Agreed. Why ask the local carpenter, or librarian how to do something when it can be Googled or find a YouTube video of it? Communities gathered to solve problems they couldn't solve alone.
We still can't solve them alone (we need big tech), and big tech is preferred because its lower friction. Ex: calling an Uber is often lower friction than asking a friend to pickup your groceries when your car is broken.
Oh you took it further, let the LLM take the wheel. I was just referring to the LLM raising a red flag during compilation. So worst case scenario it will just raise a false positive.
I've been wanting something like this for a long time. There's a lot of ways this could go wrong, but I hope it works.
I'd especially love a video platform using this model. I can't afford patreon for every YouTube channel, but I'd love to pay 10¢ per hour of video watched.
$0.10 per hour is already WAY more than a creator usually gets from your viewing. I'd happily pay that amount for good youtube-like content. Creators would love it because it's far more money than they get now. Consumers would like it because for a lot of people it's cheaper than a subscription, and they could forgo ads
Yes, Small Transfers can be used for pay-per-view or pay-per-minute billing models.
The platform's biggest risk that I see is a customer defaulting after using a merchant's service. The platform currently mitigates that with Stripe Radar, 3-D Secure, and spending caps, but I'm keen to hear anything specific you're thinking about.
> customer defaulting after using a merchant's service
I think the defaulting rate would just get baked into the asking price. But I'm assuming there isn't a way to repeatedly systematically default to get unlimited free content.
Each customer already has a limit on the amount they can owe before we require payment. Each customer account also requires a unique payment method, which must pass Stripe Radar and 3-D Secure checks. We plan to add more checks in the future.
If you store funds for a specific service that you provide, it's fine. If it's for many services or services provided by others, it's legally problematic.
We don't hold upfront funds. When a customer pays, we initiate Stripe transfers to the merchant as soon as the funds are available.
Paying the merchant before the customer's card payment settles would mean advancing funds, which would start to resemble lending/guarantee rather than payments, raising regulatory issues. It would also concentrate risk at the platform: defaults from one merchant’s customers could jeopardize the platform for all merchants.
I was thinking more in an upfront payment model, where the customer pre-funds their account with the merchant. If you immediately sent those funds to the merchant, then would you avoid functioning as an e-money institution?
Of course, this would then mean that the customer is trusting merchant not to run off with their money.
That's an interesting idea. This may avoid the e-money issues, but:
- The customer has to pay upfront, which lowers conversion rates.
- No shared balance across multiple merchants, resulting in higher total payment processing fees.
- As you already noted, trust shifts to each merchant to honor unused balances.
I thought 30 days are an option at least when you can explain the reason/necessity to stripe?
Could be an option to funnel default-risky (as distinct from chargeback-risky!) customers to a customer-selectable hold amount rolling the per-transaction flat fee into basically a per-bill flat fee thus indirectly giving volume/commitment discounts to those that select 30-day intervals with large holds?
I guess ideally offer an option to force a billing (transaction finalization) to release the hold if a customer changes their mind (or just happened to use a debit card)...
Though even with 7 day holds it'd allow you to offer service to poor people (which mostly overlaps "people with bad credit") without the APIs having to maintain revenue margins large enough to just eat that default risk, and without having to hold onto any funds yourself.
Authorization hold periods are set by the card networks/issuers and by merchant category, not Stripe.
Even if longer holds were possible, using authorization holds as a prepayment proxy can raise regulatory/consumer-protection issues similar to holding customer funds.
10¢ per hour seems low to me — I’d happily pay ~$1 per hour. $10 per week is less than I currently pay for subscriptions, and I don’t want to spend more than 10 hrs per week watching video anyway.
Where YouTube is my movie player and podcast player and general video player, all of which is done at 2x speed I can't imagine paying $4-6/day for YouTube.
Just my commute listening to a podcast that I downloaded before leaving would cost me $1.50 each way? Nah I'll keep my subscription thanks.
In the US you will never be blocked from buying a plane ticket because of bad Uber reviews, or Amazon reviews. You can also choose to not participat in Uber, AirBnb, or LinkedIn they're far from mandatory. The Amish don't even have bank accounts, they don't have credit scores.
We compile Rust to WASM and pull it in as library code for use in the frontend. It lets us reuse data structures, algorithms etc. that are also used in backend code.
