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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

PayPal is awful for small transactions, I regularily get donations for my projects that are literally 0 USD, because all of it is eaten away by PayPal fees, and even for a 5 USD donation you end up losing around 15% of the transaction amount.

Do you know of any other service that is suitable for microtransactions, besides cryptocurrencies?

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I don't know if they support it for accounts that are receiving contributions instead of payments (and I have no clue what is going on now with this new change today: I need to research this), but PayPal has also offered a "micropayments" tier that costs 5%+$0.05 instead of the 2.9%+$0.30, which is much better for small transactions. You had to activate it with customer support, though.

Is that actually mentioned anywhere, publically? We use it and as it’s account-wide, we always calculate which account we have to use to minimize fees.

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#statemen...

https://www.paypal.com/gf/smarthelp/article/how-can-i-update...

The first page says it's 5% + 0.09 now, though.

Edit: Oh, fixed the first link, the page was using javascript to break anchor links for some reason.

Also that second page only exists on some versions of the site.

I am not 100% sure I am doing the math correctly, but I think--with the other changes today to the normal pricing--that means the boundary at which you should use this pricing tier has moved from ~$12 to ~$29?!

Something like that. $27 if it's 9 cents now. The 25 cent gap has grown to 40, and the 2.1% rate difference has shrunk to 1.5%

Interesting, that section in the first link is missing in the German version of the document.

> You had to activate it with customer support, though.

I wonder why that is. Are they offering this service at a loss? If not, why not offer it to everyone automatically?

I figure most people make transactions over ~$12, which would cost more in fees at the 5% + 0.05 rate.

Yeah, but so what was always annoying about it is that they don't just automatically give you the better rate on transactions where it makes sense, considering that they explicitly would suggest you create multiple accounts--one with micropayments set and one without--and split your payments between them depending on which would be better. I guess maybe the bulk fee rate threshold would then be separate? Amazon Flexible Payments (which was amazing but was killed with no migration path and for a shitty expensive replacement) just did it all automatically for you to give you good rates (and even had fee tiers for tiny transactions down to I think even less than a penny, if you were working with an internal balance transfer and not an external payment like a credit card).

The answer is obvious. They want people to pay the higher amount, and this gives them a way to pacify anyone who complains.

I doubt it’s a common thing, but if I can send cash in the mail, I just do that. I always have extra stamps and cash is king. Can be zero paperwork for the recipient if they just pocket it (ok by me when it’s a solo project).

Sometimes works out really well if I have spare US$ or EUR sitting around (I’m in Canada).

Maybe some donations get lost or stolen, but zero-fees makes it a net benefit in my mind.

How much does a stamp cost, 29 cents?

What about Venmo? Or Cash App?

Venmo has been ubiquitous for years—everyone seems to have it. I’ve used it for everything from buying plants at the farmer’s market to paying rent and medical expenses.

Edit: Of course the default broadcasting of your payments to a social feed is bonkers and needs to be turned off.

Speaking of Venmo. Venmo for some reason would not let me confirm my bank or credit union no matter what I did or what email address I used or however long I waited, the error message is one of those non-sensical catch-all error messages originating from some black hole. And customer service cannot do anything because "it's not up to them". Cash app worked instantly though. Anyway I would not recommend venmo or at least offer an alternative.

They don't appear to be viable for people outside the US.

Venmo is owned by Paypal

There's zero fees in Strike afaik. https://strike.me

As far as donations go, Patreon and Ko-fi should have a lot lower fees.

Patreon is not necessarily an alternative because supporting someone is more of a subscription kind of transaction, and not a one-off thing.

It also isn't alternative because it makes one-to-many transactions which can offer lower fees than one-to-one transaction due to pooling

You say no crypto, but Nano was built for exactly this. You're not gonna beat zero fees.

Except it exhibits absolutely monstrous volatility.

[edit] That's a lot like saying you can't beat the "$0 commission" at the airport currency exchange - true, but misleading. They wreck you elsewhere (in that case, in exchange rates). The truth is if Nano were "just as good" as sending dollars back and forth except free everyone would be using it. The fact they're not, this many years in, means you're missing something in your analysis.

Sure. There's always a downside to everything. OP wanted a solution for small donations, and Nano is still the best option. It's worth it to take on some volatility risk so that the people donating know that all their donation goes directly to you, and anyone in the world can donate any amount with or without a bank account, just by showing a short address on your site's page.

And no, it's not at all like an airport currency exchange. In that case there's a deliberate actor trying to defraud you. Volatility is a property of all assets. Some have far more than others. Just understand that and you'll be fine.

Significant volatility is not a property of any decent currencies. I respectfully disagree with your assertion of the supremacy of nano for small donations on the basis of volatility.

Your statement that understanding of volatility is sufficient is [edit](incomplete IMO). Ask anyone holding Dentacoin haha.

Fair enough. I guess it boils down to what's worse: you _will_ lose money on the transaction because someone is taking it from you, or you _may_ lose money after the transaction.

For example, take a $1 donation that PayPal takes their 50-cent fee out of. That's a guaranteed loss of 50%. You'd have to be extremely risk adverse to take a 50% loss to avoid even crypto volatility.

It's all tradeoffs. Volatility sucks. Fees suck. But they suck more or less depending on the situation.

Zero fees? In crypto, there's an inverse correlation between on-chain fees and price volatility. So either you incur high on-chain fees or accept a high exchange rate risk.

Bitcoin and Nano move very closely together, yet one charges hundreds of thousands in fees every day and the other none at all. I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

Fair point. But Nano doesn't have sufficient liquidity to be used for payments. You can barely move $50k USD worth of Nano without moving the price 0.5%.

In comparison, you can move around $100 million USD worth of Bitcoin until you move its price by 0.5%.

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