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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

I've considered using it to have clients pay me because the only other options are to give away 3% to CC processors, or wait a week+ for a check to come in the mail.

If there was a way for me to pass new client onto a single sign-up process (whether I built it via an API or whether it was on Dwolla's page and tracked via referrer), that would go a long way to convincing some of them to use it.

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I tried this last summer. It was fairly disastrous. It usually takes 2 weeks to get paid via Dwolla, and if a banking holiday is involved it may take even longer. I had support issues that were not resolved promptly, or in some cases, not at all. If you make a mistake in the UI, your 2 week wait can grow even longer; they've since corrected some of the phrasing, but it used to be unclear if you were putting money into Dwolla or taking it out. If you accidentally put it in when you meant to take it out, you're looking at ANOTHER 2 week wait to get your money, and hopefully the account you ordered a withdrawal on has enough room for that transaction not to overdraft. They won't and supposedly can't reverse that kind of operation.

As a developer, I attempted multiple times to get information on the FiSync APIs, as I have connections to some local financial institutions. I was thoroughly ignored despite some significant persistence.

Like all banking startups, Dwolla is just a frontend for a real bank and they can't control flow or do anything once a "real bank" operation has been handed off. Dwolla therefore sucks. It'd be nice if they used that money to become a bonafide, real banking institution.

My clients and I went back to check via parcel carrier. It was still usually at least a week faster than Dwolla.

Just an FYI, if by clients you mean for consulting work, Freshbooks has an arrangement w/ Paypal (yeah, I know) where payments are a flat $.50 (yes, 50 cents) for all invoices up to $10,000. You will still have to put up with a wait to get that money in your bank account (3-4 business days if payment is immediate), but it can all be handled online. I've had all my payments over the past year go thru Freshbooks and the lifecycle of invoices/payments is tracked in their system.

Thank you for this contribution. My business uses Freshbooks, and I was unaware of this.

you can use guest checkout for this. Right now its only in the offsite gateway, but eventually we will add it to others- check it out here: http://developers.dwolla.com/dev/pages/gateway/guest

In Australia we can login to Internet banking and send money to another account with any bank in Australia free of charge and usually within 2 business days.

Is something like this not possible in the US?

The user experience for person to person transfers varies and is usually poor.

Electronic transfers (ACH) only take a couple of days though, and for things like payroll, once the accounts are set up it all works fine. They also work pretty well for making payments to businesses and what not.

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