Balanced (https://balancedpayments.com) provides a payouts solution for marketplaces like redditgifts, Crowdtilt, Fancy, Artsy, Visual.ly, and many others.
The differences with Stripe include the money being available for payout immediately (instead of 5 days), and the recipient will receive the money the next business day. Balanced has also performed a lot of work to verify merchants with as little information as possible — name, dob, and address. Instead of SSN for an individual you only need to pass in the last four.
You're posting on HN though. You cannot have a payment solutions post on HN without Balanced showing up and waving their arms all over the damn place. I understand this is a YC site but it's really annoying and distracting.
Balanced requires name, DOB, and address only to underwrite the recipient as a merchant to avoid the marketplace becoming an aggregator. It is still possible to make a next-day payout directly to a recipient without this information:
In that case you can also use Balanced only for payouts by funding your escrow with your own bank account. Stripe would require you to charge your own credit card to perform this service.
As you said, the main difference is about focus. Balanced has focused on supporting marketplaces from the beginning and continues to do so.
All three founders have engineering degrees. I built the original version of the product, was the second engineer at Milo.com, and wrote DDoS prevention software in college. Mahmoud built high-frequency trading systems for Wachovia Securities and built Milo.com's matching and categorization system. Jareau studied Electrical Engineering at U Penn, built GPS enabled devices in college, and wrote Milo.com's original systems to interact pull in data from retailers.
Even our General Counsel codes. He studied Symbolic Systems and wrote some of our internal reporting systems in Python.
I fail to see how this addresses the idea that Balanced was "promoting their brand." Was anyone questioning the engineering talent at either company?
Stripe wrote this blog post to promote their brand, Balanced let potential customers know that they have similar functionality. Both companies, in my opinion, offer extremely high-quality services (I have used both in production) and have great engineering talent. I do not think we should knock either company for "promoting their brand", it's important that potential customers (read: HN users) are able to make informed decisions. I think zende, pc, and the original blog post all do a good job of articulating the features available through their respective APIs.
spoiledtechie opinted out that a Stripe employee wished you well, while you only promoted your own brand, and your response was to prattle on about how qualified the founders are and basically list your resumes. Oh, and your lawyer codes too! What fun!
This statement fully captures the stark difference between Stripe and Balanced. Stripe is led by engineers who want to improve the payments infrastructure. Balanced is led by businesspeople who want to hit it big. Stripe just so happens to be a business as well. Nothing wrong with either, but that should point you toward which company has the developer's true interests at heart :)
Bias alert: I have a Stripe account, but not a Balanced account.
I think it's disingenuous to not suggest that Balanced doesn't 'have the developer's true interests at heart.' They've been really pushing the hypermedia API stuff, which is technologically exciting, as well as doing the whole 'open company' thing, which is taking the concept open source to interesting places.
I don't know anyone who works at either company so maybe one of them is full of nasty people who hate their customers and one is full of lovely people who don't care about making profit - but that's very unlikely. Much more likely is that they both want to maximise their profits, they both understand that offering a good service to their customers is the way to do this, and both approach this in different ways. And frankly the fact that a Stripe employee said a nice thing about them as opposed to "fuck them use Stripe" doesn't give any clue on the subject, it just says this person is a.) polite and b.) not an idiot.
Balanced has always inhabited a nebulous void of blatant-copying-with-one-novel-new-feature territory for me.
It's clear they just copied (with permission? consent?) the public interface of Stripe. They tried to copy the documentation format (layout, style, presentation) too, but it came off kinda poorly (margins, people. margins). They have public test cards/accounts, but they fail to test correctly because they get "used" and can't have multiple actions performed against them. Then, there's the whole ID thing. Why the fuzzy heck would you use ugly, long, probably-going-to-run-off-my-screen URIs as IDs instead of short IDs? They advise you to never construct your own API endpoint URIs from shorter IDs, except that's exactly what they do all throughout their documentation.
But, Balanced lets you pay out next day and Stripe holds your funds for 7 days before allowing payment. So, Balanced wins on time-to-pay speed (and they have same-day transfers to Wells Fargo). Though, with Stripe I assume you could eventually have enough of a float in your account to pay out next-day under your own prior funds.
From my complete outsider point of view it feels like Balanced is full of slightly subpar copy ninjas. (obviously just on their API, documentation, and front-end presentation. Their backend could be amazing or it could be meter high jenga code.)
I've been working with Balanced's API since they were Poundpay. I think most of your comments about copying are very misguided. The style of their documentation format is completely irrelevant to the quality of the product (and wrong IMO), which in my > two years of experience, has been superb. Your comments about test cards are just wholly incorrect, and the style of their website and how they present their products is as homogeneous as anyone else offerring a developer product.
> From my complete outsider point of view it feels like Balanced is full of slightly subpar copy ninjas.
I couldn't disagree more. Over the past couple of years, I've come to trust and admire the product as much as any other, including Stripe. These guys know what they're doing.
Balanced has a ridiculously huge advantage in the next-day payouts (same-day to WF bank accounts!), like Square offers. However, Stripe is far better supported by third-party clients for shopping carts.
It's really unfortunate that we have a fractured payment processing market where overlapping them doesn't solve the problem. For example:
Square: Best in-person payment processor. Next day payments if taken before 5 PM PST. Does card-not-present transactions as well. For some insane reason, does not have web access or an API despite being around longer than Stripe and Balanced.
Stripe: Best integration with wp-commerce, third party plugins, etc. Excellent interface. Rapid prototyping and feature rollout. Cons: 7 day rolling payments are slower than Square, Balanced, and Paypal.
Balanced: Fastest payments. Terrible third-party support. Documentation not nearly as good as Stripe, interface is slightly confusing.
I use Stripe for my ecommerce business and Square for in-person transactions, but I desperately want to switch to Balanced because of cashflow improvements. But that's not going to happen until third-party plugin support is vastly improved (I've already opened tickets on this months ago in their tracker with no response). Or I'd switch to Square if they decided they wanted an additional $XXX million dollars in business and offered a web API (what is the reason for NOT having this).
Annoying, but considering where we were just a few years ago, I'll take it.
Since they are in a sector that is in a dire need of change, why should one company reinvent the wheel? The goal is to push the boundary of the space instead of redoing the same thing over. Balanced did ach payouts first and then Stripe just released it. You should be glad there are two good companies competing.
Calling Balanced a group of subpar copy ninjas is very ignorant. Dealing with payments, fraud, and banks is an extremely difficult. I rather Balanced tackle new problem in the payments like ACH debits than reinventing their documentation. Plus, they are a much smaller team than Stripe.
If a sector is already a polished like project management, then you can complain about how one company is not perfect enough with its smaller features.
(I don't work for either, but I use both apis extensively)
How does this comment not get flagged for removal? Might as well talk about how your best friend gets paid 5k/month working from home for only a few hours/week.
As with all money transfer products, the technology to transfer funds to an individual is generally the fun/easy part. Wait until you find out about America's (and most other countries) wonderful anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing compliance laws that can land you in less-fun places like federal prison if you don't use this sort of webservice very, very carefully.
Former licensed money transmitter executive here. As far as I am aware, as long as you are not "structuring" transfers (which means breaking payments up with the intent to hide their common origin and/or destination) and are not attempting to actually launder money, the real risk of federal prison time is born by the operator of an unlicensed money transmitter, not the user of such a service.
In the US, operating an unlicensed money transmitter is an offense that carries, if I recall properly, up to five years of federal prison time per count[1]. That is to say, if you create a service by which one party is able to send money to another third party, and operate that service without a license where one is required (and under that license adhere to capital, bonding and procedural compliance requirements), you are subject to federal criminal prosecution.
I'd be curious as to Stripe's and Balanced's interpretation of their obligations under these laws vis-a-vis their payout services.
Balanced (https://balancedpayments.com) provides a payouts solution for marketplaces like redditgifts, Crowdtilt, Fancy, Artsy, Visual.ly, and many others.
The differences with Stripe include the money being available for payout immediately (instead of 5 days), and the recipient will receive the money the next business day. Balanced has also performed a lot of work to verify merchants with as little information as possible — name, dob, and address. Instead of SSN for an individual you only need to pass in the last four.