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Send payouts with Stripe

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315 pointspc137 comments

(I work at Balanced)

Balanced (https://balancedpayments.com) provides a payouts solution for marketplaces like redditgifts, Crowdtilt, Fancy, Artsy, Visual.ly, and many others.

The differences with Stripe include the money being available for payout immediately (instead of 5 days), and the recipient will receive the money the next business day. Balanced has also performed a lot of work to verify merchants with as little information as possible — name, dob, and address. Instead of SSN for an individual you only need to pass in the last four.

Stripe actually requires substantially less information -- just the recipient's name.

Still, this isn't about Stripe vs Balanced -- we just built the API many of our users wanted. Hope you guys continue to do well!

You're posting on HN though. You cannot have a payment solutions post on HN without Balanced showing up and waving their arms all over the damn place. I understand this is a YC site but it's really annoying and distracting.

Stripe is YC too.

Err... but... anti-establishment... err... fuck PG... err grumble... grumble.

Balanced requires name, DOB, and address only to underwrite the recipient as a merchant to avoid the marketplace becoming an aggregator. It is still possible to make a next-day payout directly to a recipient without this information:

  curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
      -u f97912a2cd8a11e2a411026ba7cd33d0: \
      -d "amount=10000" \
      -d "bank_account[name]=Johann Bernoulli" \
      -d "bank_account[routing_number]=121000358" \
      -d "bank_account[type]=checking" \
      -d "bank_account[account_number]=9900000001"

In that case you can also use Balanced only for payouts by funding your escrow with your own bank account. Stripe would require you to charge your own credit card to perform this service.

As you said, the main difference is about focus. Balanced has focused on supporting marketplaces from the beginning and continues to do so.

That focus also allows Balanced to build great tools to solve problems that are bigger issues in marketplaces.

They've caught a number of fraud incidents for me which has been incredibly helpful (and obviously saves me money).

Its nice to see that Stripe wishes competitors well when all Balanced tried to do was promote their brand.

I'm sorry if we gave you that impression.

All three founders have engineering degrees. I built the original version of the product, was the second engineer at Milo.com, and wrote DDoS prevention software in college. Mahmoud built high-frequency trading systems for Wachovia Securities and built Milo.com's matching and categorization system. Jareau studied Electrical Engineering at U Penn, built GPS enabled devices in college, and wrote Milo.com's original systems to interact pull in data from retailers.

Even our General Counsel codes. He studied Symbolic Systems and wrote some of our internal reporting systems in Python.

I fail to see how this addresses the idea that Balanced was "promoting their brand." Was anyone questioning the engineering talent at either company?

Stripe wrote this blog post to promote their brand, Balanced let potential customers know that they have similar functionality. Both companies, in my opinion, offer extremely high-quality services (I have used both in production) and have great engineering talent. I do not think we should knock either company for "promoting their brand", it's important that potential customers (read: HN users) are able to make informed decisions. I think zende, pc, and the original blog post all do a good job of articulating the features available through their respective APIs.

I agree. I'm starting to look at Balanced differently now.

He clearly intended to answer this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5827717

I guess this answered to the wrong comment. The comment that zende wanted to answer to was this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5827717

You just did it again!

spoiledtechie opinted out that a Stripe employee wished you well, while you only promoted your own brand, and your response was to prattle on about how qualified the founders are and basically list your resumes. Oh, and your lawyer codes too! What fun!

This statement fully captures the stark difference between Stripe and Balanced. Stripe is led by engineers who want to improve the payments infrastructure. Balanced is led by businesspeople who want to hit it big. Stripe just so happens to be a business as well. Nothing wrong with either, but that should point you toward which company has the developer's true interests at heart :)

Hint: It's Stripe.

Bias alert: I have a Stripe account, but not a Balanced account.

I think it's disingenuous to not suggest that Balanced doesn't 'have the developer's true interests at heart.' They've been really pushing the hypermedia API stuff, which is technologically exciting, as well as doing the whole 'open company' thing, which is taking the concept open source to interesting places.

I don't know anyone who works at either company so maybe one of them is full of nasty people who hate their customers and one is full of lovely people who don't care about making profit - but that's very unlikely. Much more likely is that they both want to maximise their profits, they both understand that offering a good service to their customers is the way to do this, and both approach this in different ways. And frankly the fact that a Stripe employee said a nice thing about them as opposed to "fuck them use Stripe" doesn't give any clue on the subject, it just says this person is a.) polite and b.) not an idiot.

Why do you have such a simplistic binary view of the world (hint: the world isn't like that), and why the sock puppet account? (hint: you're a shill)

Agreed; this direction is unseemly. Let's just focus on the products.

Stripe is also starting to grow internationally which is one reason why I'd choose stripe.

Interesting to see Balanced and Stripe competing. Is this going to be a growing trend in YC? I'm sure it's a hard problem to avoid.

Balanced has always inhabited a nebulous void of blatant-copying-with-one-novel-new-feature territory for me.

It's clear they just copied (with permission? consent?) the public interface of Stripe. They tried to copy the documentation format (layout, style, presentation) too, but it came off kinda poorly (margins, people. margins). They have public test cards/accounts, but they fail to test correctly because they get "used" and can't have multiple actions performed against them. Then, there's the whole ID thing. Why the fuzzy heck would you use ugly, long, probably-going-to-run-off-my-screen URIs as IDs instead of short IDs? They advise you to never construct your own API endpoint URIs from shorter IDs, except that's exactly what they do all throughout their documentation.

But, Balanced lets you pay out next day and Stripe holds your funds for 7 days before allowing payment. So, Balanced wins on time-to-pay speed (and they have same-day transfers to Wells Fargo). Though, with Stripe I assume you could eventually have enough of a float in your account to pay out next-day under your own prior funds.

From my complete outsider point of view it feels like Balanced is full of slightly subpar copy ninjas. (obviously just on their API, documentation, and front-end presentation. Their backend could be amazing or it could be meter high jenga code.)

Disclaimer/Validator: I've written a tiny unofficial client for each each product/company. https://github.com/mattsta/stripe-erlang and https://github.com/mattsta/balanced-erlang

I've been working with Balanced's API since they were Poundpay. I think most of your comments about copying are very misguided. The style of their documentation format is completely irrelevant to the quality of the product (and wrong IMO), which in my > two years of experience, has been superb. Your comments about test cards are just wholly incorrect, and the style of their website and how they present their products is as homogeneous as anyone else offerring a developer product.

Re: UUID's, Jeff Atwood has a good post explaining their pros and cons: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/primary-keys-ids-ve....

> From my complete outsider point of view it feels like Balanced is full of slightly subpar copy ninjas.

I couldn't disagree more. Over the past couple of years, I've come to trust and admire the product as much as any other, including Stripe. These guys know what they're doing.

Balanced has a ridiculously huge advantage in the next-day payouts (same-day to WF bank accounts!), like Square offers. However, Stripe is far better supported by third-party clients for shopping carts.

It's really unfortunate that we have a fractured payment processing market where overlapping them doesn't solve the problem. For example:

Square: Best in-person payment processor. Next day payments if taken before 5 PM PST. Does card-not-present transactions as well. For some insane reason, does not have web access or an API despite being around longer than Stripe and Balanced.

Stripe: Best integration with wp-commerce, third party plugins, etc. Excellent interface. Rapid prototyping and feature rollout. Cons: 7 day rolling payments are slower than Square, Balanced, and Paypal.

Balanced: Fastest payments. Terrible third-party support. Documentation not nearly as good as Stripe, interface is slightly confusing.

I use Stripe for my ecommerce business and Square for in-person transactions, but I desperately want to switch to Balanced because of cashflow improvements. But that's not going to happen until third-party plugin support is vastly improved (I've already opened tickets on this months ago in their tracker with no response). Or I'd switch to Square if they decided they wanted an additional $XXX million dollars in business and offered a web API (what is the reason for NOT having this).

Annoying, but considering where we were just a few years ago, I'll take it.

If our current payouts schedule isn't working for you, we'd be happy to help out. Feel free to ping me at amber@stripe.com.

Since they are in a sector that is in a dire need of change, why should one company reinvent the wheel? The goal is to push the boundary of the space instead of redoing the same thing over. Balanced did ach payouts first and then Stripe just released it. You should be glad there are two good companies competing.

Calling Balanced a group of subpar copy ninjas is very ignorant. Dealing with payments, fraud, and banks is an extremely difficult. I rather Balanced tackle new problem in the payments like ACH debits than reinventing their documentation. Plus, they are a much smaller team than Stripe.

If a sector is already a polished like project management, then you can complain about how one company is not perfect enough with its smaller features.

(I don't work for either, but I use both apis extensively)

They have ACH debits: https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/?language=bash#deb...

How does this comment not get flagged for removal? Might as well talk about how your best friend gets paid 5k/month working from home for only a few hours/week.

As with all money transfer products, the technology to transfer funds to an individual is generally the fun/easy part. Wait until you find out about America's (and most other countries) wonderful anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing compliance laws that can land you in less-fun places like federal prison if you don't use this sort of webservice very, very carefully.

Former licensed money transmitter executive here. As far as I am aware, as long as you are not "structuring" transfers (which means breaking payments up with the intent to hide their common origin and/or destination) and are not attempting to actually launder money, the real risk of federal prison time is born by the operator of an unlicensed money transmitter, not the user of such a service.

In the US, operating an unlicensed money transmitter is an offense that carries, if I recall properly, up to five years of federal prison time per count[1]. That is to say, if you create a service by which one party is able to send money to another third party, and operate that service without a license where one is required (and under that license adhere to capital, bonding and procedural compliance requirements), you are subject to federal criminal prosecution.

I'd be curious as to Stripe's and Balanced's interpretation of their obligations under these laws vis-a-vis their payout services.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1960

Balanced is now being heavily discussed. Mission accomplished I suppose.

I assume the author of the announcement wrote the example code with the longshot hope that some Stripe users would say, "Hey, I guess I'll send Amber Feng three thousand bucks, just to see if this works." Takeaway point: always write code examples in such a way that a straight copy-and-paste might send you a lot of money.

It's a test-mode API call, so I'm sadly not getting any money from this. (:

It's in cents, so she'll only get $30. But it all adds up :)

I just used Stripe for one of my major annual events. I used PayPal the first two years, and all I can say is Stripe is far superior to PayPal. I do wish the dashboard was a little more configurable, but that's minor. Everything else is so much better.

Pros: + auto deposit into the back account without having to make requests

+ easy refund process

+ easy charge identification process

Cons:

- a few customers like using PayPal, so there's that. We dropped PayPal entirely from the online sign up and payment so for the users who wanted PayPal we had to send them our PayPal address. Not entirely smooth or professional, but that's not Stripe's fault, it's the reality of having an entrenched payment processor.

- the dashboard displays total volume, and that's it. Would like this to be configurable. Showing total volume since day 1 is pretty useless, especially since it does not appear to remove refunds.

Which parts of the dashboard in particular? Would love to hear your feedback at amber@stripe.com!

I don't have much to complain about, but I will gather my thoughts and shoot them over. Really a huge fan of the product, though.

It's a paid add on but maybe look at DigMyData too.

I'm most interested in the inverse... allowing customers to send us cash directly from their bank accounts for $.25 per transfer (instead of the bullshit credit card company fees). I'm sure there's some serious fraud implications that Stripe would have to deal with to ensure validity, but is that coming?

FWIW, Balanced has this functionality: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea...

Network effects. :) I'm not going to swap stripe for balanced at this point, but would happily offer customers the ability to pay with a bank account if they prefer.

as a customer, why would I ever sign up for bank account payments vs card? with credit cards, one call to amex and a $5k charge gets instantly removed and I get the credit line adjustment, but with a checking account, this can take much longer and stuck cash-less for a while

We have customers who prefer paper invoicing. We're more B2B-ey. We could do their net30 payment terms all electronically, which would be a big plus for them.

I thought ACH debits were in beta? Are they out of beta now?

Yep -- this is something we're really interested in doing as well.

It may be limiting to call the API object "Recipient" then. It precludes a bidirectional ACH object. Maybe "Bank Account" or something would have been more future proof.

How soon do you estimate having international bank transfers?

Being able to receive international bank transfers on Stripe would be amazing. Our bank charges us $15 per received wire.

I doubt Stripe could do that for much cheaper unfortunately, without basically becoming a bank, and keeping money in multiple countries.

You don't have to keep money in multiple countries, just be able to receive SWIFT and/or IBAN transfers.

Many banks in European countries don't charge anything for receiving any wires, including SWIFT, only sending them.

(the $15 fee is just for receiving any wire transfer, and is independent of the standard SWIFT fees)

I am more interested in making international payouts and we are looking at switching to envoyservices.com from PayPal/Manual bank transfers in a couple of months and switching entirely to stripe looks attractive

You want to look at dwolla or venmo - which do banks transfers for payments with very low fees.

Disclosure, referral links:

http://lx.tc/dwolla http://lx.tc/venmo

This is cool, but the money has to be charged via credit card first right? It would be nice to transfer money from the bank account linked to stripe to another account, and as a user of Stripe's connect API, it would be nice to enable this in our apps for our users.

Even cooler would be full blown ACH. We are working with ACH providers now and what a stark contrast to the beauty of stripe. All require some form of monthly fee, paper set-up forms with 1-2 week delays (vetting periods) and API's from the 90's

You could checkout Balanced Payments (https://balancedpayments.com/) - a YC company that does ACH.

Last time I checked they didn't do ACH, and were doing basically what stripe released today.

I originally thought the same too, but found that it is in Beta. http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payment-method-pay...

The Balanced Payouts service has been available for some time. Our ACH Debit (pay with bank account) is in Beta however.

whoa...1% + $.30 for bank payments??? why would you need a percentage on an ACH transfer when most others charge a flat rate?

We're still trying to figure out the right pricing and are discussing it openly (https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/2#issuecomme...).

The risk scales with the size of the transaction. Granted, the risk does not scale at the same rate as the transaction size, but we wanted to keep it simple in the beginning.

What do you think about 1% + 30¢ with a cap?

What's the risk factor with large transactions ? Is it that they can be reversed or challenged ? I am not too familiar with the ACH system, but isn't it the case that once a transaction clears and a transfer completes, then that's it - there is no reversal process.

The money is a bank account is real money after all, and once it's spent, it's gone for good. This is one reason I (and I suspect a few others) feel very uneasy connecting bank account(s) with a third party web service.

ACH has a dispute system like credits cards. Credit cards have a dispute window of 120 days. Personal bank accounts have a dispute window of 60 days. Business bank accounts have a dispute window of 3 business days.

The problem with disputes on ACH debits is that the process is not formalized through a standard network like Visa or MasterCard. It's a mess operationally, and there's a near zero chance of winning the dispute. This becomes even worse because of the size of ACH transactions.

We've reduced the risk by requiring trial deposits on any bank account that you want to debit, which is also a problem for a lot of our customers.

> It's a mess operationally, and there's a near zero chance of winning the dispute

To be clear, does this refers to the business accounts / users ? The consumers with personal accounts who dispute the charges have their way and the charging entity is left to deal with the results?

I'm not sure about the percentage with or without cap. Most of the transactions for the service that we're building will be in the $500-700 range. With us taking a flat percentage, the merchant taking their percentage, and then payouts to clients. As you can see, there are a lot of levels of processing and selling the merchants on a percentage is difficult enough and then charging them a percentage again on a payout will be seen as nickel and diming them.

Our customers are doing millions with ACH, most pricing of quality ACH providers is 0% + 25-40 cents and a $20/month service fee. So if the 1% was capped at $20, I could bring over a lot of business from low-risk non-profits.

Taking over this thread talking about your service is pretty awful - surely you can announce your features in your own right rather than riding on the back of Stripe's name?

For another opinion, I'm a Stripe customer, and I really appreciate Balanced talking about their product in this thread. They're not trashing Stripe, they're just talking about the differences between the products.

It seems cordial and I would rather read about the two products together than in some later thread I'll probably miss.

It looks like he was just adding some clarity to a discussion a few users were having. He didn't post any links, or 'announce' anything.

This is an open forum and the comments about Balanced are entirely on topic.

I completely agree. I apologize if it came off that way.

We launched payouts in February: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/balanced-payments-ach-api-o...

(I work at Stripe.)

Right. Those are both things that are on our product roadmap. (:

On an only moderately related note... here are two more things that I would love to see on the roadmap:

1) Better support for disputes in the API (right now to get all our disputes, we have to pull _all_ charges and walk them...)

2) The ability to generate test disputes. You guys provide an awesome test API, but there's no way to generate disputed charges in testing, so I can't test any of that functionality...

1) You should be able to pass in "disputed=true" to the charge listing call: GET https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges?disputed=true

2) Definitely. We'll keep that in mind!

Ah, the folks in your IRC channel (and your docs) didn't know that one... Awesome, thank you!

Free hugs and kisses from me when you guys roll it out (really gets my cofounder motivated, so thought I'd try it here!)

I too would love to be able to accept ACH payments. Our customer base is currently organizations that are happy to pay via ACH, but CC is not usually good option. (B2B)

I think Dwolla offers what you want, don't they?

Congrats on the launch!

My startup was in the private beta for this and is in the process of switching to Stripe for ACH payouts from our previous provider bill.com. The folks at Stripe are super friendly and helpful. Two thumbs up! :)

This sounds pretty awesome, I can't wait to try it out.

FYI I'm working on a guide to integrating Stripe with Rails[1] and I'll definitely be covering this, as well as Stripe Connect.

[1]: http://www.petekeen.com/mastering-modern-payments

Now that payment processors like Stripe and Balanced are providing very similar services, what serves to differentiate them? As each of these companies release features, they become closer and closer to converging to the exact same product. I'm seeing the same fees, the same abilities to payout, the same ability to act as a marketplace, with only a few very minor differences. Why should someone pick Stripe over Balanced, or vice versa?

I think you should pick based on your primary use case, i.e. whether you are a merchant (stripe) or a marketplace (balanced).

IMO in a couple of years the offerings from these two companies will be so close that this distinction won't matter, but for now they are converging in from different directions so you should choose appropriately.

(I feel this is a lot like Box vs. Dropbox. One started from the team/enterprise side, and the other from the personal/consumer side, but now Box offers free 5GB for personal use, Dropbox offers dropbox for teams etc. A couple of years back, it mattered which one you picked depending on your use case, but these days not so much.)

Support and transparency.

Please bring this to Canadian Bank accounts. Please, please please. :-)

Ditto! I would implement this tomorrow if it was available on Canadian bank accounts.

Interac.ca email money transfer

If your financial institution does not yet offer the service, or if you don't bank online... You will be required to register and provide your banking information in order for the money to be deposited into your bank account. The deposit usually takes 4 - 6 business days to process and a $4.00 fee will be deducted from the deposit amount.

Not really compatible.

How does this jive with laws around transmitting money?

Tl;dr: we work with a bank to do this; we do lots of checks; and you're required to verify the identity of the recipients. See https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers#verifyin... for more info.

Do the funds ever sit in your (Stripe's) account or is the ACH transfer direct from the card to the destination account?

Come on Aaron. As someone who formerly ran a payments company, you know that going direct from a credit card to a bank account is not possible with today's banking infrastructure. Of course the funds go to their account. You know that, but you're clearly trying to prove a point here. Please, do it somewhere else.

Of course it's possible. Stripe could give its processor the routing and account number of its customer to deposit the funds in in place of its own routing and account number. This is why the Department of the Treasury distinguishes between payment processing companies and money transmitters.

By the way, I still run a payments company, and you should not assume that you know what I know (or don't).

My fault, I stand corrected.

Our implementation might change over time, but we don't ever take title of the funds at the moment.

Nor does any money transmitter.

You didn't answer the question.

And your question has a "gotcha" axe to grind.

Looks like the HN backend needs another stealth founders-only feature: highlight known troublemakers to remind people to probably not interact with them unless you know you can win a pet argument.

Doesn't even need to be a backend feature. A Chrome extension (a la Reddit Enhancement Suite) that lets you tag people would be more than sufficient.

I understand Aaron's motivation. Asking for that info on HN though is the same as starting a fight in a Starbucks. We're better than that.

I'd say it's more like asking a fellow air passenger, in earshot of others, whether that thing they just put to their lips is a candy cigarette or a real one.

Payments systems are complex and the regulations are complex. I don't think it's rude to ask questions about complex topics, and here I honestly do not know what Stripe is doing. As both a Stripe customer and competitor I have the right to ask.

I think it's the "if I answer this guy's questions he'll likely pop me in as a defendant in a crank lawsuit" that turns folks off.

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/5:2013cv0...

Disagree with the crank lawsuit part.

Yes, the law is being metered out in a discriminatory fashion. No, this is the not the way to go about fixing it.

i.e. "Can I sue you as a money transmitter as well."

Exactly.

They sit in the Stripe/Wells Fargo account exactly like any other transfer. You can't do credit card directly to ACH.

How does Stripe verify the business (which service do you leverage), besides matching against the OFAC blacklist?

"Stripe is not a bank or a money services business (“MSB”) and Stripe does not offer banking or MSB services as defined by the United States Department of Treasury."

How long does it take from the time I create the transfer to it hitting the user's bank account?

It's next day, depending on what time you create the transfer.

https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers#transfer...

Sweet.. can't wait for full ACH! ... watch out Balanced.. they're on your tail!

Any chance of this coming to the UK? Loving the UK Beta for cc payments!

The uk beta is awesome! I would love to know when we can send money to UK and other EU accounts. Any stripe employees care to comment on any potential roll out roadmap outside of the US?

$0.25/transfer, without a cap on the amount? Might expose Stripe to a lot of risk on large transfers?

Example: If something goes sideways on an $100k transfer, $0.25 is 0.0003% of the borked transaction....

Since this feature is backed by a bank (FDIC backed bank no doubt) I assume it has the same protection as any other transfer and that the backing-bank is actually shouldering the risk.

It's ridiculously hard to launch a new marketplace. I think it's awesome that we have more API choices.

My next big problem is taxes. I wish one of these two could make it a no-brainer for the same market-place scenario (eg. selling a work from a South African gallery to a customer in France via a U.S. based marketplace).

As a footnote, I am a very happy Balanced customer @ http://artsy.net.

Just to be clear, this requires a balance in your Stripe account? What if you do not have a balance? How does this affect the currently (already very slow) 7 day payout? If an account is balance holding, and then you withdraw to your own bank account, does that mean the 7 days starts then? What if you do not have enough balance?

Can't I build a marketplace with stripe connect? How is this different?

It supports substantially more complicated movements of money. Stripe Connect is basically "Bring your own Stripe account. We handle the API integration for you." This lets you do things like (hypothetical case for Airbnb-clone) "Pay the room lister 90% of the amount charged 5 days after the later of 'satisfactory feedback received from renter' or '10 days after checkout'. Then, pay us our 10% fee for enabling the transaction."

Bonus: with this, the lister doesn't need a Stripe account and will perceive all of their interactions with money being handled by you or their bank. This means you don't have to, as a part of making the sale to them to list their room, convince them "You should really open a Stripe account."

(I work at Stripe.)

With Stripe Connect, your users have to have Stripe accounts. This makes sense for, say, Squarespace, where their users are likely to want to manage the business themselves: logging in to their Stripe account, watching their analytics, providing refunds, handling customer service, etc.

This is designed for cases like paying Lyft drivers. The drivers don't really care about the internals; they just want money to appear in their bank account.

There's more at https://support.stripe.com/questions/stripe-connect-vs-sendi....

Each of your marketplace customers would need their own stripe account (we do this now). This would enable a single stripe account to be used for charging the cards, and your app controls the transfer of funds back to the marketplace vendors

Really neat feature.

Is a rollout to scandinavia in the weeks, months or years-timeframe?

From my understanding it takes 7 days for the funds charged with a credit card to be available? In this case, is there an api to show how much is actually available to payout to 3rd party?

Yep! https://stripe.com/docs/api#balance

Does the font rendering look bad to all of us? http://cl.ly/image/0S3B0H241w01

Hm, that's interesting.

What OS/browser are you on? (Feel free to email me at amber@stripe.com as well.)

Apart from Balanced Payments and Dwolla I don't think anyone gives a simple way (means using API) to send payouts. This could be huge!

FWIW, I think Dwolla still requires the recipient to have a Dwolla account. Stripe and Balanced are white labeled products.

Balanced Payments only allows transfers to customers with Wells Fargo accounts, right? Does Stripe allow transfers to all banks?

You can transfer to any US bank account with Balanced. Wells Fargo accounts benefit from same day transfers, while all other accounts are next business day.

Same day to Wells, next day to else, I believe.

When is there going to be a serious Paypal alternative that works pretty much everywhere, internationally?

Not for a long long time. The reason Paypal doesn't work everywhere is because of crazy laws, not technology.

And Paypal can afford many more hours of lawyering than most startups.

Can't wait for Canada to get this.

Seconded. I will use this immediately.

She went to my school Berkeley!

Can Stripe now be used to accept ACH payments as well as send them?

What does the payee see? My business name, stripe's name, etc

Your business name, along with the transfer statement descriptor you specify (though this varies by bank).

Keep up the great work, I absolutely love you guys!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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