Spare Change Payments was an

online payment An e-commerce payment system (or an electronic payment system) facilitates the acceptance of electronic payment for offline transfer, also known as a subcomponent of electronic data interchange (EDI), e-commerce payment systems have become incre ...

s company specifically designed for conducting micro-payments inside games and applications on

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

and other social networking sites. It is now owned by

Visa, Inc. Visa Inc. (; stylized as ''VISA'') is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded cre ...

The company was the first to offer a micro-payment solution for social networking application developers shortly after

opened its

Facebook Platform The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook. The current Faceboo ...

. It operated a virtual goods monetization platform that allowed users to deposit funds into a central Spare Change account that they could then spend across multiple games and applications on the social network, and was a precursor to

Facebook Credits Facebook Credits was a virtual currency that enabled people to purchase items in games and non-gaming applications on the Facebook Platform. One U.S. dollar was the equivalent of 10 Facebook Credits. Facebook Credits were available in 15 currencies ...

. The company pioneered and evangelized the move for app developers away from advertising based monetization models toward micro-payment models and the sale of virtual goods. In March 2009, Spare Change was reported to be processing $30M of payments across 700 applications on Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and to have over 1M wallet accounts.

Company history

Spare Change Payments was founded in 2007 by Mark Rose, Simon Ru and Lex Bayer, with offices in Cupertino, California. In April 2009, the company was acquired b
PlaySpan
which was subsequently acquired for $190M b

in February 2011. The staff and technology at Spare Change and PlaySpan was ultimately used to build ou

Visa designed Visa Checkout to be quick and tailor for mobile shopping experience. Like an online wallet, it only requires a username and password to check out once the user is registered. In September 2017, the technology patent "Method and system for authenticating online transactions" originally filed by the Spare Change founders was granted by US Patent Office.

References

Financial services companies established in 2007 Online payments Electronic funds transfer Virtual economy American companies established in 2007 Technology companies established in 2007 2009 mergers and acquisitions {{business-stub