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Show HN: Give a Dime – Donate change from credit card purchases
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoI'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!
- blainesch 11y agoThe FAQ claims you need 50¢ from each donation to keep the servers running. Do you stop taking this money once you break even on server costs?
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoServer 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.
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- harrisonmgordon 11y agoWe 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.
- joshstrange 11y agoWhich CC monitor are you using? Inuit? Plaid? Or some other?
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoWe are happy users of Plaid :)
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoI should also note that we never store cc transaction data - we request then delete it, only keeping the sum of the round up change.
- balls187 11y agoI like this idea. Are you storing bank credentials? Since you posted on HN: Besides the marketing fluff "state of the art encryption" what are you actually doing to ensure my credentials are secure? What prevents you from updating your TOS to be more ominous and adding a clause buried that allows you to inspect & store our bank transactions?
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoThanks! We use Plaid as our bank connection API. We actually never see your bank account, so we can't store it. We also use Stripe for cc processing, and similarly do not store credentials, instead opting for Stripe to do it for us.
- balls187 11y agoGotcha, so the bank credentials are passed through to Plaid, which issues an access token, which can be used to re-authenticate and obtain new data.
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoExactly!
- toomuchtodo 11y agoVery nicely done. The only thing you might want to do is get on Stripe's ACH beta, and use an ACH for the transaction (saving the CC fees).
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoI emailed stripe 2 days ago for access :)
- slg 11y agoI 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.
- noinput 11y agoI 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!
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoThanks for the feedback! 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!
- Drdrdrq 11y agoThen how about you let the users choose among your list of charities?
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- harrisonmgordon 11y agoYou get to choose from our charity list which one you'd like to donate to - Let me know if I need to make that more clear on the website :)
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- anpk 11y agoThere seems to be quite a few organizations which are doing similar stuff. swipegood.com/ https://ca.changeit.com/ https://ca.changeit.com/ www.rounditupamerica.org/ Maybe partner with them?
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoSwipegood 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!
- rch 11y agoFee structure (flat $0.50 +CC txn per donation) described here: https://www.giveadime.org/faq https://www.giveadime.org/faq
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoWould love feedback on this price point!
- dangrossman 11y agoIf 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.
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- harrisonmgordon 11y agoThat'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.
- edent 11y agoSlightly confused - what's a "Round up charge"? Is it a US thing? Not heard of anything like that in the UK.
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoIf you buy a coffee at $2.85, the round-up charge would be $0.15 (to the nearest dollar).
- edent 11y agoRight... ok, but the site says... > 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?
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoWe 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.
- edent 11y ago> 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?
- harrisonmgordon 11y ago
- mesozoic 11y agoI don't really get it as one of the appeals of credit cards is you don't have to deal with change anyway. If you want to donate just donate.
- harrisonmgordon 11y ago100% agree - I highly recommend donating even if it's not on Give A Dime. Give A Dime is just a way to get people who are less comfortable with giving to do so in a way that doesn't break the bank and feels manageable.
- deftnerd 11y agoThis 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.
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoWe 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!
- shaaaaawn 11y agoWhen 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
- harrisonmgordon 11y agoThanks! We link with Bank of America (and they're also my bank). If you have connections with them, I'd love to talk about how we could work more closely together.
- oxplot 11y agoDymocks bookshop in Australia does this at the checkout [1]. They ask you if you want to round the price up and donate the extra to charities. [1]: https://www.dymocks.com.au/childrens-charities/round-up https://www.dymocks.com.au/childrens-charities/round-up