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Balanced payments is shutting down

balancedpayments.com

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Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#161

Post by amirmc »

judk wrote: post #139
Pyxl101 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doing the right think for a fair price is pretty much the definition of maturity.

The concept of 'doing the right thing' is a matter of perspective. In other words, people may have vastly different ideas about what the 'right thing' is, in s given situation.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#162

Post by bsdpython »

q2 wrote: post #82

Compared to stripe[0], balanced[1] took very less funding as per the data. Reading from the comments here, their service seems to be liked by users. In that case, may be they should have looked into funding aspect rather than shutting down and funding might have helped them to become large,independent player as they wished. Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seein…

Wow I am shocked to see how little money Balanced raised. Considering their pedigree and name recognition I would have expected a lot more. They must have either not been interested in raising funds or had really bad financials that scared off any Series A prospects. Hopefully we get some kind of post-mortem once the dust has settled.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#163

Post by jfoster »

jordanthoms wrote: post #157
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.

Additionally, prior to the retirement they had advised that they wouldn't be communicating it to subscribers.

The retirement was so poorly handled that it's changed the way I think about services that I allow my business to depend on. Aside from a slight bias against anything with a "Google" label, I now consider it a lot more important that a service I'm using is the core business of the company providing it.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#164

Post by q2 »

patio11 wrote: post #149
q2 wrote: post #82

Compared to stripe[0], balanced[1] took very less funding as per the data. Reading from the comments here, their service seems to be liked by users. In that case, may be they should have looked into funding aspect rather than shutting down and funding might have helped them to become large,independent player as they wished. Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seein…

So let's not make this story about Balanced, but let me spin you a yarn of a totally hypothetical company named FooCorp, which has a plan to disrupt a sclerotic two-sided marketplace. FooCorp has a team of talented product people working for it. They've got a gleam in their eye and a story on how they're going to attack a ridiculously large market. FooCorp easily sails to an angel round sized in the high six or low s…

>>> Seed is raised on the dream. A rounds are raised on the metrics. If you don't have the metrics, you don't raise an A round....

These are golden words which all budding entrepreneurs need to remember rather than getting carried away by seed funding/hype. Thanks.

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#165

Post by HalfLifeDM »

tbrooks wrote: post #109
bkrausz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that Balanced was using Forte for their ACH processing. You might check them out.

https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#166

Post by sluzorz »

HalfLifeDM wrote: post #165
tbrooks wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that Balanced was using Forte for their ACH processing. You might check them out. https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm

This is absolutely not true

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#167

Post by HalfLifeDM »

bkrausz wrote: post #25
tghw wrote: post #15

It's too bad. Balanced was the only service of it's kind to provide ACH payments. Hopefully Stripe or Braintree will pick up this feature.

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

Check out Forte Payments. That's who Balanced was using for their ACH processing.

https://www.forte.net/

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#168

Post by [deleted] »

HalfLifeDM wrote: post #165
tbrooks wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that Balanced was using Forte for their ACH processing. You might check them out. https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm

[deleted]

Re: Balanced payments is shutting down

#169

Post by HalfLifeDM »

sluzorz wrote: post #166
HalfLifeDM wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that Balanced was using Forte for their ACH processing. You might check them out. https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm

This is absolutely not true

Ask Balanced to confirm for yourself. We are Forte are very saddened to see them go, but will continue to support them and their ACH processing until the day that they turn out the lights.
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