Why I Love Balanced | Hacker News Reader

Why I Love Balanced

whit537.org

67 pointswhit53723 comments

Shameless plug for my friends: I got an advanced copy of some chapters from Traction Book (http://tractionbook.com/) which is where I read about the traction vertical 'Engineering as Marketing'. I think this is an awesome example of that.

I started using Balanced today, everyone is incredibly helpful in their IRC channel, and integration is a breeze. It's a solid service.

What's worth noting about Balanced, you can use them solely for payouts, while continuing to use some other gateway for processing. https://balancedpayments.com/docs/overview#id2

I was wondering where you got that phrase. Too good to be true that you pulled it out of thin air on the spot. Sounds like Balanced should be a case study in your friends' book. ;)

If anyone's interested in contributing, one of the next things we've got lined up for Gittip is integrating an ORM (It looks like we're going with SqlAlchemy).

Join the discussion at https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/129

They're Stripe for marketplaces, and they're great. (we've used them since Sept at https://crunchbutton.com)

Question though: why doesn't Stripe support marketplaces?

Marketplaces are higher risk and don't fit the agreements that Stripe has with their bank partners. Deets:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/67

We do, just with a slightly different model. (:

Full answer at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879633

I've found that balanced is the best and easiest service to get payments to our clients at a very rapid pace, with no non-sense. Their support team is excellent as well!

Having used Balanced for a couple months, I can attest to this, they are a fantastic bunch providing support wherever, whenever and in whatever way they can.

We use Balanced as well, having migrated from PoundPay. Everyone in their team is attentive and pro-active. Support is fantastic.

I love the look of this ( https://www.balancedpayments.com/ ), is it just US only and requires US bank accounts?

I have customers and sellers in the UK and would love to be able to offer an escrow service and payment solution for them.

I'll reply to my own post as I've asked in the freenode #balanced room:

> 23:05 <mjallday> buro9: Balanced can debit cards from pretty much anywhere in the world. Payouts currently require a US bank account

> 23:05 <mjallday> buro9: you can subscribe to https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23 to get updates when make we progress on the international payouts

One thing I'm a bit confused about is the assertion that Stripe doesn't support marketplaces. However, it would seem like it's more accurate to say that Stripe does support "Collecting Fees" via Stripe Connect:

https://stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees

This might not be the full backend integration that some services require, but it does cover a lot of use cases and works in a growing list of countries outside of the US.

It also seems likely that Stripe could launch an ACH payout service of their own.

Good to have this on the table, thanks. This was in private beta when I was working with Stripe. The two limitations here for Gittip are:

- Stripe Connect is not white label. All recipients (aka sellers, merchants) have to set up an account on Stripe's website. I'm not opposed to that in principle (cf. Dwolla), but I wanted Gittip to have an on-site baseline and add options from there.

- Stripe Connect is 1:1, and Gittip is N:M. I need to take $1 from 10 people and aggregate that into a single $10 payout. I also need to take a single $10 payin and split that up between 10 recipients. Stripe Connect doesn't work for crowd-funding, in other words.

Stripe Connect is a retrofit. Balanced is designed for marketplaces from the ground up.

Balanced also does next-day payouts. Using Stripe, it takes 7 days for the merchant to receive the funds

Stripe does support marketplaces (https://stripe.com/connect), but with a somewhat different model.

Stripe Connect works by having each of your users connect their existing Stripe accounts to your application, or having them create a new one on the spot. It allows you to distance yourself from the flow of funds: the money will automatically route to your users' bank accounts (you can take a cut of it, if you want) and you don't have to worry about any chargeback/fraud liability.

This obviously doesn't cover all cases — for example, if you want to manage the flow of money manually, or you want to escrow funds.

(Disclaimer: I work on Connect at Stripe.)

Thanks, amfeng. Does the chargeback liability hit end merchants, or is that absorbed by Stripe? With Balanced, Gittip is responsible for it, and can choose whether to pass that along.

It hits the end merchants, since they're technically the merchant who is charging the credit card.

In cases where the marketplace wants to act purely as a platform (and not be involved in with the money in any way), this is perfect. You're exactly right that Stripe Connect isn't for the use case where you'd want to shield your users from that, though. (:

Word. I've added an update to the blog post with a link to Stripe Connect. :)

Oh, thanks! You definitely didn't have to do that, but we appreciate the mention. (:

Did you look at Wepay or authorize.net? They both seem like they do money in and out as well. I'd love to see a neutral party summarize the field for payment processing as it's quite hard to see what the differences are without doing some digging.

WePay: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/69

Authorize.net is pretty old-school, aren't they? I think of them as complicated credit card payments. Do they also do payouts?

Balanced rocks. JW was super helpful and they are willing to work with us to fit our needs. Looking forward to launching with them....

I agree, Balanced is a great service. Thank you!

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