I'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!
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?
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.
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.
Are customers that buy from companies that integrate with Stripe aware that it is Stripe that stores credit card information when prompted? I don't know if the average person can make that abstraction.
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!
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!
I've been through some various business types in the space, the worst was a registered Commercial Fundraiser where yes I had to setup bonds and the fees were ridiculous with individual filing between charity and state. But for you (and me actually) it doesn't seem as big of a deal until it hits scale. If you're referring to registrations for "Charitable Solicitation", we've been through that too. I quickly asked my legal and he responded with: as long as you're not specifically targeting persons in any state nor do you supply names and contact info for donors to the charities so they can't send thank you notes it's not an issue. YMMV and don't hold me to that, but it may not be a big issue for you and open up a new avenue.