Cool! Only start a transaction when you reach a threshold - makes perfect sense! Essentially, they solve the micropayments problem by using lazy evaluation.
I think a better model would be just to get users paying five bucks a month, and then to evenly divide that up among the stories each person votes for. Then you just have to get 100 users to sign up to get the thing underway. With the current strategy both the amount you are expected to pledge and the number of people needed to get the thing to hit it's tipping point are kind of nebulous.
Anyway I like the idea. I'll probably sign up once it's out.
How do you take payment from me when you come calling asking me to cover my tip pledges? Say it's Visa. They charge for that so how do you cover your costs? I like the idea of asking the content authors to tip you in turn when you pass the tips onto them, but is it those tips that you're relying on to cover costs or do you ask me, the original tipster, to cough up the tips + a processing fee?
We'll ask you, the original tipster, to cough up the tips, then we reduce all tips you made by just enough to cover whatever transaction fee is involved with your preferred method of payment. At least - that's the current plan.
In other words, the transaction cost is split according to 'share' by all the tipjars you are paying into. In practice this translates to worst case scenario 10%, usually far less.
Eat your own dogfood is the motto. We don't intend to charge for bandwidth, site development, server hosting, or any of the other costs normal sites have to contend with. We draw the line at paying transaction fees out of our own pockets, that's all.
We draw the line at paying transaction fees out of our own pockets, that's all.
Oh, quite right. I wasn't expecting you to, that's why I wondered how these costs got covered. I like the idea of the tip recipients having the option to tip you in turn for collecting the tips; very neat. I may not be the only one to read the web site and wonder how transaction costs are covered though so perhaps a little more detail somewhere for us pedants would be good.
The "give us your email address to hear future news" form isn't working. There's no response from dreamhost as at 2007-05-26 13:12:48 +0100. Can you let us know when it's back?
We've got that angle covered with a number of features, but primarily: That's up to the blogger/comic artist/musician/whatever that you're tipping. He might post more, write more strips, decide on a story line, and other such things in response to his tipjar filling up.
