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Comment by nothingbutslide | Hacker News Reader

The payment gateway will probably be Stripe. They support "auth and capture", which is necessary with our plan to gather a user's micropayments into one combined monthly bill. We might also include PayPal if there is demand for it.

We've been discussing when we want to ask the users for their payment information. We want the sign up process to be as fast and painless as possible, so we might give the first article away for free, and only ask for payment information if the reader decides to buy a second article.

Once a user has saved a payment method to their profile, they won't be bothered about that aspect ever again when buying articles, we just charge them once at the end of the month for all the articles they've purchased that month.

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So you plan to bundle all the payments into a monthly bill to avoid fees on each transaction? Doesn't this assume each user will be purchasing enough content to make the fees negligible?

It's partly to lessen the fees being paid for processing each charge, but also part convenience for the user. We actually implemented a prototype top-up system to see how the user experience would be, and everyone who tried it agreed it was fairly cumbersome so we quickly scrapped that idea. And bundling the payments makes for a cleaner card statement, although that aspect is fairly individual.

As for the volume we would have to do; Stripe for instance charges 30 cents plus 2.9% for each charge, so the first article a user buys per month pretty much covers the flat fee, after that the percentage acts the same regardless of volume.

Great feedback though! Keep up with the questions.

I was working on a similar service using Bitcoin so the idea was mostly centered around maintaining control of your money and negligible fees. Our main issue was lack of a market to pitch to, but this idea is definitely something that I would hope becomes a reality.

We looked into using Bitcoin as well, but it proved a bit too hard to use for the average user. We did some user testing with a few prototypes, and it was really hard to make it work as seamlessly as we want the process to be.

As for the market, luckily we're based in London which is home to many of the most reputable news outlets in the world. We're already in talks with some of them, but it is indeed a hard industry to try to disrupt.

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