SwipeGood (YCW11) Raises $500K From Michael Birch And Others

If SwipeGood can help pursuade people to donate more to charities then good for them, but it's not for me.

I already donate to a few charities on a monthly basis, and am open to making one-off donations now and then to others (and do that fairly often).

I donate based on how much money I'm willing to not have - i.e. the most I am "able" to afford without it impacting on my other monetary plans. If I used SwipeGood then it would either donate more (which I don't want, and if I did, I would chose to donate more right now) or less (and -5% for SwipeGood), so it would be a lose/lose.

I average 40 credit card transactions per month, or about $20/month -> $240/year under SwipeGood's average-50-cents-to-charity-per-swipe model. Assuming that's typical, since the average American household donates approx. $1000/year, a SwipeGood user would be increasing their household's giving by 20%. (Swipegood takes 5%)

But it'd be interesting to find out if users ended up giving less outside of SwipeGood because they feel they've "already given"-- or if they end up giving more because they have charities on the mind (giving to one cause is unsurprisingly strongly correlated with other philanthropic activities.)

Edit: Also, I think it's great that YC is funding a startup like this. I'm reminded of "Be Good": http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

Interesting... it takes money for donations for each transaction, but it's not dependent on the size of transaction. So each time you use your credit car it will "randomly" donate $0.01-0.99 to a charity?

I could see more people signing up for something like this than traditional "10% of gross income" that people tend to promote.

Congrats. This is an awesome idea, simply because it takes people's laziness out of the equation. It's kinda like that popular financial 'pay yourself first'/'automate your finances' set it and forget it mantra but applied to charity.

Congrats guys... great product idea and excellent team, I know you're going to do well.

Confused as to the business aspect of SwipeGood, is it a non-profit or a for-profit (if so, how does it intend to make money)?