121–130 of 143 posts
I'm most interested in the inverse... allowing customers to send us cash directly from their bank accounts for $.25 per transfer (instead of the bullshit credit card company fees). I'm sure there's some serious fraud implications that Stripe would have to deal with to ensure validity, but is that coming?
Disclosure, referral links:
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Stripe actually requires substantially less information -- just the recipient's name. Still, this isn't about Stripe vs Balanced -- we just built the API many of our users wanted. Hope you guys continue to do well!
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: curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \ -u f97912a2cd8a11e2a411026ba7cd33d0: \ -d "amount=10000" \ -d "bank_account[name]=Johann Bernoulli" \ -d "bank_account[routing_number]=…
They've caught a number of fraud incidents for me which has been incredibly helpful (and obviously saves me money).
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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…
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 i…
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I'm sorry if we gave you that impression. 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…
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…
(I work at Balanced) 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 l…
(I work at Balanced) 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 l…
Stripe actually requires substantially less information -- just the recipient's name. Still, this isn't about Stripe vs Balanced -- we just built the API many of our users wanted. Hope you guys continue to do well!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree. I'm starting to look at Balanced differently now.
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whoa...1% + $.30 for bank payments??? why would you need a percentage on an ACH transfer when most others charge a flat rate?
We're still trying to figure out the right pricing and are discussing it openly ( https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/2#issuecomme... ). The risk scales with the size of the transaction. Granted, the risk does not scale at the same rate as the transaction size, but we wanted to keep it simple in the beginning. What do you think about 1% + 30¢ with a cap?
Does the font rendering look bad to all of us? http://cl.ly/image/0S3B0H241w01
What OS/browser are you on? (Feel free to email me at amber@stripe.com as well.)