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wet blanket alert: a modal form with credit card inputs has been done many times before. What is instant or new about this? Kudos for yet another checkout, paym

wet blanket alert: a modal form with credit card inputs has been done many times before. What is instant or new about this? Kudos for yet another checkout, payment button code snippet?

jjb123 12y ago
Hi there. Thanks for the comment, and it's a valid question if you've never tried to implement current options for donations -- I'd be happy to address each example you're talking about when you say "what's new about this" (eg, stripe checkout, great for payments checkout - but isn't copy and paste, requires server code, isn't customizable, doesn't enable recurring donations, doesn't provide automated tax-deductible receipts, doesn't allow for adding additional fields for addl info collection...). It turns out that accepting payments vs accepting donations for a cause, charity, political campaign, personal project, etc actually ends up having a different set of needs. And with online giving growing at the rate we see it to growing, a simple / powerful way for any site to collect donations, optimized for conversion on any device, with two lines of code is something we think our customers will find useful.
- untilHellbanned 12y ago
  hi jjb123, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes I can see how payments vs. donations are different. I didn't mean to say what you did isn't useful. I'm a developer too so I can appreciate what it took to make your thing a reality. I guess I'm just saying you don't make the difference clear to the user. The only difference I see with Stripe's is Tilt's monthly donation checkbox. I guess investigating further, you differentiate with Stripe in making your modal for the non-developer. Still a layperson will have to inject two lines of code, but then they don't have to do all the customization by writing more code and can instead use Tilt's GUI. TL;DR; It would be good to make it more clear to the end user what's new about this. Perhaps a better title for this HN post is "Accept donations on your site without writing code". The word "instantly" obviously never can be true and seems like overhype.

wet blanket alert: a modal form with credit card inputs has been done many times before. What is instant or new about this? Kudos for yet another checkout, payment button code snippet?

jjb123 12y ago

Hi there. Thanks for the comment, and it's a valid question if you've never tried to implement current options for donations -- I'd be happy to address each example you're talking about when you say "what's new about this" (eg, stripe checkout, great for payments checkout - but isn't copy and paste, requires server code, isn't customizable, doesn't enable recurring donations, doesn't provide automated tax-deductible receipts, doesn't allow for adding additional fields for addl info collection...). It turns out that accepting payments vs accepting donations for a cause, charity, political campaign, personal project, etc actually ends up having a different set of needs. And with online giving growing at the rate we see it to growing, a simple / powerful way for any site to collect donations, optimized for conversion on any device, with two lines of code is something we think our customers will find useful.

untilHellbanned 12y ago
hi jjb123, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes I can see how payments vs. donations are different. I didn't mean to say what you did isn't useful. I'm a developer too so I can appreciate what it took to make your thing a reality. I guess I'm just saying you don't make the difference clear to the user. The only difference I see with Stripe's is Tilt's monthly donation checkbox. I guess investigating further, you differentiate with Stripe in making your modal for the non-developer. Still a layperson will have to inject two lines of code, but then they don't have to do all the customization by writing more code and can instead use Tilt's GUI. TL;DR; It would be good to make it more clear to the end user what's new about this. Perhaps a better title for this HN post is "Accept donations on your site without writing code". The word "instantly" obviously never can be true and seems like overhype.