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Balanced payments is shutting down

balancedpayments.com

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Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#101

Post by bkrausz »

chrisduesing wrote: post #77
bkrausz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe has an ACH beta we're letting all Balanced customers into.

We're a marketplace that uses Balanced's ACH + escrow for moving money between buyers and sellers. I am glad to hear you will be supporting this on Stripe, but since I only have 90 days to migrate when will api/ruby support be ready and where can we find docs? Perhaps the docs are available as soon as I migrate? I am hesitant to start that process until I have code written to support Stripe. I don't want to end up wi…

The Ruby bindings already support ACH via the "source" parameter (see https://stripe.com/blog/unifying-payment-types-in-the-api). We're putting the finishing touches on a guide to make migrating code from Balanced to Stripe as easy as possible: it should be out soon.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#102

Post by popnfreshspk »

bkrausz wrote: post #92
dblock wrote: post #57

We are very sad to see Balanced go at https://www.artsy.net - we were an early and loyal customer. Balanced has been very good to us throughout the years. Thank you. We've actually had some support for Stripe too for a small service, an experiment, but were going to delete it and continue using Balanced 100% of the time.

I'd love to hear why you were going to stop your Stripe usage. Totally understand if it was for the sake of consolidation, but if there were product needs that we weren't hitting it'd be great to know :).

Without pre-funding and escrow it's really hard to manage B2B relationships with the Stripe feature set. Ease of disbursement is a use case that made us choose Balanced over Stripe in the first place

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#104

Post by steveklabnik »

msherry wrote: post #103
steveklabnik wrote: post #8

Sad to hear this news. I had a wonderful time at Balanced. Payments is a very, very hard space, business-wise. All my best to my former co-workers.

Thanks, Steve! We miss having you around here :)

I was gonna swing by the office when I'm in SF in a month or two, oh well :/

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#107

Post by ZeroMinx »

Before this announcement, I'd never heard of Balanced.

Reading comments, some people are saying it was a great service. But, it's shutting down, while services less great carry on.

This is hard for dev people (like myself) to realize, but if you're looking for commercial success, marketing is generally worth more than the quality of your product.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#108

Post by treeface »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #65

90 days doesn't seem enough time at all. We run a big system on balanced. We're fucked.

This is one of those moments where good programming architecture and integration testing becomes obviously useful. We have a payment gateway interface and the transition to Stripe will be relatively painless after accounting for some accounting differences in how fees are charged.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#109

Post by tbrooks »

bkrausz wrote: post #90
tbrooks wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pc, it appears that the Stripe client libraries do not support Balanced-like features. i.e. ACH debits, marketplaces, etc. Migrating over to Stripe sounds great, but having these libraries updated with the proper endpoints seems like a must.

Our bindings actually do support ACH debits. The "source" parameter is a universal param for any kind of incoming payment mechanism. See https://stripe.com/blog/unifying-payment-types-in-the-api for details. Specifically, for those in the ACH beta you can put a customer's bank account token in that field to charge their bank account.

Ahh, you're right.

To make an ACH debit, you'd need to verify a bank account beforehand. And I don't think client libraries support a `bank account resource` w/o curling.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#110

Post by akoumjian »

pc wrote: post #12

Stripe cofounder here. I just wanted to tip our hats to the folks at Balanced. Stripe and Balanced have certainly competed against each other in the marketplace space for a few years, but we have a lot of respect for how Matin and his team executed with creatively and determination. While we're of course glad Balanced decided that migrating to Stripe was the best thing for their users, today is kinda bittersweet for…

Please consider a way to "prefund" amounts in escrow. Or at least existing Balanced escrow accounts. You'll see it all over the comments here. Using a CC to load money into Stripe is much too expensive, when you are paying out marketplace amounts in large sums. We provide Net30 Invoicing for buyers, but immediately payout to our sellers on our marketplace. Not being able to preload a large balance is going to make things very difficult for us.
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