up the minimum charge from $0.50 to ... $10.00? $20.00?

[chadwhitacre]

Stripe/Balanced's minimum is $0.50 for a charge, but we should up the minimum to something like $10 to reduce fees for people only tipping a few dollars a week.

(Suggested by @ilya42 on #113.)

[chadwhitacre]

@emddudley suggests $5 via Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+5 or so from HN.

[chadwhitacre]

This is deployed, but need to announce somehow.

[dowski]

What are the practical ramifications of this for someone tipping less than $10 per week?

[timothyfcook]

I assume this just means that tips will get aggregated without a transaction and once a person's balance-to-be-paid is over $10 they will be charged?

How does Balanced Payments function? Do you have to have a balance-to-be-paid >$10 in total for all of your tips, or >$10 for each tippee.

In other words: are we initiating one $10 charge that is parceled out to a number of people in smaller increments or is each charge a person-to-person transaction... resulting in a transaction for Each person you tip. I assume and hope the prior.

[sourcenouveau]

Tim, I don't know what you mean by "balanced payments". Everyone has a "Gittip balance" which is an amount of money that Gittip is holding on your behalf. When people tip you, the tips are added to your balance. When you tip, it comes out of you balance.

I'm sure Chad will chime in with the official answer, but I believe it works like this:

Whenever your account balance is too low to cover your tips, your credit card will be charged. The minimum amount that your CC will be charged is $10. If you tip less than $10 per week, it will be a few weeks until your account balance is low enough that it gets replenished. If you tip more than $10 per week, your CC will be charged for the amount that you tip, plus the 30c + 3.9% fee.

I believe Chad is looking into accepting manual replenishment so that you can bring up your account balance to an arbitrary amount, which would reduce fees for people who tip a lot.

[chadwhitacre]

Right, basically what @emddudley said. For the record here's the blog post I wrote on the topic:

http://blog.gittip.com/post/28158537529/why-were-you-charged-10