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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Can you put spending limits on a card? Or disable it entirely?

What I'm wondering is if you can have a deposit-only card, which transfers funds to the live card to keep it topped up at $10. Downside is some people have to wait an extra minute or two for free coffee; upside is someone trying to clean out the account has to spread it over a bunch of transactions, which even if it doesn't stop everyone probably raises the barrier to entry.

A PayPal account could also work for this.

Then you could broadcast a rough total balance, and just have a binary indicator for when the live card gets topped up.

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Thanks for your feedback! Your suggestion is a good one and something that I've been considering. It is possible to reload one sbux card from another, so I was thinking about using one for deposit only and dribbling the balance into the purchase card at $20 per hour or similar. I think there's something about this that would ruin the excitement so I'm working on different approach at the moment. Not sure where it'll end up.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. One thought I had (which others have suggested) is to encourage people to donate in small amounts— rather than drop $25 on the card if you're feeling generous, you should drop $5 on it each morning for a week.

But since that's kind of a hassle, then you'd whip up a quick app that lets people easily amortize a larger contribution over a series of coffee-scale contributions. Connect that to their twitter account, and you can credit each individual coffee donation to an individual and report them individually.

It's effectively the same as having a larger account balance, but since you're not holding the money it feels more engaging and social for folks.

The thing that scares me about this idea is the effect it would have on the donor if they didn't see their donation reflected immediately in the feed. Not only is it less exciting, but it potentially opens up questions about where the money is in the meantime.

I will strenuously avoid this turning into anything resembling a bank - it needs to be more like a "take a penny, leave a penny" tray sitting on a Starbucks counter. If someone want to be a jerk and empty the tray into his pocket, so be it. They're just a jerk who I'm sure will get what they deserve in life.

Fingers crossed, j

Mine too!

If you go with the deposit only card option, you could adjust your feed to display the aggregate of the two cards; but you're effectively capping an individual transaction to $20. The donor therefore sees their changes reflected in real time, but any cheats are limited (hopefully a cashier would get suspicious / frustrated if someone tried to work around the $20 limit by going multiple times in succession).

Perhaps use your API to determine when the card is less than $20 and add money to it then (rather than hourly rate), that way these big purchases can't be made?

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