Intro

Recently, we looked into Dots, a multichannel payouts API that automates manual processes for marketplaces. Dots was founded in 2021 and is located in San Francisco. It is a Y Combinator start-up.

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Product

Dots is a payment infrastructure that allows companies to accept payments, send payouts, and onboard sellers. On their Y Combinator profile, Dots describes itself as “a developer-friendly API that lets businesses pay their contractors through just a few lines of code.” Dots can manage all of the payments processes a business encounters: information collections, payments through any rail (ACH, Cash App, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle), and they can even file tax forms. 

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Creativity

We’ve reviewed several other payments platforms now in this round of Startup Studies (Finix, Nium, and TabaPay), and although what Dots has to offer isn’t necessarily unique, we really like what we see here. In several places Dots talks about how they can handle compliance and security – two important but complicated aspects of payments – so that businesses don’t have to worry about that, which is really appealing and crucial for business success. 

The fact that Dots is a Y Combinator startup shows us that other people believe in what Dots is doing and believe it has a strong future in the payments sector. 

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Website

Overall the Dots website is professional and informative. There’s a lot of text to skim through, however, and a lot of that text is heavy on marketing jargon. A few specific things we noticed about their site:

1. When you hover over the “Solutions” tab at the top of the homepage, we were expecting it to show their specific products; instead, it presents what we assume are use cases for how Dots has been applied to specific businesses. 
2. We like that there’s a “Pricing” tab, but when you navigate there it shows the range of what the monthly base cost of using Dots could be depending on what services you need. We were hoping for more information about price per transaction using Dots, but that doesn’t seem to be available unless you request a quote. 
3. Although the website has a lot of text to wade through, we really liked their coverage map that visually shows how extensive their network for international payments is. 

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User Experience

Throughout their site and external profiles, Dots claims it is “Developer-friendly,” and we absolutely agree with that. We found the “Guides” section of their Docs subsite to be excellent, and it shows that implementing Dots is, indeed, incredibly simple. There we could walk through how one line of code truly is all that is necessary to onboard new customers. We wish, however, that they would show alternative ways of onboarding other customers than by using a phone number. 

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Overall Recommendation

Out of all the payments startups we’ve looked at in this series, Dots ranks really highly on our list. We like their product, we like their implementation process, we like their website, and we like their Y Combinator status. Although we haven’t actually used Dots ourselves, this is the one we would be most likely to recommend to a business needing a payments infrastructure.

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