Every Thursday, we charge credit cards, shuffle the money around inside Gittip, and deposit money to bank accounts. We call this “payday.” It’s really the core of Gittip, and the process hasn’t been substantially refactored since we launched over two years ago.
For the past two months we’ve been working on a rewrite of the payday algorithm that addresses a number of under-the-hood issues. Payday is now safer and faster.
The most visible user-facing change is that now, if you’re both giving and receiving money on Gittip, we’ll only charge your credit card for the difference. Before, we were charging you the whole amount of your gifts even if you were also receiving money, which was confusing and also wasted money in credit card fees.
This has been a significant engineering effort for our team, which is still very much in the bootstrapping phase. In fact, we think of ourselves as “double-bootstrapping,” since we’re trying to fund ourselves on the very platform we’re building. In particular I’d like to thank Changaco for all of his hard work on this payday rewrite and many other parts of Gittip.
Now would be a good time to double-check your history page on Gittip. If you see something wrong or confusing, please let us know either privately by emailing support@gittip.com, or publicly on Twitter or GitHub.
Thanks for using Gittip!
Chad Whitacre is the founder of Gittip.