Balanced payments is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#151

Post by billclerico » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 5:41 AM UTC

coconutrandom wrote: post #123

mintplant wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't get it working on Stripe, maybe you'll have better luck with WePay. They're a marketplace payments service like Balanced was, and they support ACH payments. https://www.wepay.com/developer/facilitate_withdrawals/settl... https://www.wepay.com/developer/facilitate_withdrawals/embed... Disclaimer: I haven't actually used them myself. YMMV.

I have used them, stick with Stripe.

WePay cofounder here. Would love to better understand why you say that so we can improve. Bill@wepay.com

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#152

Post by 1945 » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 5:42 AM UTC

Balanced really had a nice web app. Kudos to their team.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#153

Post by ChuckFrank » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 5:48 AM UTC

Long shot. But if any engineers or developers from Balanced find themselves with time in their lives and are interested in working on a marketplace that optimizes prices discovery, I'd be excited for the opportunity to talk to them. Drop me a line, I'm in town and I'd love to take you out for beers.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#154

Post by jfoster » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

eviluncle wrote: post #73

jfoster wrote: post #63

Interesting. Google Wallet for Digital Goods shut down last week. It was a service whereby a business might have subscribers on a monthly subscription. Google offered no migration path; businesses had to inconvenience all subscribers by getting them to re-subscribe. It's fascinating that a startup which is going out of business acts in a more responsible manner than a huge tech company. Kudos to Balanced for doing th…

I'd like to be as optimistic as you are about this act by balanced, but I can't help but suspect there was some kind of deal between the two companies. After all, this will bring new business to stripe...

Sure. At a minimum, the people running Balanced are preserving their personal reputation by doing this.

I like to take the pragmatic view about such things. Motivations aside, at the end of the day & in similar situations, Google decided to screw customers whilst Balanced decided to offer a smoother migration path. Even if Balanced's customers don't like Stripe, Stripe has a free data portability clause that will allow them to continue on to the payment processor of their choosing. (https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-if-i-decide-to-lea...)

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#155

Post by thinkingkong » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 7:21 AM UTC

Can I just say how goddamned responsible that is. Thank you.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#156

Post by fermigier » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 8:33 AM UTC

Is there any chance that the full code base (not just the API and supporting projects) will be open sourced ?

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#157

Post by jordanthoms » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 9:32 AM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #63

Interesting. Google Wallet for Digital Goods shut down last week. It was a service whereby a business might have subscribers on a monthly subscription. Google offered no migration path; businesses had to inconvenience all subscribers by getting them to re-subscribe. It's fascinating that a startup which is going out of business acts in a more responsible manner than a huge tech company. Kudos to Balanced for doing th…

Not only did Google have no migration path, they emailed all our customers saying their subscription was cancelled with no explanation why, leading to panic.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#158

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 9:50 AM UTC

ZeroMinx wrote: post #107

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.

Big payment providers can die as well, this has happened 3 times over the last decade alone and the collateral damage of those failures is immense.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#159

Post by nandemo » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 10:06 AM UTC

downandout wrote: post #3

That sucks. They were the only people in the payments industry that could (or would) do same-day transfers to your bank account. The best Stripe will do is a 2 day rolling schedule.

Unless you're a large operation that can benefit from the float, it's hard to see how that makes a significant difference.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#160

Post by amirmc » Sat, Mar 14, 2015, 10:21 AM UTC

Pyxl101 wrote: post #118

pnathan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they should! This is a very mature and responsible shutdown (I'd also expect it to be mature and responsible, since payments are Very Important, but, on the other hand...). +1 to the Balanced executives for being mature.

Definitely a mature approach, and it's definitely better for Balanced customers to have a migration plan. However, I don't think we can assume that Balanced "[left itself] enough runway to look after [its] customers" or that the primary motivation is maturity. Balanced may have offered to sell their customer base to Stripe (or sell the company to Stripe, which presumably was refused). If Stripe accepted a deal to pur…

I had similar thoughts and wondered if Stripe had agreed to cover operating costs and a skeleton crew for the transition period. Nothing wrong with this and it speaks highly of all involved that they reached that agreement.

I did also wonder if there were some kind of regulatory requirements around managing the shutdown of a finance company (appropriate warning periods, etc).