Show HN: Crowdtilt announces the first Crowdfunding API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Crowdtilt announces the first Crowdfunding API

github.com

90 pointsknighthacker20 comments

This is one of those things that you take a look at and you say "oh thats nice", then you take a second look and yoou're like "Holy shit, that's life changing"

Crowd tilt literally just became the company that can work with any range of major processors to split up payments and allow the payment gateways, processors etc to worry about what they do best, at 1% it would be alot of work to go replacing their system and yet it will still rake in profits for crowdtilt.

As someone who has watched them from the start and met both founders I always knew that good things were coming but this move could actually change online commerce for the better, its just awesome.

How is it better than WePay? I've used WePay's API, which supports crowdfunding, and it seems to work fine.

It's similar to Wepay's except with the use of Wepay's API you're tied to their gateway and thus their rates as well. With this you'll have your choice of payment gateway (Stripe, etc) while also being able to use the features you love for Wepay, essentially meaning you should be able to get the best rates possible as well as crowdfund the things you like.

Not necessarily "better" really just a different animal altogether

Among other things: One, wepay isn't international. Two, you have to send users off your site to use it. Three, you can't plug in your own credit card processing if you use wepay (you have to use theirs).

Additionally, their api doesn't provide the tools for the collaboration side of things (messaging, invites, sharing, comments/nested comments, reward tiers, tilting mechanism, etc). Think of this api as a layer above credit card processing (so you get to choose whichever processor you like or already use, thus not disrupting your current flow of funds and you get to keep the branding/UI/UX, the users, the user data, and the credit card processing data, etc - all important things if you're, say, hotels.com).

(disclosure: I'm one of the crowdtilt founders)

> Two, you have to send users off your site to use it

Thats completely false.

Project creators/campaign administrators must use wepsy to set up their merchant account. So, that is indeed not false (completely or otherwise).

I was buying tickets on StubHub the other day and was pleasantly surprised that they have an option to "split the cost" with someone. Awesome because buying tickets always ends up being such a risky business -- if your friend doesn't show up or cancels last minute

What's awesome about this is that one day hopefully it wont just be crowdtilt but everything. Airlines, tickets, hotels.

Was it specifically through Crowdtilt?

Awesome idea - we've been considering a feature at FamilyLeaf that would have required building something like this, but this API would make it much more feasible. Looking forward to trying it out!

The API looks awesome Khaled. Congrats to the Crowdtilt team. Can't wait to see what people do with it!

This is crazy. Very smart and perceptive move, and it puts the power of crowdfunding directly into the hands of the masses.

I wonder if this will spin out ton of niche-specific platforms. This does remove some of the heavy lifting, but the hardest part about building a crowdfunding marketplace is priming the marketplace.

This looks amazing.

Once available, a live sample of someone using it for a specific purposes would be even more amazing / would help show just how awesome this is.

Congrats James & Khaled!

+1 - Love this idea :)

this would be awesome for group vacation planning via airbnb.com.

it's funny you should say that...

Congratulations! Now to go put this together with exec or taskrabbit. :)

we'd love to see that too. as well as uber here in sf. like my co-founder said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912389), we'd love to see people build all kinds of things like crowdfunding-as-a-service (think kickstarter meets wordpress).

whether it's a feature in a current app like exec/taskrabbit or it's own app like a dinner-bill splitting mobile app (take a picture of the receipt, ocr, text it out, everyone's charged once the total is reached or exceeded, etc) the api was built to help any time groups and money interact... and we hope this renders the ideas devs come up with endless.

congrats to the entire CT team. Happy to be working with you guys!

Looks great, but I wonder how this goes beyond https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter?

The Crowdtilt API can easily power something like Selfstarter and significantly improve its features by offering support to multiple payment processors instead of just Amazon Payments. It also provides collaboration tools for the supporting community as mentioned by my co-founder http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911765

Selfstarter is really cool for a one-off type of project such as Lockitron, but with the Crowdtilt API, you can also build a "kickstarter-as-a-service" type of product, which I would really love to see built one day.

(disclosure: I'm one of the Crowdtilt founders)

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