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This repository was archived by the owner on Feb 8, 2018. It is now read-only.
withdrawals outside the US, a.k.a. international payouts #126
Description
Balanced will work for withdrawals to U.S. bank accounts, but not outside the U.S. What do we do here? Suggestions?
Current Status
- 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.
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.- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Activity
mitsuhiko commentedon Jul 7, 2012
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 commentedon Aug 24, 2012
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 commentedon Aug 24, 2012
Here's the Balanced ticket for this:
balanced/balanced-api#23
jdnavarro commentedon Aug 27, 2012
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 commentedon Aug 27, 2012
How about Stripe?
https://stripe.com/
jezdez commentedon Aug 28, 2012
Strip allows transfer to non-US accounts?
victorb commentedon Aug 28, 2012
@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.
victorb commentedon Aug 30, 2012
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 commentedon Aug 31, 2012
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 commentedon Aug 31, 2012
@RafaelReinehr The "neomecenate" concept is intriguing. I wish my Italian were better. Google Translate doesn't do the best job either.
chadwhitacre commentedon Aug 31, 2012
@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 commentedon Sep 2, 2012
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 commentedon Sep 2, 2012
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.
sebicas commentedon Sep 2, 2012
+1 For Bitcoin
273 remaining items
patcon commentedon Sep 23, 2014
@balupton If I'm reading you correctly, and you're wondering why PayPal isn't the solution here: PayPal is suboptimal not on account of the fees, but rather because they won't underwrite Gratipay's model. We've only been permitted to use them by slipping under the radar, which has only been possible by making PayPal's usage a somewhat unwieldy manual effort :)
(Correct me if I'm wrong though, folks)
chadwhitacre commentedon Sep 23, 2014
@balupton PayPal's fee is 2% (fee capped at $20), and Coinbase's fee is 1% + 15¢ (these are on the FAQ, btw). I do hear that withdrawing from PayPal to your bank involves additional fees, but I can't speak to the specifics of that.
bjorn commentedon Sep 23, 2014
That probably depends on the country. In Netherlands it is free to withdraw from PayPal for example.
I'm a bit surprised to read that PayPal's fee is just 2% though. Due to receiving donations I guess I have been classified as business user and am being charged 3,4% + €0,35 on them. Maybe this also depends on the country...
chadwhitacre commentedon Sep 23, 2014
@bjorn Yeah, that hits after the 2% fee. If you look on your Gratipay history page you should see the PayPal fee that hits on our side.
bjorn commentedon Sep 23, 2014
@whit537 Ouch, so that sums up to over 5% in fees. I didn't request any PayPal withdrawal yet so far, but when I'd ever have significant amount of funds to withdraw I'll certainly go for the Bitcoin option instead.
balupton commentedon Sep 23, 2014
@bjorn good to know, I suspected that the 2% was likely only gratipay's side, and that the standard receiver fees as linked in that link I did also applied. It is pretty costly form of withdrawal.
Gratipay, how about the bitcoin exchange rate?
@patcon Just trying to figure out which method provides the maximum return on the lump that I have in Gratipay, anything less would be a waste.
chadwhitacre commentedon Sep 23, 2014
@balupton We are using Coinbase for our bitcoin wallet, and their fee is 1% + 15¢ (as mentioned above and on the FAQ), which, as usual, we pass through to you with no markup. Assuming you have your own wallet, this should be a more reasonably-priced option.
chadwhitacre commentedon Dec 11, 2014
I just learned about http://www.earthport.com/ via Twitter.
balupton commentedon Dec 12, 2014
@whit537 thanks, turns out there is coinjar in australia that allows withdrawels - unfortunately coinbase doesn't
chadwhitacre commentedon Dec 31, 2014
+1 for Canada from FD1545.
antonsviridenko commentedon Feb 6, 2015
So, are international SWIFT transfers supported currently or not?
rohitpaulk commentedon Feb 20, 2015
+1 on https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1709
chadwhitacre commentedon Aug 9, 2015
We have upgraded PayPal from a stop-gap to a first-class payout method—in fact, it's now our only payout method (#3567). While not perfect, PayPal does provide more or less global coverage. Therefore, I'm going to take the opportunity to close this old and venerable ticket.
Looking at the other options in the description: the Stripe and MangoPay tickets got closed as part of the Balanced shutdown, because we ended up charting a roll-your-own course instead of using a prefab solution (see #3324 (comment) for discussion). Transpay is still on the table, to be revisited once we have a proper in-house anti-money laundering (AML) program. IAT and SWIFT are also options; those were in the works downstream of #3366, which fell through for (again) lack of AML.
Thanks, everyone! :-)
chadwhitacre commentedon Aug 10, 2015
(Thanks, fixed.)