekly payment cycle in the amount needed only for that week. The idea here is to decouple funding from the weekly cycle, so you could add funds to your Gratipay account at any time. That way you'd have more control over when your card is charged, etc.

Original

From #97:

How does this relate to purely pre-paid gittip accounts? Many people do not want to allow automatic charges against their credit cards, but would still participate by pre-paying.

Is it possible that a tip can remain "backed" by a pre-paid deposit even without a card linked to it? (It would stop being backed when the deposit runs out).

The architecture of the site makes this not too hard. Tips come out of your balance before hitting your credit card. The calculations on the site use "has-a-working-credit-card-on-file" as an approximation for "backed" at the moment. Cleaning that up (#112) would be the biggest associated task.

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[chadwhitacre]

My concern with this is that it erodes confidence in one's funding stream. If I make a big personal marketing push and receive pre-paid tips for $500 for this week, how do I know how much I'll receive next week? If tips are clearly understood to be recurring automatic credit card payments, then I expect my funding stream to decay much more slowly over time than if they're pre-paid. Yes it raises the bar on receiving each tip in the first place, but once a tip is secured I can be much more confident that it will continue into the future. With pre-paid tips I think we would see weekly tip volume per-tippee become much more erratic.

I want to design Gittip for slow, long-term build-up and slow decay of a personal funding stream, rather than non-committal one-time payments. This is part of Gittip's being optimized for making a living: a tippee needs their weekly tip volume to be stable in order to count on it to pay their bills.

[simenko]

I think you should at least to allow to make pre-paid deposit even with card linked to account. As far as I understood, now if i wish to tip someone a dollar a week, my credit card will be charged 1.30$ each week because of stripe 0.30 fee, rigth? I don't like this. I want to put, say, 20 bucks on my account with one transaction and pay 0.30+3.9% of 20 = 1.10$ fee instead of 0.30x20 = 6$. It's all about optimising micropayments.

[chadwhitacre]

Good call ilya42. Reticketed as #167.

[thiloplanz]

I want to design Gittip for slow, long-term build-up and slow decay of a personal funding stream, rather than non-committal one-time payments.

I think those are separate issues. This ticket is about enabling pre-paid deposits to your Gittip account. It is not about one-time donations to projects (those would still be fixed weekly payouts).

With pre-paid tips I think we would see weekly tip volume per-tippee become much more erratic.

Maybe, maybe not. We'd have to try and see. But it should increase the total number of tips, as it lowers the barrier to entry.

I for one really want to join Gittip, but cannot link a credit card to it. Pre-paid PayPal would be fine (bitcoin even better).

In the mean-time, can I fund you via flattr? Please claim your account over there: https://flattr.com/thing/736820/whit537-on-Twitter

[ghost]

Adding my vote over here as this addresses my problem with international transaction fees somewhat.

[chadwhitacre]

@thiloplanz Thank you, I linked my Twitter account to my Flattr account. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@voltagex I think the international transaction fee issue is better addressed over on #167 (raise minimum charge to $10), which is deployed for this week.

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

This is relevant to #310 ([as discussed][story] between @whit537 and I on Twitter.)

I think it'd be easy to mitigate the steadiness-issues with something social, instead of technical. For instance, automatically booting you off the site after the third infraction (not paying-up in time, so a week's tips from you were prevented) … or putting you in a different “category” of giver, a category whose contributions aren't shown in the weekly-total to random users, and whose contributions were shown separately to the receptor themselves:

whit537 is receiving $195.98 per week.

You are receiving $195.98 per week (as well as $24.00 a week from untrusted users.)

Show a large warning to this effect, when you're switching your account from the default (auto-top-up) mode, to the manual mode. Of relevance to #310, require users to preform this switch (and agree to this warning), before allowing Bitcoin (since Bitcoin can't recurrently charge.)

Edit: Could integrate this into #5, later. When there are one-off tips, could show recurring tips from untrusted top-up users amongst the one-off's.

[thiloplanz]

just wanted to bump this thread again, as the similar thread about bitcoin deposits (#14) is diverging from this a bit, now focussing on recurring bitcoin payments that are also bitcoin denominated.

Both nice things to have for some people, but I think a simple way to pre-pay the current weekly dollar payments (using established payment methods) has a higher priority.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @strugee via Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @stevepurkiss on Twitter.

[thiloplanz]

@whit537: I saw you made a one-off bitcoin payout the other day, how about a one-off bitcoin deposit? Can I send you a bitcoin and you put equivalent USD in my gittip balance?

[chadwhitacre]

@thiloplanz For you, yes. :-)

Looking at Coinbase, it looks like I need your email address and an amount to "request," either as BTC or USD. If you want to give me that privately you can use support@gittip.com.

[thiloplanz]

Small status update on that: @whit537 has made a payment request for 1 BTC to me on Coinbase. From the looks of it, I have to create a Coinbase account myself to make the payment, rather than just being able to send coins to some address (unless I misunderstand something). Fine. I made an account. I can see the request in my account page there, but when I click on "Complete payment" all I get is a 404 Not Found error page. Retried a few times over the last week, and we also contacted Coinbase support. No progress yet ;-( @whit537: If possible, can you just give me a regular bitcoin receiving address? I believe you can create one within Coinbase by going to Account Settings > Bitcoin addresses > Create new address.

[chadwhitacre]

@thiloplanz Thanks for the tip! I've created an address and emailed it to you.

[thiloplanz]

I've created an address and emailed it to you.

1 BTC should be on its way to you.

[chadwhitacre]

@thiloplanz Got it!

$193.58 will arrive in your bank account on Tuesday Oct 29, 2013.

I've started the transfer from Coinbase to New Alliance. When I see it hit there and am sure of the amount, I'll move it into Balanced and credit it to you in Gittip.

[chadwhitacre]

@thiloplanz The $193.58 has cleared New Alliance. I've kicked off a transfer from there to Balanced, and have credited your account within Gittip. Huzzah! 💃

[bruceadams]

As @zwn kindly and correctly points out, I'm +1 for this 👍

[rummik]

I'm +1 on this as well

[kghbln]

Prepaid seems to be the only way to participate at Gittip for me from Germany since the automated system of my credit card provider simply blocks the transfers and chances are high that this will happen every time.

A "way out" is that Gittip informs me about the exact amount of the next debit, then I call the provider via telephone to say it is ok. Next Gittip is to charge the amount. All this has to happen within 24 hours! I believe that this is however not feasible as well as ridiculous.

Ideally it will be nice to be able to transfer the money to my Gittip-instance, probably as a recurring thing.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from a representative of a top-25 Internet company:

Turns out its often easier for us to make one large payment than to make multiple smaller ones. The reason: we have to submit expense reports and approval forms for expenses. I'd rather do it once and have an allocation account than have to issue multiple transactions that I'd have to expense and get approved.

[chadwhitacre]

+3 from #2401 (dupe).

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃