

Gittip minimum raised from $0.25 to $1.00 - whit537
https://www.gittip.com/about/me.html

======
femto
I've written down my experience of tipping in Australia, as an illustration
that the word "tipping" has different connotations in different cultures.

Historically, Australians don't tip. During much of the the 20th century
Australia had quite a strong (relative to the US) tradition of socialism and
unionism, resulting in a strong set of minimum employment conditions. There
was very much a view that a decent living wage was an entitlement and a matter
of dignity, not something that a worker should have to stoop to collect.
People didn't tip, since the common perception was that the potential tipee
was as equally entitled to a minimum wage as the potential tipper. Indeed, I'd
say that people actively didn't tip as an act of homage to equality.

Tipping is probably more common today than in the past, and the above is being
eroded, but I think the above is still generally true. A tip is rarely
expected, or let on to be expected, as that is a sure fire way not to get a
tip.

I mention the above, in the supposition that it has connotations for a site
like gittip that liberally uses the word "tipping". Some cultures don't do
tipping. As an Australian, I'd be more inclined if the idea of compensation
was being sold on a "equity" (as in fairness) basis rather than a giving
basis. I know it's semantics, but semantics does influence decisions.

I hope the above is constructive.

~~~
whit537
Love it, thank you. Noted here:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/138>

~~~
DASD
Maybe something along the lines of 'patron/patronage' would be a better term?

A play on the word for domain names such as patronous.com (full of patrons) or
patronian.com .

------
pyoung
So to start, I am not a target user of this site (at least at the moment), as
I am not very active on github and I don't follow open source projects very
closely.

With that said, I have followed these discussions, and I think this may be the
wrong approach. I think that you should implement a balance transfer feature.
This would prevent a lot of the money from getting eaten up by processing
fees. Once that is implemented, you should just leave the amount up to the
user, no mins, no maxes. If someone thinks that $0.25/wk is too small, then
they are free to tip more. But at $0.25/wk, that comes out to $13/yr. At
$1/wk, that is $52/yr. I am a man of modest, yet comfortable means, and giving
some people ~$10/yr to support their cause is well within my discretionary
budget, but at ~$50/yr, that starts setting off my internal 'frugal' alarms,
especially if I want to donate to more than one project.

~~~
whit537
There's a distinction between truly supporting a person, and being part of a
long tail of "oh well here's a few cents." I see us trying to feel out how to
work with those two cases. My current thinking is that the long tail of
support for an individual will come via their association with various
projects, groups, companies, brands--whatever we want to call them. Here's the
ticket where we're tracking this:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27>

------
whit537
Gittip is a site for micro-subscriptions to fund open source developers. I got
a lot of feedback this week on HN and GitHub that the minimum subscription
should be raised from $0.25 to $1.00:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/180>

I rolled that out today, so if you wanted it, go use it. :^)

<https://www.gittip.com/about/me.html>

~~~
thaumaturgy
me.html is giving me a 302 redirect to the home page. Am I missing something?

~~~
whit537
If you're already authenticated then it redirects to your profile page.

~~~
whit537
Okay, should give you a message now if you're anon.

<https://www.gittip.com/about/me.html>

~~~
thaumaturgy
Nice, that's a little less confusing. :-)

Just as a heads-up: Google "gittip minimum raised from" or search Twitter for
the same
([http://twitter.com/#!/search/gittip%20minimum%20raised%20fro...](http://twitter.com/#!/search/gittip%20minimum%20raised%20from))
... there's a collective audience of tens of thousands of people, any of whom
could be seeing Gittip for the first time from this submission. Linking to a
blog post, even a very brief one, might be better for picking up new interest
in the future.

I feel like I'm being a pain in the ass between this and yesterday's grousing
over needing a Github account. Sorry about that.

~~~
whit537
If you're a pain in the ass then I'm sittin' on sunshine.

Definitely could do a better job of converting traffic. Don't feel like I have
that nailed yet. :-/

~~~
john-n
Just my 2 cents, but I did not/do not know what gittip is. The above link
invites me to sign in using github, I'm extremely cautious of logging in using
github anywhere as my personal account is also my work account.

Any page where I can land and be asked to log in should do a better job of
saying what you do, especially where trust is involved.

~~~
whit537
Thanks for feeding back. I'll try to do better next time.

------
aliguori
I know this sounds lazy, but it would be really nice to stream line the
process of 1) Finding a project 2) Getting a list of the top contributors to a
project.

For instance, I'd love to go to a site like this and give $100 to whoever is
the most active contributor in glib who is accepting contributions.

I generally don't know people's github account names. Digging it up is a pain.

~~~
whit537
Agreed. Working on it:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27>

------
adrianwaj
Gittip is well suited to use bitcoin (I even saw it mentioned a few times in
issues
[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/search?q=bi...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/search?q=bitcoin)
), bitcoiners can even fund that feature.

~~~
whit537
Here's the main ticket:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14>

Basically I'm open to it if the bitcoin are transparently converted to
dollars.

Code talks. ;-)

------
catshirt
apologies for soliciting on hn, but i couldn't find a support line through the
site.

 _must_ donations be recurring? why can't send one-off donations? also, at the
risk of sounding vein, _must_ the donations be anonymous? these things are
keeping me from giving my money to people.

~~~
whit537
Gittip is designed to pay the mortgage for donees, and mortgages are
recurring. I expect we'll mix in one-offs eventually. Here's the ticket for
that:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/5>

Donations are anonymous in the particulars but public in aggregate on the
homepage by default.

~~~
secoif
Many devs don't have recurring income. It'd be good if i was able to simply
say "10% of every invoice I send gets sent to gittip for me to distribute
amongst the projects I used to generate the work in this invoice."

Freshbooks Integration?

~~~
whit537
Ticketed with comments: <https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/196>

------
DASD
I like the speed that you're implementing feedback and new features.

I was curious about your payment processor since you're working as a
marketstyle service. For reference on a project I'm working on, were there any
hurdles to getting such an account? Also, how do you plan to handle
chargebacks?

~~~
jasonz
he's using <https://www.balancedpayments.com/>

~~~
zcvosdfdgj
hopefully the site will grow larger and he'll change that. They're taking
about 1/3rd more than if he opened a real merchant account.

~~~
dangrossman
Until his service grows much, much larger he'd be paying more with most
merchant accounts. And he'd be on his own for paying out to the donation
recipients, which this company is handling as part of their transaction fee.

I've worked with 3 different merchant account providers over the past 8 years.
All of them, in the end, ended up costing more than twice the rates they
originally quoted when I applied. Downgrading most cards to higher fee
schedules, having a dozen fees 3rd party processors simply build into their
flat rate, and the ability to raise rates every month for years can add up to
a very high _effective_ transaction rate.

PayPal, once you pass $10000/mo for the 2.2% tier, is currently my cheapest
processor when you factor in all the processing, gateway and monthly fees. I
still accept credit cards directly for various reasons, so I'm trying to move
off directly storing cards in Authorize.net's CIM to a service like
SpreedlyCore that will let me switch merchant account providers without losing
my current customer billing info.

~~~
whit537
Good to hear from someone with experience, thanks.

