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Ask HN: What is the best way to pay users?

14 points by gathersight ↗ HN
We want to establish a mechanism to send payments to our users, many of whom are non-technical professionals and few of whom will have a stripe, payoneer or even a paypal account. What are our other options, if there are any? Thank you!

26 comments

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GhettoComputers
There are no good micropayments, much of it is going to be eaten by fees, and paypal friends and family might work but they always are shady with banning accounts.

You can have cash gift cards codes for reaching a tier so you can send payments of $5 or $10 off the top of my head, but seeing a bunch of .03 cent transactions would just annoy me.

Jugurtha
>they always are shady with banning accounts.

Jeeesus, they are. For no communicated reason. With no recourse, even when you talk with several people there.

GhettoComputers
To be fair amazon did that to someone on HN, and it happens to many accounts, but PayPal... man they’re on another level. I got locked for no reason.
Jugurtha
PayPal is ghetto.

I had some issues registering with AWS, and they called me and we sorted things out. It took more than a week to fully register, as opposed to Google's GCP where I didn't even need to think about it.

netizen-936824
What does a ghetto have anything to do with this? I'm not sure I follow the comparison, could you please explain it?
gathersight
For context, average payment in the low hundreds.
netizen-936824
What does that have to do with ghettos?
GhettoComputers
Not him, but I’d say the user experience is awful compared to others and your money isn’t safe. They hide lots of useful things, they can steal your money any time, and it feels extremely mentally taxing to deal with issues like them randomly breaking things or locking your account. It’s comparing a modern iPhone to the first edition of android, so much work, so slow, so unnecessarily complex to do simple things like unlock your account when they lock it randomly.
pjc50
Bank transfer? Mail them a cheque?

Mind you, the tax implications of paying users may be considerable. I certainly know Amazon has to handle this for all its self-publishing authors; and even if you're not American you have to declare that annually to Amazon.com.

gathersight
Yes, agreed, an even bigger minefield than payments.
sethjgore
not sure if they can do it but Mercury.com (online bank) allows for API access and wires that cost nothing. Might want to check out their APIs and see if you can do something like what you want to do abovee.
gathersight
Hey thanks, we bank with Mercury and I didn't know that wires were free. Just domestic US I'd assume.
mahesh_rm
Not a crypto bro, and not sure how crypto friendly your users could be. This being said, nano is built for this (https://nano.org/).
gathersight
It's unlikely. Fiat only kind of user base!
GhettoComputers
Brave did something where they’d “pay” sites by making a default wallet and you had to redeem it. It’s as successful as you can guess.

If you can be less vague it might help, such as amounts of payments or times you want to pay out.

throwtowards321
I would consider a solution like Tipalti (https://tipalti.com/), depending on the scale of the problem.

It will handle the onboarding of payees and also the disbursement of payments globally along a variety of payment rails. It has an open API.

Probably the best solution if the economics make sense.

Edit: for context, this is the tech that Twitch, Roblox, etc. use to pay their users. For this purpose it is easily the best solution on the market.

Disclaimer: I work at Tipalti.

kleer001
Maybe discount their monthly payments? If that's your customer model.
gathersight
Thanks, but this group of users don't pay anything to us so there's nothing to discount against. Good idea though.
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quadcore
Gift cards or prepaid visa maybe
gathersight
Yes, the prepaid visa is something we've looked at although the payments to users are recurring so we really want time to be able to store ongoing payments as a balance and then transfer to their own bank account whenever they want.
Irongirl1
This one looks interesting...based on Hedera Hashgraph: https://dropp.cc

uses both $USD and Crypto.

Only potentially bad? thing I see is the use of a proprietary wallet. It would be so much better from a consumer standpoint if they would all agree to a few standard wallets merely for ease of use and not having to having 20 or 30 different ones.

gathersight
Thanks, as you say the issue with this is the need for a proprietary wallet to receive payments as this will add a fair amount of friction to the process.