Below about five pounds the card fee is the price, so pence payments only work aggregated

Stripe's standard UK rate is 1.5% plus 20p: on a £20 payment that is 2.5%, on £5 it is 5.5%, on 50p it is 41.5%, and on 10p it is more than the payment. So payments of pence only work aggregated: one charge a year that covers many projects, or a platform that already holds a balance and settles in bulk, which is how the newsroom's reading meter prices a page at a few pence against £5 of credit settled as one balance. Payment also has to be tied to a verified user who receives something, not to a count: when tea.xyz rewarded package popularity with tokens, one developer published nearly 14,000 packages.

Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).

Note. The article finds the card-versus-platform difference smaller than expected at £2 to £3, where the 20p fee is under 10%; aggregation matters below about £1.

Where it comes from

Open source is not free The pence problem; Why not just charge?, Per-install rewards get gamed (newsroom)

What it answers in the 2018 book

Karma Points unanswered outline, Concepts

Where it goes

Chapter Price it, then give it away, part Start the company (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).

Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: The four moves after 'do they miss it': define it, price it, deliver it at a flat marginal cost, offer it free to the people who know you, Free is never free for the other side: measure the cost you place on them, then cut it, Pay after the value: credit first, a meter, a balance that can go below zero, and no subscription by default.

Node idea:pence-only-work-aggregated in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.