plantedd

It doesn't quite answer the question, but we use GoCardless to handle payments from our sellers on our marketplace and that's 1% per transaction - the difference is that it's processing direct debit payments (withdrawals direct from one bank account to another) instead of credit cards.

It seems to be partially down to the underlying costs of processing credit cards and partially down to competition.

We have a category just for shrubs here http://www.plantedd.com/t/categories/plants/shrubs, but yeh, our search isn't clever enough at the moment.

You're right, it's a difference about the principles of the matter and no doubt we disagree over the government's role (especially in an economic downturn). Setting that to one side though, the truth is that the government is spending your tax dollars already and I'm suggesting that there may be a better way for them to do it.

(The One Direction solution??)

I agree that more tax breaks for startups would help and it would be a more straightforward thing to achieve. The two things don't have to be mutually exclusive though, so I'd say we need both. For early-stage startups though, sometimes the challenge is more in actually reaching the stage where there's anything to tax - which is why I still think actually giving them the money in their pockets is vital.

Thanks for the compliment about Plantedd!

We've got things like the West of Scotland Loan Fund and similar schemes. The equity or loan funding support is better, but there's still essentially a large degree of inefficiency and a lack of effectiveness in the process because you've got teams making decisions on who to pick without the benefit of any randomised evaluation, so you're not gathering any objective data on what's actually effective.

It's always an encouraging sign to see the tech community tackling big problems.