Ask HN: Review my micropayments startup, RubyPay
I just launched my new startup, and was hoping for some feedback. It's a micropayments site based around selling digital content, with a focus on making it dead simple for sellers to set up.
https://www.rubypay.com
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24 comments
| 14 points
| on HN
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I like the way you've worked around the transaction fee issue by offering different rates for buying and redeeming. The cheapest points are $0.00769 to buy and redeeming gets you $0.00667. So, on average, for every $57.69 coming in (or more, if people buy in smaller amounts), you're paying out $50, plus any interest you earn on parked balances.
Is there a difference between the two that I missed (besides the fact that iStockphoto screens submissions)?
There are ample opportunities for fraud on both sites. For example, say I'm a drug dealer and I need to collect illicit funds from customers. I could post a digital image on iStockphoto and require my customers to buy it before I give them the drugs. Or if I already had a stack of cash I needed to clean I could set up fake accounts to buy my own images, and pay taxes on the profit.
Oh, wait, that was wallet systems after all...
The public could not pay each other using iStockphoto points, it's stricly a one-way street where the photographers get an automatic payment based on the number of credits worth of stuff that got sold. They're not going to go and re-use their credits to buy other stuff.
That's what RubyPay describes here: https://www.rubypay.com/pages/points. If I sell 7500 points worth of whatever, I get $50. The only difference between the two is that RubyPay lets you prepay for an arbitrary service, not just stock photography.
They're not going to go and re-use their credits to buy other stuff.
On iStockPhoto, you can use the credits you earn to buy other items. RubyPay doesn't make it clear whether points you earn can be used to buy other services or whether they have to be redeemed for a check. iStockPhoto looks more like a wallet system than RubyPay actually.
> Thanks for the suggestion, for now if you'd like to see what a paid link looks like: https://www.rubypay.com/i/9c7wfUo4ACZ
Rather than having to sign-in to view how a transaction is done, can you have a demo page that includes 'dummy' rubypoints that can be redeemed to view a pdf/mp3 - for me, it would help make a decision about whether the service is useful or not.
In general, cool idea! I'm just the type of person that would like to see the service in action without having to login/create an account first.
https://www.rubypay.com/pages/demo
- points: Need to support more payment options e.g. Paypal and Google checkout. No way am I putting my credit card into your application. If you are storing these details I also hope you know you have to be PCI-DSS compliant Small bug: edit profile to add address etc gives you an error because the change password verification box is empty
have you considering to find a niche of content that people might pay for? istockphoto does seem like a relevant example... there are also lots of niche services that people pay for... like elance, 99designs, trada...