
Would anyone use a charitable payments API? - jeremypshapiro
Recently built a tool providing a real-time, direct link between donors and recipients (living on ~$2 a day or less). Donors can send cash to very low-income people and exchange messages (e.g., confirmation message, a SMS indicating how the gift was used). Wondering whether it is worthwhile to make it open via API, so that anyone could integrate an option to make direct cash transfers to globally poor people into products, sites, etc.<p>My question is if people would use such an API, or more specifically:<p>a. What are the use cases &#x2F; potential needs solved that would motivate developers to use the API (e.g., something for people to use for side projects to develop skills, a way to encourage more customer spending)?<p>b. Are financial incentives important (e.g., developers keep 1% of transfers sent through their application)?<p>c. What other motivations might be there for use?<p>Curious to hear thoughts.
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_bxg1
I definitely think an API for donating to charitable _organizations_ would be
extremely useful. Most of them have terrible web flows for making/managing
payments, and I've thought for a while about what it would look like to have a
single website you could go to to make/manage donations to any number of
nonprofits. Could significantly lower the bar and open the door to micro-
donations.

Unfortunately, such a project would likely require case-by-case relationships
with each organization.

