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Comment by sjtgraham | Hacker News Reader

How is Balanced inferior, exactly? I would call neither party inferior, but as far as I can see Balanced has the better product. Two things Balanced has that Stripe does not: ACH debit and credit, and programmatic merchant underwriting. Massive features IMO.

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The big win Balanced has over Stripe is the ability to use their payouts API independently of whether you're using them to collect credit card and ACH debits or not. So you could be charging cards through Stripe and paying out via Balanced. Stripe forces you to charge cards through them in order to do any payouts.

It's true Stripe is integrated with more shopping carts and invoicing systems, but Balanced will get there. Personally, it would be great to see a Balanced credit card and ACH FreshBooks/Harvest integration because we're moving more into invoicing, as we're now dealing with larger companies and larger payments.

Oh, I didn't notice that stripe doesn't do the merchant underwriting. That's a non starter for us.

Hm? We absolutely do perform the underwriting ourselves.

OH! Very interesting!

Want to drop me a note? patrick@stripe.com.

To clarify: Stripe underwrites you as the merchant. Balanced lets the API user underwrite anyone (yourself or someone else) as a merchant, allowing for example the operation of a marketplace, where each merchant has their own merchant account. Balanced allows you to underwrite an arbitrary number of merchants programmatically via API. Correct me if I am wrong, and I am sure pc will do if this is the case, but Stripe does not offer this functionality.

(I work at Stripe.) When you create a seller via the API, both Stripe and Balanced do the exact same thing: verify the identity of seller. You can run a marketplace on either.

Edit: I'm using the words seller and recipient interchangeably: https://stripe.com/docs/api#update_recipient

I'm sorry, I can't see any mention of a seller resource at https://stripe.com/docs/api, nor does the Ruby library seem to implement it. Is it called something other than Seller?

I am very curious about this as well.

Third party plugins is not even close. Shopping carts overwhelmingly support Stripe and not Balanced.

EDIT: Not sure who downvoted you; it was a fair question. I countered it with an upvote.

Thanks. Shopping cart integration is first mover advantage. Stripe was the first to market with a product that dissolved two huge problems with accepting payments online: merchant underwriting and PCI-DSS compliance. Because of this it's unsurprising that i.) shopping carts rushed to integrate with them, and ii.) there is as much community good will toward Stripe as there is.

You could reach out to Balanced about API wrappers libs, I'm sure they would love someone to write language idiomatic libraries for them. It might be a nice contract gig.

>You could reach out to Balanced about API wrappers libs, I'm sure they would love someone to write language idiomatic libraries for them. It might be a nice contract gig.

I have, they suggested I open a ticket, and I did many months ago. No movement since.

I am not good enough to write a wrapper and frankly time/money preference dictates I spend it elsewhere, in any case.

I'd probably send them another note. They've been pretty good working with GitTip.

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