4 ms·

Do you know why they batch the pledges into several payments and not just one big payment?

floatingatoll 9y ago
Like Apple, they break up charges into arbitrary batches on their side, but I did not ask them to provide guidance on what their batch limits are. Apple sometimes waits days to charge me, and often distributes charges randomly across multiple transactions, so clearly there's some kind of optimization limit that's reached at scale.
huac 9y ago
Money laundering rules
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Can you go into some more depth?
  - huac 9y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15872128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15872128 (just a guess)
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    Hadn't thought of this reason, but that might make sense - in essence, the standard AML rules have always required specifying the final beneficiary of a payment if you pay money to someone who'll hand it over to them. If Patreon is being treated as or claiming to be a payment service provider (i.e. it passes money through to authors without owning it in between, the only revenue on their balance sheet is the fee they take) then it'd be wrong to state that Patreon is the beneficiary of a particular payment, since it's not; and they'd be required to list all the actual beneficiaries on every payment, which can't really be done for reasons, so they need to charge many small separate payments. On the other hand, if Patreon is being treated as or claiming to be selling a service (i.e. it takes all your money, and pays it out to authors as a business expense) then that has major tax implications, namely, all the amount (as opposed to just their fees) is their revenue and thus subject to various sales taxes and VAT worldwide. This seems to be the current option, since they're charging VAT on the full amount for EU patrons. It might be plausible that they're currently switching from option 2 to option 1 for financial reasons, and this precludes them from batching in the future.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > they'd be required to list all the actual beneficiaries on every payment, which can't really be done for reasons How so? If they can list the beneficiaries on the individual payments, why can't they lump them into my single-payment?
      - PeterisP 9y ago
        They can list a beneficiary on the payment, not an arbitrary number of beneficiaries. They can list a beneficiary tax residence on the payment, and that'll apply for the whole payment. Two beneficiaries means two amounts (you have to specify how much goes to person A, anyway), and thus two payments.

Like Apple, they break up charges into arbitrary batches on their side, but I did not ask them to provide guidance on what their batch limits are. Apple sometimes waits days to charge me, and often distributes charges randomly across multiple transactions, so clearly there's some kind of optimization limit that's reached at scale.

huac 9y ago

Money laundering rules

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Can you go into some more depth?
- huac 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15872128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15872128 (just a guess)
- PeterisP 9y ago
  Hadn't thought of this reason, but that might make sense - in essence, the standard AML rules have always required specifying the final beneficiary of a payment if you pay money to someone who'll hand it over to them. If Patreon is being treated as or claiming to be a payment service provider (i.e. it passes money through to authors without owning it in between, the only revenue on their balance sheet is the fee they take) then it'd be wrong to state that Patreon is the beneficiary of a particular payment, since it's not; and they'd be required to list all the actual beneficiaries on every payment, which can't really be done for reasons, so they need to charge many small separate payments. On the other hand, if Patreon is being treated as or claiming to be selling a service (i.e. it takes all your money, and pays it out to authors as a business expense) then that has major tax implications, namely, all the amount (as opposed to just their fees) is their revenue and thus subject to various sales taxes and VAT worldwide. This seems to be the current option, since they're charging VAT on the full amount for EU patrons. It might be plausible that they're currently switching from option 2 to option 1 for financial reasons, and this precludes them from batching in the future.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > they'd be required to list all the actual beneficiaries on every payment, which can't really be done for reasons How so? If they can list the beneficiaries on the individual payments, why can't they lump them into my single-payment?
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      They can list a beneficiary on the payment, not an arbitrary number of beneficiaries. They can list a beneficiary tax residence on the payment, and that'll apply for the whole payment. Two beneficiaries means two amounts (you have to specify how much goes to person A, anyway), and thus two payments.