I've always heard that narrative that micropayments simply won't work and that people don't like it.<p>Recently, I've found myself paying for OpenAI's GPT-3 playground app in micropayments format. I use it for small tasks here and there and pay around 2-4$ a month. It feels totally fine and now I don't see why I wouldn't do the same for my Google searches or usage of maps.<p>Does anyone else have examples of services/products that they pay for in micropayments?
Back in the dark ages, I was an early employee of Bitpass, a micropayments startup, and for Bitpass I co-founded what may have been the first completely indie online music store, Mperia (in the sense that artists could simply upload and sell their work directly, with no contracts or middlemen). It used Bitpass micropayments for record sales.<p>(We may have also been the first online music store to have Creative Commons licensing built in, as our launch coincided with CC's. I'll never forget at their launch party, when the nice, awkward teenage kid I thought was just some attendee's son got up and was introduced as one of CC's developers, Aaron Swartz.)<p>The thing that killed the momentum then is the same thing that still kills it - card transaction fees. Bitpass got around this by allowing you to buy Bitpass credits for like $3, which you could spend anywhere. It worked great for music, and Mperia was originally seen as a good gateway (and, frankly, loss leader) for getting people to adopt our system.<p>Alas, it never took off, and Bitpass's brilliant CEO and founder got sidelined by investors in favor of some ronin CEO from the ad world who bogged it down in awkward partnership deal negotiations until the money ran out. I'm still convinced, all these years later, that if they'd focused on the indie media angle, it could have taken off.<p>(I also wish that this band who played their first gigs ever at my coffeeshop open mic in Vegas called The Killers had put their record up pre-record label deal, as I asked them to. I think Brandon was down but their shitty manager told them not to, and later they sued him for being shady af, which I did warn them about.)
<i>>, I've found myself paying for OpenAI's GPT-3 playground app in micropayments format. </i><p>Unless I'm misunderstanding OpenAI's pricing format for "bulk tokens" [1] prepaid for by <i>credit-cards</i>, this isn't <i>web micropayments</i> in the way many others think of that term. Likewise, buying audiobooks via Audible Credits by prepaying $229.50 to get 24 credits isn't really micropayments.<p>Some were hoping for internet micropayments at the <i>granularity of transactions</i> rather than pre-paying a large upfront amount to be parceled out in smaller amounts later. What prevents micropayments at the fine granularity is the high VISA/Mastercard credit-card transaction fees.<p>E.g. many want to micropay 2 cents for a news article without prepaying $10/month or $120/year to a "media aggregator" taking a percentage cut of that.<p>[1] <a href="https://openai.com/api/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/api/pricing/</a>
Transferring the $1 vs $1000 digitally, have no technical difference and hence the commission based payment cut is something that I have a hard time to accept.<p>Btw I am from India. Earlier,every time I see people swipe the cards in the retail stores, I felt sorry for the shopkeepers as they had to bear the 1.5%-2% as transaction charges of the total amount paid.<p>It all changed after the launch of UPI payment system, now I can just pay 5-10 INR(7 cents to 13 cents) to a shopkeeper without feeling the guilt of payment charges.
It has been more than two years when I used my last VISA card payment transaction for any retail shopping. I think other countries should also develop such not-for-profit payment network system that can be used to pay efficiently digitally without making any side the victim.
Personally, I'd prefer to just pay tiny constant monthly fees for things, than to have the mental overhead of knowing there is a nonzero cost for every search I do.<p>I am prone to microoptimizing things, and I would absolutely spend an objectively excessive amount of time and mental energy trying to avoid doing another search to save three cents.
The whole Podcasting 2.0 / "value 4 value" movement is built on top of Lightning Network micropayments. It works. People use it. When you listen to a podcast that has the v4v tags in the feed using a compatible app you are given the option to send contribution based on how much you have listened. Also, you can send "boosts" which include a message that the podcaster could, for example, read out live.<p>I think the next step would be something similar but for blogging / text content.<p>PS: I myself wrote a RSS reader & podcast client that I released on the Umbrel app store. As you listen to podcasts, you can stream donations straight from the app running on your Umbrel node using funds you have complete custody of. It is pretty amazing.<p>PPS: In the Lightning world, micropayments can be as low as a millisat, which is 1/1000 of a satoshi. Routing fees are also very low and transactions are instantly confirmed.
We kind of do have it, but hidden behind prepays/pooled payments. Nobody wants to deal with people actually paying $1.5 for something. Just processing that from a card is not worth it unless you're a massive company. (AWS does charge me $0.46 for S3 on some account) But my Nebula subscription is effectively a few micropayments in a trench coat. Same for Vultr.<p>The only time I'm touching actual micropayments is when someone sends me $0.50 through Brave.
Meanwhile in India, offline micro payment has become more convenient than Cash. Look for UPI. Unified Payment Interface. I regularly make payment of INR 10 ( USD 0.13) for a cup of Tea at a roadside stall.
In Europe and the UK there is now the Open Banking standard [1] that should technically make it a lot more feasible to do micro payments because it allows account-to-account transactions, therefore not needing to go through Visa/Mastercard processes and fees.<p>[1] <a href="https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/</a>
Chargepoint: An electric car charging network.<p>You seed your account with $20. Sometimes charging is free, sometimes it's $1-2 dollars, and sometimes it's more. When your account gets low, they bill your credit card.<p>EZ Pass: The electronic toll network on the East Coast of the US. Works similar to Chargepoint. If you only drive a few miles on a toll road they deduct a few cents from your account.
Mircopayments (in the form of "Read this article without a subscription for 2 cents - click here") are one of those ideas that everyone claims they want but don't.<p>The only way consumers can use micropayments is to set up a subscription via a credit card (or similar). Either with the vendor themselves or via a thirdparty. They don't want to do that.<p>Publishers don't want to deal with the hassle of accepting 100000 small transactions, some percentage requires them to add sales tax, some percentage will fail, and a non-zero percentage will be reversed. In the face of these problems, getting a check every month for advertises seems like a much better bet.<p>The closest thing to micropayments for content makers is something like Patreon, where consumers pay a small amount up-front for access to future content. But even here, a small amount is usually a few dollars rather than cents.
While it isn't micro-payments as many think about them, we did run this experiment with cell phones. First it was SMS messages, commonly used to cost $0.10 per message. Still the case for a small group of people, and some may seek out pay as you go plans to optimize their bill, but for most, they prefer to just pay a little more monthly it seems and not worry about being billed for each one. (I know it's not a perfect correlation, but it is probably the largest scale study of pay as you go vs. other options that we have.)<p>I've been waiting (both with anticipation and dread) for a day when micro-payments are ubiquitous, as I think it's the only way to compete with the subscription and ad business models. I just don't know if people will really accept it given previous examples of it have played out. But I still hope someone gets it right, and I can pay 5c to read a newspaper article without needing to subscribe, and things like that.
I think the idea was coalesced in Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: if there are no micropayments, there's no middle class. If there's no middle class, we're essentially doomed. So it feels logical that there has to be a marketplace for "ideas" and "thoughts", not just services. Creating a kind of global network of independent researchers as in E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909):<p><a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops</a>
The point of micropayments is to make it cheap to charge for content, whenever, wherever. In that context, a $2-4 payment is not a micropayment because it's a monthly subscription fee. That fee has baked in the cost of transaction processing.<p>Micropayments should be like cash on the Internet. No transaction fees, no filling out payment forms, and instant settlement. This would allow us to leave behind the SaaS pricing models and ad-funded models that have taken over the internet.
It helps a bit if you look at the business ecosystem as being made of various fish sizes, up to huge krakens like Facebook. And everything is sitting on a tortoise called VISA.<p>The size difference between what we're used to think as "players" and credit card processors (and a few others) is fking huge. We don't have cheap micropayments because they don't want cheap micropayments, period. It's not going to change soon.
Barter's been around longer than money. Each party in the trade has something the other party wants. No middleman.<p>For scarcer, non-local trades, maybe there's a long-distance bartering protocol waiting to be invented. Tell what you have and what you want, and wait. Optimizing trade chains might minimize shipping/handling (but take longer).<p>Expect bankers not to like this.
Many of the limitations are around the values for payment processor minimums. With rapid inflation it will be a race to see if those values change first or the values of what we consider 'micro' today exceed their minimums making 'small-but-not-micro' payments easy because they are just normal payments in the eyes of payment processor policies.
DigitalOcean droplets: $0.007/hour.<p>Most of my servers run for a long period of time, but sometimes I do experiment with running a certain setup that I kill after a few hours or days. Knowing that I only pay per hour at the same low cost allows me to experiment more.<p>Those are not cryptocurrency micropayments, and the actual transfer aggregates to one accumulated, monthly payment.
Everybody coming in with the lightning angle, but I just want to point out that constantly having to sign micropayments is a pain. People really want prepaid draw down of the account. Having to approve every transaction is a horrible UX, but not something you would want to automate for crypto either.
No, there is not.<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...</a>
The problem with micropayments is nontrivial.<p>In order to make micropayments work, you need to<p>1. have some sort of personal money-holding folder (it's so hard to avoid the word 'wallet' here), that you can easily fill (e.g. via your credit card). This moneyholder needs to be sufficiently safe for use, and should be password-protected. Ideally, it's a function or tightly integrated with your browser.<p>2. The website itself needs a moneyholder, though this could conceivably be implemented with limited functionality.<p>3. An easy to implement way to have small transactions from your moneyholder to the moneyholder of a website. To avoid creating issues around money laundering, the maximal height or a daily limit for transaction to one destination could be considered.<p>4. A legal way to retrieve funds from that moneyholder.<p>That's the easy part. Now consider the following:<p>1. The system should be useable regardless of the participants countries of origin, even in countries that have a cash culture and little implementation of credit cards...<p>2. ... but must adhere to international and national legislation (looking at you, Russian/Iranian/Cuban sanction regime)<p>3. A certain level of anonymity is advisable. The newsman at the newsstand has no idea what my name or address is when I buy a newspaper, and neither should the micropayment merchant.<p>4. Transactions need to be failsafe and fast. I don't want to first click through four layers of login screens and read an email before I get to reading the article I was about to buy.<p>5. Somehow, whoever manages this system needs to make enough money to support infrastructure and engineers, plus a profit. (The most easy way would be to demand a 5% processing fee for sending money into the moneyholder... I can see that approach failing for psychological reasons, though ("I put 20 dollars in there, why is my balance only 19$?")<p>All current net payment schemes fail in one of these fields. Paypal is comparatively fast and ubiquitous, but fleeces people with their fees. Cryptocurrencies are often slow - and processing fees are no joke, not to being with the volatility issues. I think GNU Taler [1] is interesting, but that by necessity would become a regional solution linked to local banks at best.<p>[1] <a href="https://taler.net/en/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://taler.net/en/index.html</a>
I confused the headline with micro deposits, like the 10 cents that gets deposited and withdrawn to link a bank account.<p>I wouldn't pay for my searches. I don't think I would pay for maps either. Plenty of alternatives.
I had an idea for a video streaming platform where people would add money to their account and be deducted a penny per minute and then publishers would get bulk payouts.<p>Couldn't get many people interested though.
It exists in games with their own currencies. In the cryptocurrency space. Online advertising sends micropayments to publishers. Spotify sends micropayments to artists. Cloud computing uses it too.
The future of micropayments will be the Lightning network. It's still under heavy development, but people use it to stream instant sub-cent payments all the time.<p>Check out stacker.news as a live example.