I am a developer interested in integrating a payment system into one of my sites where my target customers are mainly in the US. Could someone outline the major differences between Stripe and Balanced?
As an Australian company selling to the US, we've kinda been left in the lurch with their AU beta.
When it was launched we were told they were working on being able to accept/convert USD into AU accounts, so at the time we (incredibly naively) started building our subscription code around their API, assuming it'd be ready by the time we were.
Almost 6 months later and all we can get out of them is "we don't have an eta but we're working on it", and we've been sitting here the whole time losing money hoping that it's just around the corner, when really we should have just thrown out the work we'd done and gone with a provider that can already handle it.
Since then they "acquired" an entirely separate recurring payments company (I don't recall the name), and it was all just a bit too much of an integration mess at the time, when compared to Stripe who also announced their beta then.
You can look at this comparison in a few ways. We share a lot of the same investors: Both YC, SV Angel, a16z, etc. They've gotten a lot more funding than we have, and so have a bigger team.
You get paid faster with Balanced: we have _same day_ payouts to Wells Fargo customers, and _next day_ payouts to any other bank. Stripe is seven days.
Feature wise, we provide a lot of the same things, but Balanced has more. We support ACH debits AND credits, for example, and Stripe only supports credits. We're soon adding push-to-card as well. We have escrow, and let you choose how long to hold funds in it.
Speaking of escrow, in general, we have lots of extra features for marketplaces, since that's our bread and butter. Stripe now has a marketplace product, Connect, but it basically requires all of your sellers to sign up for Stripe. Our customers tell us that white label is important, and so Balanced is 100% white labeled. We individually underwrite all sellers, and we give you full control over your descriptor, on a per-transaction basis.
Our fee structure is 100% transparent, and the same for everyone. You can negotiate with Stripe on your rates, ours are just published publicly: https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing
In general, Balanced is striving to be as open and transparent as possible: new feature discussion is done in the open, on GitHub. As I just mentioned, our pricing is transparent. We're working with Gittip and several other companies to start the Open Company Initiative[1] to help promote general open-ness. Loving that internal transparency from Stripe with their emails. [2]
To say some more good things about Stripe, they have launched in a few places internationally, and we are still US only. We can accept foreign credit cards, but merchants need to be in the US.[3] Hoping to fix that, regulations are hard.
Stripe has a loyal fanbase for a reason: they do a great job. I really appreciate the clarity of their docs, for example. Patrick, I know you're as much of an HN junkie as I am: congrats on the raise. Let's all keep dragging the payments industry kicking and screaming into the future. ;)
Here's some links from others, comparing the two of us:
* http://blog.localon.com/2013/11/21/why-we-switched-from-stri...
* http://blog.apixchange.com/2013/10/why-api-xchange-uses-bala...
* http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-compare-agai...
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14289347/stripe-vs-balanc...
As always, you can reach me here on at steve@balancedpayments.com to talk about any of this more.
1: http://opencompany.biz , though we just chipped in for .org: https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/issues/59
You should have a form on your website where I can add my email address and then you can tell me when Balanced is available in my country.
Good suggestion. We'll work on adding that [1]. Right now, we have those interested +1 on a GitHub issue tread [2], so we can contact them later, but you're right something a bit cleaner would be easier for you and us.
[1] https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/issues/... [2] https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23