More warning would have been ideal, but perhaps it's a security issue. Or a business negotiation issue. It's apparently something they don't want to tell us about, and are in a (relative to usual deprecation) hurry about.
I bet a lot of sponsorship dollars will be lost when people do not update.
I wonder if this will effect non-US donors especially. In general, I'm pretty sure paypal is accessible to more people than visa/mastercard. Over the summer they announced some international expansion to who can receive sponsorship dollars. https://github.blog/2022-07-28-github-sponsors-available-in-...
Not sure how different things are in other parts of the world, but here in Australia all of our debit cards are on the regular Visa/Mastercard networks; you can use them wherever you can use a credit card online. It's just the transaction is likely to decline if you don't have a balance in your account.
If you're in Europe, I can recommend N26. They have a bank card that functions as a "credit card". Only you need to have a balance on it or the transactions won't go through, because the account is charged instantly.
do not ever use N26 for anything else than a credit card though, don't have your main account with them, they lock accounts without giving a (concrete) reason and are then unreachable.
They say that in the article, but at the actual checkout the only options listed rn are paypal and credit card. Also, honestly not even sure my banks debit card would work with something like that, only thing I ever used for paying online is ideal (a dutch payment standard)
The HN community absolutely hates crypto but this is an example of where stablecoins would be great. No dealing with the logistics of international bank transfers or services like Paypal.
You could use something like https://privacy.com/. In fact, I’ve been using a Privacy credit card (connected directly to my bank account) for GitHub sponsors since I signed up.
Sure, I buy things through PayPal a lot. It’s purely out of convenience. It saves me the steps of entering in my address and credit card info when buying something online. If the checkout page offers Apple Pay or Stripe, I’ll use those instead, because they’re even easier. I’ve never had any problems with any of these payment services.
I also like that both PayPal and Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions, so I don’t have to argue with someone on the phone to cancel. My understanding is that Apple subscriptions incur a 30% fee for the developer (and often a price hike for me), so it’s nice that PayPal offers something similar without that fee.
PayPal still charges about a 3-4% + 50 cent fee. Not as large as the exorbitant 30%, but still a lot compared to the tens of cents it costs for IBAN payments in the EU
Apple doesn’t charge merchants anything for using Apple Pay, they charge the banks for being able to have their cards in Apple wallet. Merchants still get charged by the banks but Apple doesn’t take anything from them.
Yeah, I've sold over $1M worth of stuff on eBay since 2011 and have mostly good things to say about them.
Much better support than eBay or Amazon, at least for merchants, and the few times I've needed them as a customer they've helped me out. Even one time when I was socially engineered into ticking the "item received" when I hadn't received the item, they helped me get a refund.
I think a lot of the bad stories you hear about them come from people upset at the customer being always given the benefit of the doubt, even in suspicious fraud situations (e.g. where the customer has 3 positive feedback and the seller has 10,000). It's bullshit, but from a business perspective it's a small price to pay so that your customers don't think "am I about to get scammed?" every time they click the Buy It Now button.
If you drill down a bit too, you'll find a sizable minority of people who lost their shit at support staff then act surprised when they don't get any help.
I can assure you the customer experience, when the purchase is above a 1000$, is also atrocious. They will send you in circles. Scammers do use paypal, there's a reason.
I've never had a bad experience with PayPal and there ain't no way I'm handing out my raw credit card info to another website so they can get hacked and leak it.
Makes it super easy when you get a new card or a card expires to simply change the card in PayPal without having to go through and change the card everywhere you used it.
I know PayPal gets a bunch of hate for some of their business practices, but I think most of that comes down to them being in the financial services industry which is the most regulated industry to operate your business in. This is the reason why you don't see much competition when it comes to payment processing.
This is a general statement about many companies, though PayPal is an example of it:
The company was great to work with until it wasn't.
Most people, most of the time, will have no major issue (and few minor ones) and wonder what the hubbub is about; a minority of people, a minority of time, will have lots of minor issues and a few major ones, and some of them will be _devastated_ by the experience.
All of this is to say: You will find lots of folks who've loved PP and had zero issues, but when the company is that size, a 0.001% error rate screws over a lot of paying customers.
It makes a lot of my transactions very low friction and significantly increases my willingness to buy things from small independent sellers on the web. I don't really ever have to think about PayPal, but now that your question has made me stop and think about it, I quite like PayPal and think it's quite a good bit of infrastructure.
Even though sometimes using Paypal causes me to lose "reward" points, I do use quite a bit. For things like annual domain renewal - it is a life saver. I have had my domain expire far too many times with Credit Cards.
I use it for small recurring payments to some online services. Some online services only accept Paypal so I just pay via Paypal using my stored Amex/Visa details and Paypal process the payment and passes it on to the service operator. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Also means I only need to update my card details in one place when I switch cards or get a replacement card. No problems and in some ways the UX is better than using a traditional Visa/MC/Amex processor.
I have never had bad experience with PayPal. I use it always when it an option and I give out my credit card info very rarely (e.g. it has to be actually life altering product/service and not support PayPal for me to input my credit card details.)
If I was sponsoring someone this change would put end to that. I don't want to give my credit card details to Github.
As a customer they're great, especially as someone who moved internationally and so needed to use a "foreign" credit card to pay for things for a while. Being able to pay everywhere with a consistent UI and have my payment history (and manage which card I'm using) in one place is really nice.
I like that I have it set up to pull directly from my bank account (instead of going on a credit card bill to pay, possibly with interest), and that I just have to log in to paypal to make a purchase, and not enter any other numbers, or share my credit card number on an additional form/system that might get hacked.
If a vendor offers paypal as a payment method, I almost always choose it.
I have no particular loyalty to paypal, if another similar option were available I'd be happy to use it, paypal has just gotten such market penetration as non-visa/mastercard payment method. Nobody offers a "pay with venmo" checkout option.
I trust PayPal as the default payment method, I do not want to provide my cc details to any random store that may have questionable security. I never had a single issue with PayPal.
There was a moment when I needed to buy an expensive ticket from Qatar and their Visa processor was unable to bill my card. PayPal managed to get my money to airline. I appreciate that, but still thiunk that creating user experience worse than that of PayPal is a non-trivial feat.
What's so extremely terrible about the user experience?
As a regular user, I can't think of anything that would've annoyed me, beyond sending official emails that look like phishing emails, and then support not even being able to always distinguish whether it's a valid email or not.
Other than that, I've added a credit card, can press the pay with paypal button, login and pay for my goods. Nothing to complain in this loop really, so I'm curious what your perspective is.
I consistently have a pretty good experience with PayPal if you discount the ads and nags on the Website. The merchant "horror stories" actually give me a lot of confidence that whoever I buy from will be sufficiently motivated to fulfill their side of the contract.
I also use PayPal a lot. It is more convenient since I don't have to find my credit card to enter the digits manually. It is also easier to change payment methods with PayPal.
As a customer PayPal works great for me. I much prefer it over typing my credit card number. Subscriptions over PayPal also work well. Just cancel in PayPal and it’s done.
As a non-US citizen one of the worst user experience in fintech I had was PayPal. Especially when I tried to stop using it and it just didn't allow me to just pay by entering card data without login, even in anonymous mode. There also were couple of moments when alternative card payment processor failed to bill my card, but PayPal managed to make it. I understand that US barely have any alternatives, but still.
I’ve always used PayPal on GitHub for sponsoring great devs since it’s the lowest touch option. Strange that there is no explanation as to why it’s being stopped.
Readit News
I bet a lot of sponsorship dollars will be lost when people do not update.
I wonder if this will effect non-US donors especially. In general, I'm pretty sure paypal is accessible to more people than visa/mastercard. Over the summer they announced some international expansion to who can receive sponsorship dollars. https://github.blog/2022-07-28-github-sponsors-available-in-...
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But is there anyone who has had a good experience, either as a merchant, or as a customer?
I also like that both PayPal and Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions, so I don’t have to argue with someone on the phone to cancel. My understanding is that Apple subscriptions incur a 30% fee for the developer (and often a price hike for me), so it’s nice that PayPal offers something similar without that fee.
That's only a thing for Apple in-app subscribtions though, not for Apple Pay, right?
Supposedly there is a new management UI for recurring payments at supported merchants/PSPs, but I haven't encountered it in the wild yet:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213041
https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/merchant-tokens/
The 30% fees is on App Store purchases
Much better support than eBay or Amazon, at least for merchants, and the few times I've needed them as a customer they've helped me out. Even one time when I was socially engineered into ticking the "item received" when I hadn't received the item, they helped me get a refund.
I think a lot of the bad stories you hear about them come from people upset at the customer being always given the benefit of the doubt, even in suspicious fraud situations (e.g. where the customer has 3 positive feedback and the seller has 10,000). It's bullshit, but from a business perspective it's a small price to pay so that your customers don't think "am I about to get scammed?" every time they click the Buy It Now button.
If you drill down a bit too, you'll find a sizable minority of people who lost their shit at support staff then act surprised when they don't get any help.
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How?
Makes it super easy when you get a new card or a card expires to simply change the card in PayPal without having to go through and change the card everywhere you used it.
I know PayPal gets a bunch of hate for some of their business practices, but I think most of that comes down to them being in the financial services industry which is the most regulated industry to operate your business in. This is the reason why you don't see much competition when it comes to payment processing.
The company was great to work with until it wasn't.
Most people, most of the time, will have no major issue (and few minor ones) and wonder what the hubbub is about; a minority of people, a minority of time, will have lots of minor issues and a few major ones, and some of them will be _devastated_ by the experience.
All of this is to say: You will find lots of folks who've loved PP and had zero issues, but when the company is that size, a 0.001% error rate screws over a lot of paying customers.
I've never heard a business prefer PayPal over CCs but maybe there are some.
If I was sponsoring someone this change would put end to that. I don't want to give my credit card details to Github.
I like that I have it set up to pull directly from my bank account (instead of going on a credit card bill to pay, possibly with interest), and that I just have to log in to paypal to make a purchase, and not enter any other numbers, or share my credit card number on an additional form/system that might get hacked.
If a vendor offers paypal as a payment method, I almost always choose it.
I have no particular loyalty to paypal, if another similar option were available I'd be happy to use it, paypal has just gotten such market penetration as non-visa/mastercard payment method. Nobody offers a "pay with venmo" checkout option.
Apple Pay is getting there as well.
No complaints.
As a regular user, I can't think of anything that would've annoyed me, beyond sending official emails that look like phishing emails, and then support not even being able to always distinguish whether it's a valid email or not.
Other than that, I've added a credit card, can press the pay with paypal button, login and pay for my goods. Nothing to complain in this loop really, so I'm curious what your perspective is.
100Bn of TPV flows through Paypal every month, why do you think all those people trust their money with Paypal?
That said, I would never trust them as a business owner. They are too happy to freeze funds and then never release them.
Has there been recent drama with PayPal?
Not heard of anything directly involving GitHub but PayPal have created a huge amount of drama around updates to their terms of service: https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/10/paypal_fine_disinform....
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