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Comment by trevyn | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, they don't exactly make it low-friction to become a member:

> Membership fees are debited by means of SEPA direct debit. Please email to contact@codeberg.org for other transfer methods.

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That is literally the easiest inclusive way that works beyond a single country's borders. Easier for me would be iDeal, but that's not easier for you unless you're also Dutch. Easier for people in the USA might be credit cards, but those are issued only if you have a credit rating at all and the rating is good (I don't meet the former condition so bank said no), and surely transferring money from anywhere in the world to an IBAN got to be common enough that it's doable and cheap/free in any country with decent payment infrastructure?

It doesn't have to be the only way. Add a Stripe, Klarna, Adyen, Paypal... option and you lower the barriers even more.

As a single system, though, it beats all of them. My mom doesn't have a paypal but she sure has a bank account. More options is always better, especially if you are happy to swallow exorbitant fees from the various systems, but I can very well see why they chose SEPA as primary payment method. I often wish more websites supported it: I don't want to pay more middle men, accept more privacy policies, deal with more crappy websites that break every few months when using an ad blocker, etc. when I'm already paying for a bank account where I can just send money from.

> Easier for people in the USA might be credit cards, but those are issued only if you have a credit rating at all and the rating is good

Debit cards are effectively the same as credit cards for this purpose, paying for things online. Many (if not most) banks and credit unions in the USA will issue you a free debit card upon opening an account, some without even needing to put any money into the account.

In US, if you have no credit score or a poor credit score, you can still get a credit card by making a collateral deposit with the bank (usually they expect it to be 2x your expected credit limit).

And transferring money to random bank accounts outside of the country is rather messy in US. Some banks won't even let you do it online.

Interesting, I didn't know that was a thing. I offered this when I couldn't get a credit card, but no dice. Didn't know this was a common solution elsewhere. I figured they didn't want to deal with custom solutions for uncommon cases like foreigners with no credit score wanting a debit card that has a credit number (essentially, that number is all I want, I don't need a loan/credit at all). Maybe it's not a thing here because a credit card is not as common or necessary.

Credit card would also be a big issue for German users, even in tech. I know a bunch of people who don't have one, as they aren't accepted in most places within Germany anyway, no idea how they make it work when travelling though. I guess for German users Paypal would be best, that seems to be the most widespread solution.

FWIW, in Germany, that is an extremely convenient way of paying.

Not only convenient, but also cheap. Often free, certainly less fees than PayPal etc.

Don't non-consumer account holders pay much higher fees? I seem to remember they were okay if you can have a very low transaction cap, but if you need to accept/send many payments, you had to get expensive subscriptions or pay per transaction.

Almost certainly still cheaper than literally any alternative, though, since you need that bank account anyway and I will get very much doubt they'd take as big a cut as the paypal mafia.

Yes, bank accounts for commercial purpose have different fees, but unless they pick a completely stupid bank it's still multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than any other transfer.

Only downside of SEPA is that it is a lot less common outside EU/Europe and then more expensive and instant payment is not really possible (there are some vendors offering solutions ...) but that doesn't seem to be their aim. (Would be: "click here to get a license for a commercial download")

> Only downside of SEPA is that it is a lot less common outside EU/Europe

SEPA stands for "Single Euro Payments Area" and was build for the EU/Europe, I don't think it's available outside of Europe.

Can you not just enter an international bank account number (IBAN) into online banking outside of this area? How does transferring money work then, do you need to send couriers with cash or use third parties like paypal? IBAN is the most basic infrastructure I know of, and I've heard that in the past you also had bank routing so this paying via banks (and banks settling it later) can't be new.

I should ask my boss how we get money from customers in other countries. As far as I knew we just give them our IBAN, chamber of commerce number for tax reasons, and it just appears in our account.

> As of May 2020, 77 countries were using the IBAN numbering system

-- IBAN Wikipedia [0]

It’s not that widespread. For international payments, you can do international bank transfers which have fees associated with them which can be shared or put on one side of the transaction only. It’s often easier and cheaper to use a 3rd-party provider like XE or TransferWise.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...

Amazes me that there is no standardized way to do money transfers between big countries that we very commonly buy/sell stuff from/to like the USA, China, etc. Thanks for the info and link!

tbf, SEPA direct debit is across the Eurozone a both common as well as easy way of transfering funds.

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post, but also a member of the codeberg prasidium. Thank you for this feedback I will bring it back, and hopefully lessen the barrier to join.

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