Wednesday Wisdom: Looking Back to Jump Forward

I have two favorite old-school niche travel blogs, TravelBloggerBuzz and The Free-quent Flyer. One of the interesting insights from the latter, from way back in 2016, was about manufacturing small transactions with Plastiq. At the time, Plastiq’s transaction fees were percentage based and didn’t have minimums so you could send a very small payment and pay a $0.01 fee for it, a perfect way to manufacture transactions.

Plastiq fixed the small payment nearly zero-fee transaction years ago, but Gideon at The Free-quent Flyer set up scheduled transactions through the year 2026 before the minimums kicked-in and those transactions are still going under the old fee structure.

There’s a lesson here, especially because we just had another niche payment method go away this week: Whenever you can schedule your games to continue into the future, you probably should find a way to do so. If you played your cards right, you may have years of shenanigans ahead of you even after something dies.

Good luck, and remember: I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian cause I care.

Warning: You can go too far with manufacturing transactions, but on the other hand I never saw a Plastiq hat.