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Comment by aculver | Hacker News Reader

I think the bigger difference for most of us is that Stripe's implementation is actually available to all of us, vs. being in private beta. No sooner did I see this announcement than I forwarded it along to a friend who could use this functionality today in a service he's building.

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Actually, I should amend this comment: I'm not even sure why there is a comparison being made here. The potential applications for Stripe are so, so broad, and when you check out the marketing site for the other, the messaging is so niche in comparison. Maybe I should have said the biggest difference between the two is that Stripe actually seems to be applicable to most types of businesses we're all building. Judging from the homepage with Balanced, it seems like all this payment infrastructure is very tightly coupled with a solution for a niche type of business. I'd expect that latter bit to just be a Stripe Connect SaaS app that plugs in on top of the broadly applicable payment infrastructure Stripe provides.

In what way is Balanced only for "a niche type of business"?

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Their slogan is "payments for marketplaces." That's a very specific type of business.

I generally refrain from the Balanced vs Stripe debates because I use and like them both, but this comment is unfair, so much so that if I didn't know any better, I'd guess it were from someone with an interest in Stripe.

I'm in the same boat as you: I was hesitant to actually comment at all earlier, but before I posted, I thought the comments on this thread and others were reading very much like they were being hijacked from being about Stripe's feature release to being all these "me too" comments from the co-founder and a developer at another payment processor. It didn't seem very classy to me at all, so I threw my two cents out there to provide what I thought was some balance to the discussion. I'm sorry if it reads unfair at all, it's just IMHO.

Can't tell if that was a little jab at the end there, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. :-) My preference for and interest in Stripe as the operator of a Stripe Connect service is clear to anyone who clicks on my profile. :-)

It's not entirely clear, unless you go to your website. I'm not saying that as an attack or an accusation, just pointing out that I didn't know until your comment just now that you did :)

Fixed. Thanks. :-)

Was not meant as a jab. It just felt like it had a bit of agenda (the comment). Thanks for clearing it up.

Something I did learn today is that what Balanced really excels at is making marketplaces easy. Stripe doesn't do this well at all...at least not yet. So I think that for now, there's room for both.

You're right. See this comment for some insight on why Balanced is releasing to a private beta first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785476

(Balanced co-founder)

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