refund Gratipay 1.0 balances

[chadwhitacre]

In Gratipay 2.0 we state the following:

You have until August 19, 2015 (90 days) to migrate your incoming payments from your Gratipay user account to a new Gratipay Team; this will also pay out your current balance. On that date, we intend to clear all remaining payments to Gratipay users, and to clear the balance of any user that is not an owner or member of a team, by refunding the money back to the sources it originally came from.

Since that was published, we've added a way to cash out 1.0 balances, so that's another option folks have before the big refund. We've also pushed the date back to October 1.

Notify

• [x] https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/3103

[chadwhitacre]

Coordinating with PayPal reticketed as https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/330.

[chadwhitacre]

The 1.0 payout status page is up! #3743

I've made the following modifications to the blog post:

Changed title from "$140,000" to "$130,000."

Changed first sentence from:

On October 8, 2015, we plan to refund almost all of the $140,000 that we’re currently holding in escrow for about 4,700 of you.

to (see numbers at https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/3743#issuecomment-138388374):

On October 8, 2015, we plan to refund about $130,000 that we’re currently holding in escrow for about 2,000 of you — unless you withdraw it first.

Added "Do nothing" option.

[chadwhitacre]

=> select status_of_1_0_payout, count(*), sum(balance) from participants
group by status_of_1_0_payout order by sum desc;
┌──────────────────────┬────────┬───────────┐
│ status_of_1_0_payout │ count  │    sum    │
├──────────────────────┼────────┼───────────┤
│ pending-application  │   1952 │ 127447.47 │
│ completed            │ 110848 │  10272.68 │
│ pending-payout       │      5 │   1622.64 │
│ too-little           │    207 │     42.99 │
└──────────────────────┴────────┴───────────┘
(4 rows)

[stevepiercy]

@whit537

Should be "three"

You have two options to withdraw Gratipay 1.0 money:

1. Do nothing.

[chadwhitacre]

Good catch. Changed from:

You have two options to withdraw Gratipay 1.0 money:

To:

You have three options regarding your Gratipay 1.0 money:

[chadwhitacre]

I've shared the blog post with The Changelog and Pycoder's Weekly.

[mattbk]

What will happen to ~users who have a balance but who are unable/unwilling* to create a PayPal account before refunds happen? Is it even possible we'd have a bank payout available before October 8th?

*Unable may be due to local laws, e.g., PayPal is not available in South Africa.

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk There's a slim chance we could have U.S. bank payouts before Oct. 8, if someone implements Dwolla (#726), but certainly not non-U.S. If someone in South Africa needs a payout we would have to find an alternative. E.g., we used Transferwise for the first time recently: https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/249. I think we should take this on a case-by-case basis since most people will probably be fine with PayPal. Sound right?

[mattbk]

We have a number of participants with a 1.0 balance less than PayPal's minimum payout of $0.50. How are we going to pay them out? Dwolla (#726)?

https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/3103 says she doesn't want it. The ~user is marked as "too little" but would it go to donation if I changed that to "completed"? User also wants to close account, otherwise this wouldn't matter.

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk Leave it as pending-application. That's what we'll use to determine what to refund on Oct 8. I think she'll need to wait until Oct 8 to close her account, maybe start a "Notify" list?

[mattbk]

Can't use pending-application, there's no payout route.

[mattbk]

If someone in South Africa needs a payout we would have to find an alternative. E.g., we used Transferwise for the first time recently: gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#249. I think we should take this on a case-by-case basis since most people will probably be fine with PayPal. Sound right?

Sounds right.

[chadwhitacre]

Can't use pending-application, there's no payout route.

Sorry ... too-little is also fine.

[chadwhitacre]

Just got off the phone with Matin. Walked him through our situation. Take-aways:

• Balanced is still on track to have the refund API open until October 9. No problem from that perspective.
• Whatever is left in our Balanced escrow account after October 9 will be sent to our bank account.
• Issuing lots of tiny, old refunds is very likely to trigger risk checks at multiple levels: with Balanced's banking partner, with the card brands, and with the issuing banks.
• Therefore, we need to:
  • Try to payout as much as possible, to reduce the need to refund.
  • Sort refunds according to age and size, and only issue refunds above some threshold, to be determined together based on an analysis of the money left in the system.

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk If I make a dashboard page listing pending-application ~users by balance, would you be willing and able to reach out to them personally to encourage them to apply for a payout?

[chadwhitacre]

Matin mentioned a legal term, escheat, which has to do with disposing of unclaimed property, and could be relevant to how we handle the money we're left with on October 10.

[chadwhitacre]

To: Matin

Thanks for the call, Matin. Here's my summary:

https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/3539#issuecomment-142102062

Feel free to subscribe to that ticket for updates if you like. I'll email you again once I have data.

[chadwhitacre]

Submitted to HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item ?id=10255117

(URL intentionally broken according to HN Referer lore).

Let's get a couple upvotes so it gets some traction?

[chadwhitacre]

We need the money in our Balanced account in order to do the refunds.

We have $28,402.62 in there right now. That's enough for the ~$10,000 in advance fees next week (#3763).

We need to decide how much we need in there for the rest—and how we're going to handle payouts once we don't have enough cash to float the PayPal transfer week to week. We should start moving money on Monday.

[chadwhitacre]

To: Matin

Quick note to say we're behind on the refund lists, and we may not get to the refunds on Balanced at all. I'll keep you posted.

[chadwhitacre]

We should start moving money on Monday.

We didn't start moving money on Monday. Therefore, we only have $28,402.62 in our Balanced account, and it takes 3-5 business days to add money. The most we can refund is $28,402.62, well short of the ~$130,000 we were targeting to refund before tomorrow.