TL;DR / Summary
Edit: Check out our new post, with updates, new features, and future vision here.
My friends and I have built a very early MVP of Good Wallet, a platform that lets anyone set up a public page where supporters can “tip” them into a dedicated wallet. The page‑owner can later direct those accumulated funds to effective nonprofits of their choice—think “Buy Me a Coffee,” but the cash stays in a personal, donor‑advised‑fund‑like pot until the owner donates. We’d love the EA community’s help pressure‑testing the concept.
If you have <5 minutes, please:
- Take our short survey here
- Kick the tyres by visiting my own Good Wallet page and exploring the donation flow here
All feedback—positive, negative, or nit‑picky—is greatly appreciated!
Where we are
We’re in an exploratory phase: we have an MVP live, and would like to get feedback on its real‑world value, trust dynamics, and product direction. We’d love honest critiques before investing more engineering and outreach effort.
Why Good Wallet might be useful?
- Lower friction for small donations. Many people happily toss a few euros to creators they follow; we want to channel that impulse toward high‑impact charities. Owners decide when and how much of their balance to grant.
- Introduces a new way to show appreciation or support someone beyond monetary transactions.
- Mini‑DAF functionality for everyone. Today, donor‑advised funds typically require large minimums. Good Wallet aims to offer flexibility at any scale: supporters donate now; creators batch‑grant later.
- We plan to follow GiveWell’s recommendations for the charities we offer, so supporters can be confident their tips eventually reach high‑impact organisations.
- Our long term vision is to offer a public API that enables the use of the Good Wallet as a payment system. With that, any platform or service (think loyalty cards, marketplaces, etc.) can integrate charitable giving as a means of “payment”.
Again, this is at a very early stage, and we are hoping to get any kind of insightful feedback. Don’t hold back and let us know what you think.
Hi Jason! Benjamin here, co-founder and responsible for the technical side. This is exactly the kind of feedback we are looking for so thanks a lot for commenting.
The delayed-allocation model is mostly a feature of us being in the prototype phase. The main reason is rather technical, because public APIs are missing to directly set up the payment flows from external donors to different charities via the GoodWallet.
There are two other minor arguments for at least having the option to accumulate funds first: One is emergency relief. We believe that having a social fund that can easily be directed to emergency relief when needed can be valuable. The second is privacy. Even among highly effective charities, people still have preferences, and we've heard people say they would appreciate an option to choose and switch between charities in private.
Having that said, we totally agree with you. Giving GoodWallet users the chance to pre-select a charity to which incoming payments are directed to is something we will certainly add to the platform.
In general, our current situation is mostly resource limited. This is the reason why we kept things as lean as possible. However, we are starting to see interest and would like to drive this forward. Our goal is to register GoodWallet as a non-profit itself and then decide on further product directions. The mini-DAF functionality is something we see fit in perfectly into the overall concept, but we definitely need to explore its practicality further.