ShowHN: I built a piggybank to dripfeed a new MacBook

Okay, please excuse my ignorance if there's something I'm missing here.

I understand the problem when it comes to saving, and the issue of dipping into savings when you shouldn't. But I really don't see the point in a service like this, at least not personally.

There's three main issues I have with it:

1. Why should I let some random company I don't know or trust keep my savings for me? I would assume you're not a actual bank, so should you go bankrupt there's no government insurance that'd ensure I don't loose my money. And not saying you would, but from my point of view, what's there to stop you from taking the money and run?

2. A charge of 3%. So to save £100 I'd loose £3. If I was saving for a Retina MBP of around £2,500 I'd lose £75.

3. Interest. Ok, sure, banks pay pretty horrible interest, but still, I'm loosing out of money I would otherwise have gotten. I saw your response about working on providing interest somehow in the future, but I'm focusing on the now here :)

When you add it all up, the increased risk of losing all the savings, combined with the loss of money in the 3% charge and lack of interest, personally I really see no point in using your service compared to my bank's savings account.

And ok, it's easy to move money out of my savings account, but it's supposedly easy moving it out your service too. If you were to change that, there might just possibly be some point to it compared to a savings account. Except then you're treading on dangerous legal and/or moral ground if you deny people access to their money, even if they've previously agreed to the terms.

On a final note, I believe the only valuable feature you have to offer is the fact that friends can chip in. If I were you, I'd focus on that feature instead of holding people's cash. Let people set up some kinda campaign page for their new phone/laptop purchase and let family and friends chip in, wiring the money back to the user, rather than you holding on to it. Think of it like a personalized kickstarter mashed with amazon wishlists or something.

<rant>Let little Jimmy Neutron setup a campaign for his wish to get an Xbox One. He's got £200 cash already, which the campaign reflects, then he sends the campaign page to his grand parents, uncles, aunts, etc, and maybe they'll chip in enough so he can get his new console.</rant>

How do you handle the legal side of things? Aren't you, in most countries, considered operating as a bank in this scenario? And therefore tied to a whole load of regulations?

First, sounds like you're solving a major problem that most people have - sweet!

However, this is my constructive negative feedback - I don't think it will work because of this one piece here:

Pause if you know you'll have less money this week, deposit a bulk amount if you'll have more, even let friends and family deposit.

I tried doing this in a rather "manual" fashion by setting up a recurring monthly deposit into ISAs. The reality is - the freedom to turn it off is a huge anti-pattern to saving money. You need to make it very difficult to have the user turn off their dripfeed. Perhaps they have to make a call, or maybe they get penalized? Either way - I see this as your most important "anti-feature".

I would also question the commercial model of this - you're going to take a cut as well as GoCardless. It'll be interesting to see if people are willing to pay for that. However, what would be interesting (potentially) is to have a model (similar to financing) where the actual item is purchased through your platform. This will get complicated, but maybe there is a way to undercut the traditional micro-financing models that exist today?

I can see how this might be useful for some people. Personally, I have my savings account on line and they allow me to just make any number of "sub accounts" that I want. So I have used that before to create sub-accounts to save for specific things. I then set up automatic transfers from my checking to that savings account. The most successful one was a "new car" fund. Once my old car was paid off, I continued to make the same payment amount to the "new car" fund. It helped me maintain my habit of making a car payment while helping me save for the down payment. Worked like a charm.

As a person who is not a great money saver, this seems like a great tool that I will most likely use. Just a note, the text on my PC using chrome is nearly unreadable, the font renders strangely, not sure how to describe it.

The site looks nice, however I'm slightly puzzled. What do I gain from Dripfeed over the current standing order that transfers a fixed amount per month from my current account to my savings account?

I think its a really good idea. It would be cool if you could have an on/off switch to make pausing more difficult. For instance, I know that for myself, as soon as I wanted to spend that money I was saving, I would just pause the service. But if I could make it harder to do that (I.E. make it so I have to do several prompts to pause it, answer some math problem or something that would take me more than 5 seconds to open an app and hit pause), I would certainly turn that on for myself.

Just bouncing an idea out.

This is a neat idea but the fee (3%) is disappointing (but expected). It reminds me a little bit of how Simple is doing "savings". If you haven't heard of Simple[0] it's a new-ish bank (build on Bancorp) that has awesome customer service and some really useful tools to help you save. If anyone wants an invite send me an email (In my bio) with your email address so I can send you one.

[0] https://simple.com

This sounds pretty cool. I do not see if it costs anything to do. Am I charged processing fees? Pay per month to dripfeed? EDIT: I found the FAQ link. https://www.dripfeed.co/faq. Looks like it is 3%

The site looks great, and I think a lot of people would want something like this. You've mentioned in other comments that you're hoping to get some kind of interest going. That, with what you've already got, is enough for me to signup.

Feedback and suggestions would be massively appreciated by the way!

Does this pay no interest?