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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

> To send a payment in Clubhouse, just tap on the profile of a creator (who has the feature enabled) and tap "Send Money".

> Enter the amount you would like to send them. The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to register a credit or debit card.

> 100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe. Clubhouse will take nothing.

That's unusually generous. Apple and Google take note.

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I think it's naive to think that they're doing this out of pure goodwill. They've taken over $100 million in funding in only a year of being in business. Since they're so new, my estimate is that they're generating goodwill with consumers before any of their investors are expecting to make their money back. Given the sheer number of Clubhouse competitors, this is probably a smart move for their business. They get to generate reactions like yours en masse.

They're building a strong brand and reputation to beat out the competition, and they'll only start monetizing once they've won.

I don't see how Clubhouse taking nothing is sustainable. I'm suspicious their "take nothing" approach lasts forever.

Apple Pay Cash (the one in the Messages app), Google Pay take $0.00 for person-to-person payments. Given Clubhouse isn't formally introducing some sort of monthly payment or "pay me for access to Clubhouse streams" thing, they can probably argue they're just creating another P2P money sending service.

Pushing the processing cost to the user doesn't imply it's zero-cost for Clubhouse; they're still on the hook for disputes/refunds.

Are they? Presumably if there is a dispute they will just remove the money from the creator.

Yes, But they would incur an additional service charge for that dispute. That’s the worst part about being a merchant. Someone buys a digital product from you, then they file a chargeback. You are then down the original charge plus a fee that can be as much as $25 or more.

If they pay out money to creators in a reasonable time, then a fraudulent "creator" (accounts created with fake/stolen identities and tipped with stolen cards) will withdraw anything ASAP and there won't be anything to remove/recover; and if they want to protect from that, then they have to do invasive verification and/or freeze any income for a quite long time.

They can just do KYC for people who withdraw money from the platform.

It's temporary to encourage demand for the feature.

At some point in the future they will have to take some percentage.

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