I'd love feedback on this project - it's been a labor of love for a year trying to find the best charities in the bay area and making it easy for anyone to donate what they can without a lot of effort. Thanks!
I may be overly critical here, but I don't think it is completely right to say in your FAQ that you don't store credentials "which means your sensitive information is safe and secure!" Sure, you don't store them. However you still ask for them and then have someone else store them on your behalf. That still leaves end users vulnerable to the exact same problems. The user could still experience issues specifically because they used your service. They wouldn't really care who is actually responsible if that were to happen, only that it was caused by using Give A Dime.
You are responsible for your partners. Saying you won't do something isn't completely honest if you turn around and outsource that exact same activity to a partner.
I'm not sure on the exact phrasing. It can either mention Plaid by name or some complementary descriptor about "banking level security". It just shouldn't say credentials aren't being stored when they are being stored by a partner.
I would think how you message this. What others and I picked up on is appropriate for this level of discourse (HN), but something that is likely not going to make sense to your core customers.
Are customers that buy from companies that integrate with Stripe aware that it is Stripe that stores credit card information when prompted? I don't know if the average person can make that abstraction.
I would rather shut the company down than inspect and store bank transactions. Risk of lawsuit is also a pretty good deterrent, since lawyers are expensive.
I like it. I was [almost] an Acorns user because I dig the model of simple round-ups, but am too impatient to wait for small change to make a difference in my personal savings alone. To that note, I know pennies go a long way especially when combined with others to who needs them.
Feedback: Let users pick their own charities. I can tell by your FAQ you want to curate but people need to know their efforts are going to what they care about. I have personal experience with exactly this on a current startup, email me [in profile] if you want to chat more on it.
Congrats on launching something that matters to you!
Yes - this is definitely a big philosophical discussion we are having.
(Time for some sausage making)
in California it is actually illegal for us to give money to a charity without having a signed contract in place (this is to protect consumers and guarantee that the money we promise is actually going to charities). This puts a bit of a hamper on enabling donations to all charities. We've opted for curated charities to keep compliant and also to help those new to charity donating make a big impact immediately.
With that said, we want to expand the number of charities we support and would love to hear about great charities!
Hm, I'd love to hear more about the illegal thing you cited. My startup lets everyone choose, all we require is an EIN and there's no paperwork, and it's all been approved by my legal.
I've been through some various business types in the space, the worst was a registered Commercial Fundraiser where yes I had to setup bonds and the fees were ridiculous with individual filing between charity and state. But for you (and me actually) it doesn't seem as big of a deal until it hits scale. If you're referring to registrations for "Charitable Solicitation", we've been through that too. I quickly asked my legal and he responded with: as long as you're not specifically targeting persons in any state nor do you supply names and contact info for donors to the charities so they can't send thank you notes it's not an issue. YMMV and don't hold me to that, but it may not be a big issue for you and open up a new avenue.
Server costs will certainly go down as Give A Dime reaches scale, but will always be necessary per user to account for bank transaction requests and other services. I will update the FAQ to be more clear on how we use this fee. We also intend to use those funds to continue growing and vetting charities in other communities.
We asked a lawyer if we could be classified as a 501c3, but it didn't seem possible given what we do :-/. Instead, we're looking to be classified as a B-Corp in the future.
This seems like a very inefficient infrastructure to accomplish what you want to do.
By using Plaid to determine transactions, I assume you then do a once-a-month transaction that is the sum of all the round-ups? Or do you do a separate transaction every time someone does a transaction?
If you're doing a separate transaction, you're paying some ridiculous Stripe fees for the micro transactions.
I think the ideal solution would be to set up your own debit card. It's not significantly hard to get a branded debit card solution through Bancorp. Then you can control thins a lot more easily.
When a customer makes a $12.10 charge, you can actually charge them $13 and just keep the 0.90 on the backend and the processing fee is only paid once.
We do once-a-month transactions to help with the micro-transaction issues. We're also looking into ACH transactions to get rid of the 2.9% + 0.30 fee.
Technically you're absolutely right - setting up our own debit card would be a great way to efficiently generate donations.
We weren't sure how likely people would be to get a new debit card though, and many people favor credit cards so they get points. This is definitely a route we could consider in the future though!
If you grow large enough, you'll find that you don't need to charge your users anything as charities will become your customers. Charities have huge budgets for fundraising, and would pay to be promoted as a donation option.
That's a very good point! We actually try to focus on smaller, more local charities that don't have large marketing budgets (there are some exceptions) - for instance, Rocket Dog Rescue doesn't even pay a staff, they are entirely volunteer-run. Their entire marketing strategy is unpaid, and we LOVE that, since every dollar they get is spent on helping amazing animals find homes.
These are the kind of charities we want to make sure are getting funded - the ones that make the biggest impact/dollar in a local community.
When I worked at Bank of America I tried to do something similar with their Keep The Change program, allow customers to have their 'change' go to the charity of their choice instead of their savings account, I called it Give the Change. I could never get it past the product team so I'm glad to see this project pop up on HN today! Keep at it
Swipegood was shut down in late 2011 unfortunately :( Give A Dime is most similar to this one.
changeit.com doesn't support a lot of the popular banks/cards here in the US, and rounditupamerica.org focuses on getting businesses on board - but you're right, they'd be great partners!
What makes change special is how small it seems on a day-to-day basis. We toyed with $x/mo vs. change, and feedback showed people were more likely to give if you describe it as change. I believe a part of that is knowing that what you give is tied a bit to what you spend.
> Give A Dime links to your bank and monitors the round-up change from your transactions (but not the transactions themselves).
So where does the "round up" come from if you can't see my transactions? Do bank provide you with a list of "round ups" so you see 5c, 10c, 85c rather than 2.95, 9.90, 1000.15?
We do get access to the transaction info via Plaid, but we immediately delete it once we have summed all of the round up change. All that is stored on our servers is the round up change amounts.
We also provide standard monthly donations if anyone is uncomfortable with bank account linking.
> but we immediately delete it once we have summed all of the round up change.
Ah, that puts a different spin on it. You do have access to all transactions - but you claim not to store them.
It's an interesting idea - and I hope you can convince people to donate more to charity - but I would feel uncomfortable giving you access (albeit read-only) to every transaction I make.
Perhaps this is a model which is best suited to selling directly to banks?
Would you consider a standard monthly donation that doesn't link to your bank account?
Yes - we're definitely interested in connecting directly with banks - we'd just need to grow a bit before doing so since we only support 1 community right now.
