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Comment by preinheimer | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr App called "even" allows people with incredibly variable income (case study is on a massage therapist, lots of money one week, little the next) to even out their income. They evaluate their income history, then offer a stabilized value, say $380/week. Weeks they make more, the application takes it and puts it aside. Weeks they make less, it either pulls it in from a reserve, or an instant loan is made.

Costs users $3/week. Which is non-trivial, but less than a payday loan company.

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For once I wished I came to the comments before reading. It was an interesting article, but it is definitely full of fluff

Exactly my thoughts :/.

Brilliant from a PR perspective though for your average NYT reader.

I would kill to get an article like that written - it's lengthy, detailed, has an accurate representation of the actual function of the app with tone a that's not breathless or sycophantic, and just the right level of skepticism thrown in so that readers believe a deep, detailed analysis has been done and that this is the future.

What's the value of that PR? Attracting quality employees or boosting VC interest? Because I highly doubt their target market is reading articles about startups in the NYT.

Attracting quality employees I'd imagine. I think a twitterbot I had been using followed the user researcher in the article because she tweeted today about looking for talent.

So its a very basic personal economy management tool that automatically takes loan and restrict withdraws. Sound risky.

What is the risk you are referring to? On the surface it sounds like a decent app for someone who lacks financial skills.

Making automatic loans sound very similar to sms loans, which is a common cause for people falling into incurable debt. It mean less insight and less responsibility, targeted to those who lack financial skills. That could make things better in theory, or things much much worse if the incentives are to get people to take unnecessary and expensive loans.

They say they aren't loans, but credits. It's not clear that you actually become indebted to them.

If its only credit and this work, banks really have something to learn from this. Having customers pay you to restrict withdraws from the bank account is one those ideas that sound crazy, but sure, I can see some direct value from that kind of service. Not one I would personally pay for.

Not nearly as risky as using a payday loan.

If you have someone you could borrow $500 from you are not the target market for this app.

> Costs users $3/week. Which is non-trivial, but less than a payday loan company.

That does depend how much and how often you need to borrow money. If twice a year I need to borrow $50 but pay it back the next month, that's equivalent to a 13000% APR loan rate (~$150 for the convenience of borrowing $50 for a month twice is equivalent to borrowing $50 and paying back $125 the next month, 150% per month or 13000% per year).

It doesn't have the same risk of spiralling out of control, but for small short term loans this is a really expensive thing to do.

Edit - For comparison, $150/year is like borrowing $2800 at 10% and paying it off in a year.

fair enough, but almost no one uses payday loans that responsibly, the twice a year payday loan user is closer to a myth than commonplace.

Yeah, in fact the article said someone is more likely to take 17 payday loans in a year than just one.

When I started reading I thought it was going to be "Uber for Masseuses" but it turned out to be more interesting than that. I hope it works out.

Thank you. This article was way too long to get such a simple thing across.

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