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Comment by pc | Hacker News Reader

Stripe cofounder here. I just wanted to tip our hats to the folks at Balanced. Stripe and Balanced have certainly competed against each other in the marketplace space for a few years, but we have a lot of respect for how Matin and his team executed with creatively and determination. While we're of course glad Balanced decided that migrating to Stripe was the best thing for their users, today is kinda bittersweet for us.

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Please consider a way to "prefund" amounts in escrow. Or at least existing Balanced escrow accounts. You'll see it all over the comments here. Using a CC to load money into Stripe is much too expensive, when you are paying out marketplace amounts in large sums. We provide Net30 Invoicing for buyers, but immediately payout to our sellers on our marketplace. Not being able to preload a large balance is going to make things very difficult for us.

Any plans for escrow services? That was the one pain point balanced tackled that Stripe has yet to provide a solution for.

You can control the transfer schedule for your recipients, which should effectively cover what you need to do. (Sorry this isn't clearer in the docs.) Feel free to email us, too. I'm patrick@stripe.com.

Any chance you guys are going to support funding the marketplace balance via the bank account?

Great, will do. Good work on the PR, jumping on this. I'm sure you'll have a ton of e-mails today from this comment --- maybe I'll wait a week or two. :)

It's not the same at all. There's a "Pending" balance and an "Available" balance.

If you were to initiate a transfer after a successful charge, you will get an error. You have to wait days for it to make it to your available balance and transfer then.

Your comment came off as a humblebrag at first, but then I read the link and saw that they mentioned transitioning customer to Stripe. So, if anyone had the same reaction as me; just read the link first.

Hm, I can see what you mean -- edited to make clear what our involvement is. (I.e., the migration.)

With the migration, will our data be replicated or ported over to Stripe? I.E. We start the migration and we still have access to Balanced API while we make the needed changes to comply and test with Stripe.

I want to start the migration, but don't want to lose access to Balanced all together until we're ready...

You can start the migration process and continue to use Balanced. Your existing cards, bank accounts, and seller data will be ported to Stripe, and all new cards, bank accounts, and sellers that you create on Balanced will be mirrored on Stripe.

Weird. I was only looking at the Balanced site for the first time yesterday, researching payment services that offer ACH. I understand Stripe has an ACH implementation in private beta though?

Greetings from a fellow "Limerician" btw :)

pc, it appears that the Stripe client libraries do not support Balanced-like features.

i.e. ACH debits, marketplaces, etc.

Migrating over to Stripe sounds great, but having these libraries updated with the proper endpoints seems like a must.

Our bindings actually do support ACH debits. The "source" parameter is a universal param for any kind of incoming payment mechanism. See https://stripe.com/blog/unifying-payment-types-in-the-api for details.

Specifically, for those in the ACH beta you can put a customer's bank account token in that field to charge their bank account.

Will I have the ability to debit ACH w/o verification?

(I currently have this ability with Balanced. Also have very low fraud, chargeback, etc.)

Ahh, you're right.

To make an ACH debit, you'd need to verify a bank account beforehand. And I don't think client libraries support a `bank account resource` w/o curling.

Maybe I'm missing something.

If you don't get it working on Stripe, maybe you'll have better luck with WePay. They're a marketplace payments service like Balanced was, and they support ACH payments.

https://www.wepay.com/developer/facilitate_withdrawals/settl...

https://www.wepay.com/developer/facilitate_withdrawals/embed...

Disclaimer: I haven't actually used them myself. YMMV.

I have used them, stick with Stripe.

WePay cofounder here. Would love to better understand why you say that so we can improve. Bill@wepay.com

WePay doesn't do ACH debits AFAIK.

WePay engineer here. We support ACH debits. Checkout the live example with "Pay with Bank Account" option here - https://www.wepay.com/developer/process_payments/iframe-chec...

I was thinking via API.

I know that Balanced was using Forte for their ACH processing. You might check them out.

https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm

This is absolutely not true

Ask Balanced to confirm for yourself. We are Forte are very saddened to see them go, but will continue to support them and their ACH processing until the day that they turn out the lights.

Although you should be doing it anyway, you should especially want to be friendly in on-boarding the transitioning customers… so PLEASE release all of Stripe's client-side JavaScript as free/libre/open software so that GNU LibreJS recognizes it.

In other words, while I and many others may wish you to actually get to Balanced's level of public commitment to transparency, the essential item is to allow people to simply use Stripe without being forced to run non-free code on their own machines client-side. Fixing this is as simple as making the source just for the client-side JS be available under an appropriate license and including some header or license file indicating this appropriately.

Please consider this, it will win you a lot of good will and is the right thing to do.

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