

Ask HN: smallest sensible (micro-)payment?  - Tichy

I just had an idea for a fun marketplace. I am half inclined to run it for free because I would like to see it become popular, but of course a classic approach would be to charge a fee per transaction. For what I have in mind, I suspect 1€ or 1$ would be already a lot - perhaps something between 0.10 to 0.50 would be more realistic.<p>So I wonder what is the smallest useful payment to ask from users? I suppose 1$ does not make sense as processing costs might be higher than the gain, and the hassle is not worth it. Perhaps something like 5$ would work (and giving the user credit for 10 transactions in exchange)?<p>Would be interested in the payment issues, but also to hear about experiences with payments. Maybe subscriptions work better than credits? Other ways?<p>What I like about credits that it could open ways for all sorts of incentive programs, like users getting credit for being nice etc. I could also give users some free credits for signing up, so that I would not scare them away completely from the start.
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jacquesm
Most micropayment systems are implemented as wallets for that exact reason.
You pre-pay an amount that gives you credits, a single click + confirm alert
box can then be used to spend the credits.

If you intend to do a full transaction you have to keep in mind the costs of
scrubbing and processing, probably less than about 50 cts would give you a net
loss.

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Tichy
Thanks - what is scrubbing? I assume processing is the fee to be paid to the
credit card transaction facilitator (not sure how they are called)?

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jacquesm
Scrubbing is the process which checks the card and other data against various
databases and algorithms in order to detect if the charge is a fraudulent one.

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byoung2
The credits system is a good way to go, because you can get people to spend
more when it doesn't feel like real money (a la Microsoft Points). Amazon
Payments provides an easy way to do it too:
[https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=devfps/agg...](https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=devfps/aggregated)

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Tichy
Thanks, didn't know about Amazon Payments offering that kind of thing. Very
interesting.

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cperciva
It's not exactly the same thing, but tarsnap works on a pre-pay model with a
minimum payment of $5 (and then bills people for their backup usage in
attodollars).

Given that some people make larger payments than the minimum amount, this
keeps the payment processing costs down to a reasonable level (slightly under
5%).

