That's why I built Checks Supply with a friend to make check sending as simple as sending cash on Venmo. With our app, you can fill out your check details and have your payment processing within minutes after downloading.
Check writing is becoming a rarity, and many first-time senders find the process daunting. We hope Check Supply is a quick and convenient option for those moments you're puzzled why someone is asking you to pay by check.
Bill pay sends a bank check which is covered by the immediate withdrawal of funds from the customer’s account. In most cases, the customer would be fine with that or even prefer it, to ensure they don’t accidentally bounce a check.
However, I’m wondering if another customer base can be someone who has bank bill pay but wants to float the funds until the check is cashed. Maybe they don’t have the actual funds yet but want to write a check against funds they expect to have soon (risky but people do it).
Do you restrict writing checks that are for an amount greater than the current account balance?
Lastly, I’m wondering how you handle deliberate check fraud. Victims will try to sue all associated parties. How does your liability work in those cases?
>Do you restrict writing checks that are for an amount greater than the current account balance?
There's no reason to. You can already write a check for more than your account balance. The service also generates the checks using your account number, so they're not taking on any credit risk in case your account is overdrawn.
It's not risky at all when using "overdraft protection" via a linked savings account.
And why would I want to not receive any interest while a physical object representing the payment (I'm still not over how bizarre that is in 2025!) is making its way to the payee in the mail?
"Chime is great for everything else, but their check features are absolute trash and will cause you frustration. Just don't do it and find another option."
> Do you restrict writing checks that are for an amount greater than the current account balance? Lastly, I’m wondering how you handle deliberate check fraud. Victims will try to sue all associated parties. How does your liability work in those cases?
That is one of our fraud signals. We have systems in place to review payment amounts, address, frequency, etc that can cause additional KYC checks to be preformed via Plaid before we'll send the check.
I wish you best of luck but I avoid any service that uses Plaid.
If you have a Capital One or Citi account, both use a direct integration.
My account number is fine (and the entire point). My balance and last n transactions? That's just absurd and shows both how broken the US retail banking landscape is in many aspects, and the level of Stockholm syndrome exhibited by a large fraction of their depositors.
Whats the upside of this option?
With BillPay, they deduct the amount you pay on the day of, the banks take their sweet time to send the check because they want to slow down the money.
If you lose the check, it’s a lot more overhead to cancel and get your money back.
Maybe some shit banks, but a decent bank like Ally will try to have the check delivered by the due date chosen (mailing out a few days prior). There isn’t much money to be made this way. If you knew they were always late you’d just adjust the date back anyway. Decent banks don’t play petty games like this.
For electronic payments the money is withdrawn similar to an ACH, for paper checks any reputable bank will withdraw the money only when the check is cashed.
If somebody compromises your data and an unauthorized debit occurs, you'll have 60 days to detect and report the fraud for personal accounts. Business accounts have only 24 hours to detect and report the fraud.
If you make the report after the time limit expires, your bank has no responsibility to recover your funds.
https://firstbusiness.bank/resource-center/managing-payment-...
How much is a checkbook? My bank (FRB, RIP :( ) gave me, for free, like 8 years ago, an enormous box of checks that I have hardly made a dent in.
Domestic postage is like $0.69, envelopes are, what, couple bucks for a box of 50? Amortized over a couple years, you aren’t looking at more than a dollar or two/month.
Either send a bunch of post dated checks at once or set a calendar reminder to send a new one each month. Either way, I don’t really see a market here
I remembered specifically helping him resolve a bill pay issue for one of his payments so I asked why doesn't he use bill pay for all of them?
He says he likes practicing writing, the physical nature, and the routine of intaking these bills and mailing them out.
he's retired.
So that might be another reason your dad might be doing this.
Use a less shitty bank. For any reputable bank if the payment is made my paper mailed check the money is withdrawn only when the check is cashed.
it's a down side of "set it and forget it". if i remember correctly his bill pay was to pay down a medical bill, over time the details of his balance changed and it became annoyingly obtuse to him on how to change the bill pay settings.
2. Setup recurring bill pay for your check payment.
3. Setup recurring external transfer from your hipster bank to Ally or equivalent in step 1.
$6.99 isn’t worth replacing the above system that has another distinct advantage over this: you have two layers of cushion from your main account. My understanding is that this service will print your account details on the check. The “bill pay” services typically are not writing checks against your account, they withdraw the money and use their own account. Knowing the horror stories of intercepted checks that are cashed, this is not a triviality.
I know that the big banks I use offer this service for free (as “Bill Pay”), but maybe there are also-ran banks that don’t? Or is the aim more to address the unbanked and fintech crowds: “Cash App us a lump of dollars and we’ll send it somewhere by check”?
You stoked my curiosity, and I looked around: at a glance, it seems like Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, and US Bank all include online bill pay (electronic if possible, with fallback to paper checks) as a built-in feature of their consumer accounts. It looks like weirder branchless ones like Ally, Neo, Chime, and SoFi do this too. Am I missing something that differentiates what you do from what they do?
I don’t mean this as a criticism, just a curiosity! History has shown there’s often more than enough room in the market for smart, reliable, attractive purpose-built tools, even when their function overlaps with incumbents’ notional features.
> Cash App us a lump of cash and we’ll send it somewhere by check
Funny thing about sending checks is it's just an account and routing number in a special font on a piece of paper. We don't touch any customer funds.
> Am I missing something that differentiates what you do from what they do?
We have a simpler UI with a focus just on sending the check, so having your contacts prefilled make it quick and easy. But, if your bank already supports this then probably not for you!
If we grow the app enough, we'll add more features like scheduled / recurring payments and tracking for delivery and when the check is deposited.
Oh that’s so cool! I hadn’t even thought about that operational aspect. Very clever: I guess that means you’re an easy, slick option for customers from an awfully long list of banks and neobanks with varying quality of native products.
I can order paper checks with arbitrary account and routing numbers on them.
Also, for people with printers: checks don’t need to be with special ink or on special paper.
(We tried it a couple times at two different banks. With n=2, our p value was < 0.05 :)
Is there some sort of standards document somewhere that outlines the minimum viable check? Because handwritten in crayon on a napkin... I don't think that even "technically" counts. At least not anymore.
But on the other hand, I suppose a payee could accept your Crayola-napkin-check and just punch the numbers into their electronic check submission system?
To prevent fraud
Your use of Plaid would exclude me from your service for two reasons:
1: I bank at a small regional credit union that is almost impossible to get linked with Plaid.
2: Plaid hypothetically lets you do a lot more than just learn my account and routing number. I would not trust a new start up with that level of access.
Given that relatively few things require the MICR numbers to be printed with magnetized ink anymore, it’s not clear what fraud someone could commit with your service that they couldn’t commit just as easily commit in a dozen different ways and that we can’t really prevent without a systematic overhaul of the paper check system
Checks might have been useful historically, but I really can't think of any use case these days where I'd prefer writing a check over just instructing my bank to pay somebody directly, which has the huge advantage of being more secure (my bank and I can agree on any security measures we like, vs. having to trust various third parties to "authenticate" a piece of paper and a signature) and avoids having to "balance my checking account" entirely.
My (US) bank has this functionality. It's a real pain to set up, and most people I know will prefer Venmo/Paypal, or god help me Zello, before a bank-to-bank transfer.
> my bank and I can agree on any security measures we like
Well … so it's more like my bank and I can agree on any security measures the bank likes. My opinion doesn't matter to them, or there'd be some actual cryptography involved.
My bank's set up / "security" involves an odd song and dance of depositing a few cents into the destination's bank account over multiple transactions over multiple days, and then using the transaction amounts as some sort of authentication.
I've done it for transfers that exceed what I am comfortable sending on the payment services above. (And I don't have/use checks.)
Yes, I'm unfortunately very aware of the incredible market failure in the US in that regard.
There's a much bigger variety of means of initiating bank transfers in Europe, probably simply because push bank transfers are a thing in the first place (the security of which banks are often liable for).
Looking at the dumpster fire that is Zelle, US banks apparently just don't seem to want to cannibalize their profitable debit/credit card business with a cheap, fast, and secure payment method.
The issue isn't technological, it's this notion in the US that rent-seekers ought to exist and be enabled. Your Paypal/Venmo, CashApp, etc. enable things, for a cut of the transaction, that you can do for exactly zero dollars in India.
ACH and Zelle are both "push" transfers, although the former isn't typically available to consumers. Businesses certainly use it to do direct payroll deposits, for instance.
Germany and Austria, for example, had standardized slips of paper that the payer could send to/drop off at their bank to instruct them to wire money to some payee at a nominal or no fee. The big advantage over checks is that there's no possibility of overdrawing, and as a payee, once you saw the money in your account, you knew the transfer was final (unlike for deposited checks, which can bounce).
This also means that there is much less risk for banks to open "checking" accounts, as the biggest risk for depository banks, i.e. that of potentially bounced checks, just does not exist, which in turn means that "unbanking" is much less of a concern.
Furthermore, all electronic payment systems in the US are either operated by for-profit companies (VISA, Venmo), or are not available to consumers for one off transactions (ACH).
The result is that for many circumstances, paper checks are the cheapest way to move money around, even after accounting for their credit and fraud risks.
I write paper checks for:
• municipal utilities that either don’t accept electronic payment, or have a surcharge for electronic payment that exceeds my costs for writing checks.
• services provided by individuals or sometimes small businesses. While these sorts of people accept Venmo and their competitors more often than they used to, many of them still prefer a check.
• quarterly state and federal tax payments. While these guys accept EFT, the websites are terrible so it’s usually a better use of my time to mail a check.
• anybody who will give me a greater than 1.5% discount for paying by check rather than credit card. Contractors and small medical offices fall into this category most often. But sometimes also local shops for large ticket purchases.
Pretty much everything is done through electronic transfers - either Direct Debits, which occur on a regular (usually monthly) basis, or ad-hoc payments a straightforward transfer which are rated to go through within a few hours, but which usually happens within 1 minute.
Does anyone know what conditions need to be in place for this level of convenience to take place?
It does mean we're liable to pesky IT issues though: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9qzg92g72o
It almost happened twice, but the other time it actually ended up being a direct bank-to-bank transfer.
Where it happens IME is large value transactions, where the merchant isn't capable of ACH, basically. Any normal bill payment like rent or utilities can do ACH, so that leaves large purchases. The one above was for a car.
If you rent, you'll often have to send a check off monthly.
I don't remember the last time I've mailed a check, however.
Inflation makes this worse, too. I used to keep a handful of $100s in my wallet to pay for little odds and ends like a plumber or someone hauling trash to the dump. If I wanted to keep doing that, my wallet would have to fit a whole stack of them. The highest denomination bill printed by the US no longer even covers a night out at a mid-tier restaurant.
At the end of the day, if someone is trying to give you money using a valid form of payment, why would you not accept it. Driving to the bank to make a deposit (again, value too high for app check deposit) is a minor deviation to my day, but am I going to say no because of that. Some people are just weird with their protests to checks.
I have envelopes. I have stamps. And I have a checkbook. The only thing this is saving me is the (minor) physical labor?
Not worth $6.99 per month. More for the times I have to write checks for other things (e.g. paying contractors).
Besides, when I bought my house I bought one of those 300 address label sticker thingies. How else am I going to use those?!
Envelopes, checks, postage, gas / your time trip to the post office - agreed isn’t a lot of money probably about $3 + your time.
> Envelopes, checks, postage, gas / your time trip to the post office - agreed isn’t a lot of money probably about $3 + your time.
Less. Gas is not a factor. Envelopes are at the grocery store, which I'm going to go to any way. Postage is sold at Costco, so that's not really extra. And the mailbox is right where I live. The time to get to the mailbox doesn't count as, well, I do need to check my mail anyway. So really, the only time spent is:
1. Finding the items at the stores I already shop at.
2. Write the check.
3. Apply the stamp.
Now, I am scared of even the thought of pulling out my pen and writing. And you merely call it daunting?
/s
Some people assume people will fucking buy anything when wrapped by a pretty website eh?
Yes, it's pretty incredible actually
I haven’t seen a check for at least 20 years now.
Financial transactions are all nicely digitalized by now.
Both have their advantages, and I accordingly find it baffling that the US only got one, but not the other, and even more baffling that this has largely survived the transition to digital transfers (consumers usually can't initiate ACH credit transfers to third parties directly).
This is mostly fine, but the ability to essentially give somebody cash in-person without actually having the cash would come in handy sometimes.
I know checks can bounce, but I always feel a bit uneasy when I tell people "hey I just send you a transfer I promise, it's friday so it'll probably arrive after the weekend, here's the transfer confirmation PDF that I so totally couldn't forge in 10 minutes."
There are still a lot of businesses and government agencies that require payments to be sent by check.
It's paying for convenience. Name any "basic adulting" task and I'll show you a service that can do it for you. House cleaning, taxes, groceries, laundry, childcare, etc.
I haven't had a checkbook for well over a decade. I seem to function.
> It's not hard or expensive to do, so why on earth would anyone want to pay you to handle basic adulting for them?
It costs money / banks charge for checks. I don't have any use for them (nearly anything I could write a check for can be handled by ACH or card) … so why pay for a service I'm not using?
(The lone check that I did need to write in the last 2 decades, in theory the procedure is "go to bank, ask for check, receive check". The bank managed to screw that up, so it took a bit more than that, but that's par for the course for companies these days.)
I have one person I need to pay each month with a check. They get it mailed to them from my credit union's bill pay service. Anyone else can either accept cash, ApplePay, Zelle, or a card.
This to me seems similar to the app I use to fax things. It costs $1 a page I think? And is totally worth it for the one time I need to fax a document every five years or so.
