And of course once you back out the overhead and direct costs of selling, the amount of your potential profit that eats up is some multiple of that.
They charge 2.9% + $0.30, and then 2%.
Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30.
So they are approximately 65-70% (2/2.9 = 0.69) more expensive, depending on your average charge.
But we look at it from a time and capital perspective. With Stripe, you have to code and maintain your own payment solution on the backend and your own checkout form. You also have to worry about a million other things like emailing your customers when they place an order, and handling refunds. If you don't have the coding skills to build that yourself, you have to hire an expensive developer to build and maintain that for you.
If that extra 2% cost savings is worth it to endure the hassle above, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming at people who don't want to deal with all that and would rather concentrate on growing their business doing things like launching a new product and marketing their current ones.
But when you're first starting out selling something, it's a huge capital investment to build that payment processing code on top of Stripe/Balanced, likely $5,000+ if you do it right. We're trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.
In any case, I like to see competition in the this market so good luck :-)
We're aiming to be the best. We're aiming to be the absolute easiest checkout process and the simplest experience for the merchant.