The glory days of “Square Cash” — when you could EMAIL MONEY
Back in the day, “Cash App” was “Square Cash”, and you in fact did not need an app at all to send or receive money.
“Square Cash. Email money to anyone’s debit card.”
Once upon a time (2013), Cash App used to be Square Cash, and it offered the simplest way to electronically swap money the world has ever seen. You didn’t need an app, or even a smartphone. It allowed everyone with an email address (but I repeat myself) to send and receive dollars.
Buying stocks and Bitcoin, a free debit card that gets you crazy promotional deals, even a bank account number for traditional transfers — these are all wonderful features that have since hit the scene. I remain a power user and geek for each new feature Cash App rolls out, but miss the days when I could email money to friends.
Elegance
Less is more, and that has never been more true than now — when we have accounts, notifications, apps, programs and piles of electronic devices inundating every minute of our daily lives.
Square Cash was ahead of the digital minimalism curve — and set themselves apart from payment services before and to come — when they devised the brilliant idea of allowing people to simply use email that everyone already has to transfer the dough.
You were able to send an email to anyone, cc’ing “cash@square.com”, with the amount as the subject, and the money hit their account, or they received an email asking them to connect a debit card to get their funds. If you copied “request@square.com”, an email appeared in their inbox asking them to send the amount in the subject line.
Another lovely option provided to each user was a web-based payment page, located at their own URL. For instance, cash.me/$kiefer in any browser would display a page where no accounts needed to be created and no apps had to be installed — folks could type in their debit card info pay your Cash account. To prefill the amount for $5, simply add another sub-directory to the link with the dollar amount: cash.me/$kiefer/5 .
(Fun fact: these links still work this way, but force a redirect through Cash App.)
From Square’s perspective, allowing people use your service without opening your app, or even visiting your domain, certainly leaves money/data/usage on the table. My guess is a data cruncher at Square provided the firing squad the ammo to nix these options.
Code-free automation potential
Sending and receiving money with my Gmail account was a regular occurrence, even used for payroll. As a programmer wanna-be and low/no-code enthusiast, one day a light bulb went off in my head: this is the basis for quickly and easily setting up payment automations!
My inaugural job to automate was collecting utility bills from a tenant. I had been opening emails from our gas and electric companies and manually requesting the amount from our upstairs neighbor. With a few steps in Zapier — parse the amounts from bill emails, then compose and send a “request” email — I would not have needed to think about this task ever again. Setting forth to make this happen was exactly when I discovered that the email feature was sadly no longer supported.
While nixing email to gain app traffic likely made good business sense, I could see where there are potential legal issues from this angle. Not only thieves accessing a Cash-connected email account, automation this simple could enable spam-scams, such as massive Cash Request campaigns. Many services rely on email security, though, and limiting the number of requests is an easy fix for the second scenario.
Square Cash, you will not be forgotten
There will be singing and dancing in St. Louis if Square ever decides to bring back the kick-ass, mind-blowing ease-of-cheese-dispensing that emailing cash provided.
This will stand as a love letter to one of my favorite tech features ever released in the wild, and its brilliance will always inspire me toward graceful solutions.
Regardless, I will continue to refer hundreds more to Cash App, and enjoy penny-pinching around town with Boosts on my Cash Card. The same wizardry at work in 2013, and that recognized the importance of mainstreaming Bitcoin, certainly has many more tricks up their sleeve to look forward to.
