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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

Apple, meet Orange.

Why are they bashing Stripe Connect, which is not comparable to Balanced? They were looking for Stripe Marketplace, which does offer a complete white-label solution.

For a fairer comparison and review of Stripe's white label marketplace API, I will shamelessly plug my blog:

http://blog.chriswinn.com/working-with-stripe-payouts

The people at Balanced are great, but I still prefer Stripe's products any day of the week. They've written the best API and documentation I've seen in a while, and laid a lot of groundwork for others to mimic. A good thing for us developers, at least.

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Stripe Connect, according to their own website (https://stripe.com/connect) is Stripe's marketplace offering.

Stripe Connect is not a complete white label solution. The user still has to be redirected to stripe.com to complete the OAuth process. We had many issues with users being confused as to who Stripe was, and why were they asking for their personal information when creating an account.

(I work at Stripe)

Stripe Connect is great for a certain kind of marketplace, specifically one that does not want to be liable for chargebacks or refunds and wants to remain outside of the flow of funds.

We launched the ability to send payouts with Stripe over a month ago for a different kind of marketplace (such as Lyft, SideCar and Exec), which want more control over the payout process. You can read more about it here on our site: https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe

I think you've missed the point Chris. I wasn't bashing Stripe at all; quite the contrary actually. I have a ton of respect for their founders & team. However, there are some elements which are essential to our platform and payments model, which Stripe/Connect/Marketplace cannot provide; Descriptor & Money Management, among s few other nuance things. With so many options out there today, (many VERY BAD options), I merely wanted to share our process and headaches, in the hopes of saving another entrepreneur a bunch of time.

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