withdrawals outside the US, a.k.a. international payouts

[chadwhitacre]

Balanced will work for withdrawals to U.S. bank accounts, but not outside the U.S. What do we do here? Suggestions?

Current Status

1. MassPay—As a stop-gap while we await the chance to prioritize implementing a more robust solution, we are offering automatic weekly payouts via PayPal. This is risky because PayPal is likely to freeze our account once we get on their radar. If you'd like to participate, email support@gittip.com with your Gittip username, PayPal email address, and the first eight digits of the API key from your Gittip profile page (to confirm your account). PayPal's fee is 2%, capped at $20.
2. Balanced—Our automated payments provider, Balanced, is working to implement international ACH transfers (IAT). Please see their roadmap and voice your interest on this ticket. Balanced is shutting down, see migrate back to Stripe #3245.
3. Stripe—They've added payouts (à la Balanced), and are known to be working on expanding to the EU. See migrate back to Stripe #3245.
4. Trans-Pay—The ball is in our court to improve our KYC practices (via verify individual identity programmatically #2449?) and circle back. See pay out via Trans-pay #417.
5. MangoPay—They're a European counter-part to Balanced. We would need a European legal entity and bank account. See explore partnership with MangoPay #891.

Want to Help?

Give us a PR for multi-currency support. That's a pre-requisite no matter which direction we go.

[mitsuhiko]

I'm starting to get the feeling the only real solution for international transfers is paypal. They however already burned open source projects in the past because paypal does not accept donations officially so it would make sense to get some clarification if paypal is acceptable for that.

[RafaelReinehr]

I'm also from Brazil and want to clarify this question. The objective of this "neomecenate" tool is do help develop a series of projects dedicated do common good. I suggest paypal.

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the Balanced ticket for this:

balanced/balanced-api#23

[jdnavarro]

Bitcoin could be a solution for this. If you don't want to deal directly in bitcoins, there are some merchant gateways that do the currency exchange between bitcoins and different currencies in the same transference. I don't think all currencies are supported and I don't know how reliable they are. BitPay looks like the most popular one, but there are more services listed in the bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Shopping_Cart_Interfaces

[victorb]

How about Stripe?
https://stripe.com/

[jezdez]

Strip allows transfer to non-US accounts?

[victorb]

@jezdez no, the company that receives the money need to be based in the US, although it accepts international payments. I supposed that it worked international but it didn't, sorry about that.

I am all for the bitcoins idea. +1. Outside of it i don't really see any real solution. Paypal is one possibility, but not sure of their policies.

[victorb]

Braintree(1) just expanded their list of supported countries. Might be worth checking up.

Supported countries:
the U.S., the U.K., Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, and Italy.

(1), https://www.braintreepayments.com/

[chadwhitacre]

Stripe, Braintree, and BitPay are non-starters because we're talking about paying out to people, and afaik those are services for paying money in to a single merchant.

[chadwhitacre]

@RafaelReinehr The "neomecenate" concept is intriguing. I wish my Italian were better. Google Translate doesn't do the best job either.

[chadwhitacre]

@RafaelReinehr I'm reluctant to go down the PayPal route because I'm afraid of getting burned by opaque APIs and policies. As mentioned on #63, if someone with strong PayPal experience wants to champion the implementation then step forward and let's put together your pull request. Otherwise I'm going to prioritize other matters for now, and keep encouraging Balanced to strike some non-US deals. ;-)

[kangasbros]

Bitcoin would be otherwise godd (unfreezable & fairly easy to convert to other currencies), but the problem is converting the monies from credit card payments to bitcoins. This should be done by gittip operator.

I would love to donate some money with Bitcoin to developers, is this kind of feature planned?

[BladeMcCool]

Gittip should allow donations in Bitcoin. Use bitpay to handle that aspect. Let recipients choose if they want to keep their received donations in BTC or have it autoconverted to USD. If they keep it in BTC then you just forward them their BTC. If they convert to USD then you jump through legacy bank system hoops as usual.