Arash's Blog

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Maggie Liu's Blog

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Bank changelog

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Few things are as essential to the banking experience as photo IDs. You always gotta wait for the teller to get a real good look at you, and your ID, before making a transaction. (after all, you wouldn't want your near-identical evil twin stealing your hard-earned money)
The Hack Club Bank experience should feel as good or better than a physical IRL bank. Now, you can sign in using just your face (or fingerprint), on supported devices & browsers.

Currently, this includes modern versions of Google Chrome, Safari, and Edge (as well as some versions of Firefox), but you can check for support on your current device using this nifty website.
Have a Yubikey? Guess what: Bank supports hardware security keys too!
To get set up, head on down to the brand new Security Keys section of your Bank settings. You'll be enjoying faster sign-ins in no time!

Face ID, fingerprints, Yubikeys, oh my!

Maggie's Website

My experience attending LancerHacks V (my first in-person hackathon)!

LancerHacks V

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I hate passwords. I can never remember them when I need them, each new account I create means another 'unique' password, and people are great at leaking them. We really don't want to burden everyone with all that just to access their financial platform, so now it's even easier to login to Hack Club Bank without a password.
I'm happy to announce that you can now get login codes for Hack Club Bank via SMS. The feature can be enabled from your settings page.

Users on iPhone and some Android phones can autofill their SMS login code.
You can now get your passwordless login code that much faster– reducing login on some devices down to under 10 seconds.

SMS login codes

From Blueprint 2021 (my first hackathon!) to Blueprint 2022, I've learned a lot. Some thoughts on how these hackathons went!

HackMIT Blueprint

Hack Club shipped a web based game editor called Game Lab. Since I've never made a game before, I decided to try it out and make a simple dino game!

Making a Dino Game with Game Lab

Pick

Pressure

Watch

Spirit

Raven

Knot

Vessel

Suit

An interactive Delaunay triangulation made with D3.js

Crystal

Dragon curves are cool fractals that have fractal dimension 2.

Dragon Curves

My solutions to Portals, from the 2021 USACO Open Gold contest

Portals

My solution to Problem 3 from the USACO 2016 February Gold contest

Fenced In

Solutions to problem 3 from the USACO 2015 February Silver contest

Superbull

My solution to USACO 2021 January Silver Problem 3

Spaced Out

Hello World

Improvement
 
 
This post is to explain the background details of our switch to Stripe Issuing. Accounts that need action to make the switch will receive an email.
Emburse cards have been a feature since one of the earliest versions of Hack Club Bank, allowing any team member to spend money with a debit card without dealing with reimbursements. While that’s been amazing, there have been a few trade-offs with using Emburse:
Separate bank & card balances. This was the big one. Emburse cards spent money from an Emburse balance ("card balance" in the Bank interface). That meant after you raised money, you couldn’t immediately spend it. The invoice/donation needed to deposit, you needed to transfer the money to your card, wait 3-5 business days, then you could spend your money. Ideally, moving money should take only the 3-5 seconds of fishing your card out of your pockets & tapping at the register.
A separate website login to remember. We tried to hide emburse.com from as much of the app as possible, but at the end of the day Emburse was built for people to use directly. To issue a card to someone, we had to create an Emburse account. To activate your card, you had to sign into emburse.com.
These trade-offs made sense when we first started, but lots of details have changed in the last 2 years. Hack Club Bank has grown by…I started doing the math on this, but the comparison is stupid–our first year on Emburse has less than $1k spent per month, last week Bank users spent $20k through their cards. Emburse has been acquired (by a company that renamed to Emburse) & have shifted their product features.
Recently Emburse announced they’d be removing the card budgeting feature Bank currently relies on. If we stayed on Emburse the new flow would require organizers to request funds for a purchase, staff (Michael / Chaleb) to approve the purchase amount, then the card could make the transaction. Emburse was super gracious about the change, delaying the budget feature removal long enough for us to switch to another platform.
The card alternative we’ve eyed for awhile is Stripe Issuing, but it was in private beta we couldn’t access when we built Hack Club Bank. At the time of writing, we’ve got a private version of Stripe Issuing cards running on Hack Club Bank (only available to admins) to make sure our new system works. I’m happy to say it improves many of the previous issues with cards:
You’ll have 1 true balance: this should explain itself. Donations go into your account balance, your card spends from your account balance, no more transfers & maintaining two balances.
All built into Bank: no more Emburse account login, just login to Bank with your email.
More card control: ever forget the billing zip code of your Emburse card was 90069? or was it 60096? I don’t even remember it. Now we’ve got way more control over cards through the Stripe Issuing API. You can use your own card billing address instead of Hack Club’s, we can make keeping track of receipts way easier, we can let you spend money without waiting for a physical card to ship. The Stripe Issuing API is way more flexible, and we’re working on a bunch of ways to let you spend money more easily.
This is obviously a big change, and if you have any questions/comments please let us know either by reaching out to bank@hackclub.com or posting in the #bank channel on Slack.

Moving to a new card provider

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4 major improvements to Bank live today:
Aesthetic overhaul. All the controls of the app—buttons, cards, menus, filters, inputs, modals, tables—have new colors & a new look & feel. Additionally, you’ll notice revised interfaces in a bunch of places, from the project settings page to G Suite accounts.



Donations. While a beta has been kicking around in the settings page for awhile, Donations are redesigned & available for everyone. Your project now has a live page where anyone can donate with a credit card, & the funds will go directly into your account. You can add a custom message (using Markdown) to your donate page if you’d like.



A small addition: you can now export your transactions as JSON, in addition to CSV.
New icon. Inspired by macOS Big Sur, the previously-flat icon is now 3D-looking & pretty sweet :)


All of this is live for everyone now. More to come! 👀

Donations, new design, & more

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Thanks to our generous friends over at repl.it, in light of COVID-19, Hack Club Bank users get a free Hacker plan for the next year. Repl.it is an amazing web IDE, where you can get basically any programming language running in your web browser in just a few seconds—regardless of what kind of computer you have. The Hacker plan, normally $84, gives you private projects, unlimited collaborators, & unlimited storage. They’ve generously sponsored many events that have run on Hack Club Bank, and we’re so thankful for their continued support.
To claim your subscription, visit the promo page & click "Apply". It’s limited to the first 500 people who claim it, so don’t wait.
Hope you’re safe & well. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reply & ask away!

Free Repl.it

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Last week, we launched a new feature in Hack Club Bank: Transparency Mode.
With Transparency Mode, you can open source your finances instantly from your account settings page. Why would you want to do that? Nonprofit donors deserve to know what their contributions are funding—as a hackathon/nonprofit, you can talk about what you’re spending money on, but transparency in every transaction builds trust for supporters. It’s already live in action!
You can see Hack Pennsylvania’s finances here and @lachlanjc made a transparency page showing more details from their event.
The first event on Hack Club Bank, Hack Chicago, is open here.
Windy City Hacks open sourced, too.
That’s not all. When Hack Club first started, Zach’s hope was to build a different kind of organization: one not only open source with code, but open source with its finances too. Every month, Zach would painstaking put every transaction on GitHub. Unfortunately, as we grew, the tooling took too long & we had to outsource our books to an accounting firm that didn’t know what GitHub was.
We’ll be sharing this publicly next week, but Bank users are getting a sneak peek today: Hack Club HQ has been running entirely on Bank for months now, and our finances are public. Dig in, right here: bank.hackclub.com/hq.
Let’s set a new standard in financial transparency for nonprofits. If you have any questions or feedback on how to improve Transparency Mode, please let us (bank@hackclub.com) know!

Transparent finances (optional feature)

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Today, we’re announcing with Major League Hacking that Hack Club Bank is the new preferred financial platform for all MLH Member Events.
With this announcement, Cal Hacks, the world’s largest college hackathon, is announcing their switch to Hack Club Bank. Spectra is joining them as well.
Click here to read Linus's full post on this announcement.

Hack Club Bank and MLH are combining forces.

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Bank can now predict the future! 🌀🎉
If you want to know when your invoices are coming in, or how much money is going to be automatically withdrawn from your account, Bank will now tell you. 
Check it out by clicking on either "Incoming Deposits" or "Pending Withdrawals" on your Bank dashboard.

Upcoming Activity

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If you've ever wanted to get that old, unpaid invoice off of your invoices page, you now can.
Check it out by clicking "Archive" when you're viewing an invoice. 🚢🎉

Archiving Invoices

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You can now upload custom  profile pictures on Bank.
Check it out by navigating to the Team page and then selecting the settings icon next to your user. 🎉👌

Upload a Profile Picture

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Have you been stuck with a lame URL like https://bank.hackclub.com/hack-pennsylvania and have wanted to change it to something like https://bank.hackclub.com/hackpenn? 
Well, now you can!
Check it out in the your Bank's settings. ✨ ⚡️

Change Your URL!

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We've added a document to all projects that you can give to sponsors confirming that you're fiscally sponsored by Hack Club. 
Check it out in your Documents tab! ✨☝️

Fiscal Sponsorship Confirmation

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Have you ever wanted to attach an image or link to a transaction or invoice? Well, now with the addition of Markdown, you can. 
Power up your notes now! 🚀

Markdown Now Supported

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Starting today, there's no longer a fee for accepting credit cards, bank transfers, or any other payment method.


You've invoiced Balsamiq for $500, they paid via credit card, but you only received $485.20. Where'd that $14.80 go? Welcome to the world of payment processing. (HC Bank uses Stripe)
Payment processing fees are annoying. Calculating them ahead of time is frustrating and the result is always less money for your event, club, or project.
Starting today, Hack Club Bank will make all your payment processing fees disappear.
This means that regardless of whether a sponsor is paying via credit card, ACH, or wire, when you send an invoice for $500, you'll receive $500.


And we're taking it even further.
I'm proud to share we're also reimbursing all previous payment processing fees, from all time, for everyone.
Depending on the size of past invoices, you'll receive somewhere between $4.48 and $390.50 (actual numbers) granted to your HC Bank account this week.


If you want to read more, check out our blog post with the full story.
P.S. We also resigned the invoice page to show you way more details.

Hack Club Blogs

Check out blog posts written by Hack Clubbers!