Just a quick note of gushing praise, OfficeSnapshots is one of my favourite sites, I've been a reader from being a teen to a twenty-something, I never expected the creator to show up on HackerNews!
I'd love metadata to be added to more kinds of purchases, by debit card for example, beyond just the name of the retailer - it'd create such a wealth of valuable data that one could do so many interesting things with.
Hi there! Just to let you know, I introduced the 'protect me from myself' feature you suggested today, there's a blog post about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503740
Very good question: Banks generally don't award much interest for small, short savings, they're really geared towards saving for cars and houses, not small goals.
We, on the other hand, are designed to help you save for the small things in a much nicer way, and we're working on ways to make your money work in ways that banks really just don't care about.
Case in point - in the next few weeks, we're rolling out a feature that finds cheaper offers for the item you're already saving for (since we know what you're saving for and roughly how long it'll take to save for it), we can leverage the fact that you're saving for something to encourage a supplier to offer the product cheaper in return for the money right now. That's just one of the ideas we're working on right now.
We're aggressively pursuing FCA regulation in the UK since we're pretty compliant with their policies already. Suffice it to say, we're doing everything we can, we really don't want to screw this up.
We're looking into a whole bunch of ways to stop charging fees as soon as we can - it was kind of the lazy way out for the short term. We're looking into referral fees, as you suggested, as well as earning interest. We also had an idea that, since we know what a user is saving for, and roughly how long it'll take for them to save for it, we could put the item up to tender and hunt down cheaper deals so the user can save money. Just an idea, but there are so many interesting things we can try when we have that kind of data.
Re: pause - I totally didn't consider that, and smurfy brought it up too, so I'm probably going to build out a 'protect me from myself' feature to do just that
Right now, no. I know that sucks, but we're looking into ways to leverage savings to earn more interest than a bank would typically give you for a small, short-term goal. Part of the reason I started working on Dripfeed was because my interest rate went down to about 0.08%, which is effectively nothing on say a £500 phone.
Tangential question: Dailybooth used to do pretty much what Selfie.im does now, but failed and shut down a couple of years back - Do you think Dailybooth would be more successful if they launched now?