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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

It would be more interesting if you pre-approved the transaction for some set date in the future (the task due date), which you cancel on completion of the task.

This also guarantees "punishment" in the event that you forget about it.

I would genuinely consider using something like this iff ~90% of the money went to a charity of my choice (with the rest as a platform/transaction fee)

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So just schedule a bank transfer to your charity? 100% will go to them if you don't cancel.

Setting up a scheduled bank transfer is exactly the sort of task that would spend too long on my todo list in the first place.

I think there's an interesting bit of human psychology on display here, where signing up for this service wouldn't be lost in the depths of a to-do list, but scheduling an equivalent bank transfer would.

I wonder if it's mostly the ease of use of credit card payment versus the scheduled payment system of a bank website. The latter being more complex as you need to specify the destination vs a payment where you just enter your details.

There is a time window for how long you can hold an authorization on cards otherwise it’ll expire. IIRC, 30 days is standard for most payment processors. Longer term goals would require a charge and a refund, and most processors still charge fees even if the amount is refunded.

This is exactly what I wanted to do. But I didn't know how. I looked into it with Stripe and they said they would have to authorize a payment every day and if this happens on a big scale it could trigger some bad stuff and lock it from working. Then I thought maybe I can create a community where if you don't post a message proving you did it this will trigger the transaction, but again it was very complicated. This is my first app and I am using off the shelf tools.

But hey, if you know how I could do this, please tell me and I am gonna do it.

About the charity I disagree, if the money goes to charity you will feel good about failing.

also I don't want to have to deal with saving people's cards on my server for security headache reasons. So if you have a suggestion that takes this into account also, thanks!

I don't know for sure if this would work, but it's pretty common for services to have a monthly subscription where the first month is free. You could maybe set up something like that, which either gets cancelled by you just after the end of the first month, or cancelled by the user at some point before then. (where "month" is some arbitrary duration)

I have been thinking about this as a "daily" habit kinda of thing, instead I think you're seeing it as a "monthly" goal kinda of thing. Maybe your view is easier so people don't have to subscribe and unsubscribe every day, but they can do so once per month.

So for example let's say I create a subscription, first month free.

My goal is to not drink alcohol for the whole month.

So let's say I do drink alcohol > I don't cancel the subscription and get automatically charged. If I don't drink it > I cancel it.

But then next month I would have to sign up again if I want to keep using this method let's say.

Will this mass subscribing and canceling on a daily/weekly/monthly basis annoy Stripe? I was reading from someone who did a similar app that 95% of people will say they achieved their goal. So that would be a 95% subscription cancellation rate.

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