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Ask HN: How to pay your users?

2 points by jerhinesmith ↗ HN
I'm in the brainstorming part of trying to start a new app. Similar to Amazon's affiliate program or the way 99 designs holds design contests, I'd like to be able to compensate the site's users for their input.

For those getting compensation, I'm thinking the average amount would be less than $100.

What are some hurdles to paying your users? What legal obstacles should I be aware of? Is this a solved problem (i.e. should I go with PayPal? Stripe?)

2 comments

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petervandijck
The main hurdles seem to be taxes. The solution seems to be (IANAL) to have some checkboxes that say "I will take care of taxes myself".

See how Adsense and Amazon affiliates do it. You can probably get away with doing less than them.

Good luck, interested in finding out the answer myself :)

jerhinesmith
Yeah, that's the same thing I was thinking. It seems like you could do payments through PayPal, but I'd rather not get stuck keeping track of all compensation paid and providing the requisite tax forms at the end of the year -- it's just too much overhead for a bootstrapped side-project.