jareau

yes.

This is really good insight abalone. Thanks for sharing.

We had the same issue with our banking partners. Their pricing schemes are very opaque and we didn't know when we should approach them. We, and you, have better things to do than polling a bank/payments provider asking for discounts. The not knowing is part of the problem.

Thanks for using Balanced.

Yes, this is per marketplace. We'd love to give you a discount. Our discounts are applied quarterly, so if you get to $100K+ by April 1, we'd be happy to drop your rate to 2.7% + 30¢

More here: https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing

(I'm a Balanced employee)

Sorry if this isn't clear. We don't have separate pricing for credit vs. debit cards. These rates are blended for all card types.

(I'm a Balanced employee)

We calculate these fees per marketplace. Usually a single marketplace has many merchants associated with it.

Balanced employee here.

Thanks for calling us out, robotfelix (honestly). We're working on expanding internationally, but until then checkout mangopay.com for European marketplace payments.

Balanced employee here.

Axsuul, thanks for checking out Balanced! Let me know if I can answer any questions.

Sorry I didn't disclose that I'm a Balanced co-founder. HN won't allow me to go back and edit now.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Jay, and I appreciate the honest feedback. I'd be concerned if you didn't take seriously your choices about core pieces of your infrastructure, especially ones that are so closely related to your revenue.

I will say that Balanced has been processing live transactions for over 3 years, works with hundreds of marketplaces and crowdfunding platforms, and has been growing as fast as we can (~780% y-o-y). Unfortunately, there's not much we can do to become more established besides exist longer and continue growing. We're not planning on going anywhere, so we'll keep improving in that dept. as well. :-)

Thanks again!

pc probably has the authoritative answer, but this Quora answer by Vish Shastry might shed some light: http://www.quora.com/Online-and-Mobile-Payments/When-will-St...

Excerpt:

>I have no particular insight into Stripe's product roadmap, but my guess is that they probably won't put 5% + $0.05 pricing into the market anytime soon. That pricing would put them underwater on individual transactions, since it costs more than that to process a charge to a credit / debit card.

>Amazon and PayPal can only do it because a) PayPal can sometimes process payments to a user's bank account (instead of their credit / debit card) or pull funds from a user's existing PayPal balance, which costs them next to nothing and b) Amazon also sometimes routes payments through a bank account, but they also don't have high margins and can live with some 'loss leader' transactions.

@memset who did you end up using for payments?

This is a huge problem for me. Excited to see how this works!

Congrats to the the Crowdtilt team!

Really appreciate the support!

thanks for the feedback, @msutherl. passed this along to our designer.

Zach, exactly! We think of Balanced as payments by developers. For example: we've got a guy named victor in Taiwan that's completely taken over work on the recurring billing/payouts engine we're building called Billy. Since Billy is completely open-source (just another Balanced API client), he can work on it as he likes. Check it out: https://twitter.com/balancedbilly

wow! didn't expect to get a compliment in return. thank you! Feel free to join our community and hack on anything you're interested in: https://www.balancedpayments.com/open

Maybe this one: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard/issues/93?sou...

Thanks, Taylor. This is for you: http://blog.balancedpayments.com/benefits-open-company-balan...

Thanks for helping make Balanced better

beautiful!

We're thrilled to have Ben finally working full-time at Balanced. This is the kind of extra little stuff he did that really impressed us.

Here's a stand-alone vanity page he built to showcase his balanced-ios SDK: http://balanced-ios.unfiniti.com/

thanks for the links. I can't speculate at what their requirements are for affiliate payments. I only know the requirements Balanced is placed under as a PSP. I imagine Amazon must follow similar guidelines.

Most payment companies aren't able to (due to regulations) do anything particularly high-yield with funds they steward for their merchants. The amount of float a company like Amazon is able to make may factor into their revenue model, but I imagine they hold on to funds more for regulatory and risk mitigation reasons.

Never mistake for malice what can be explained by mere incompetence

Is your thesis that Stripe will follow a similar path as Braintree's...to low margins and acquisition?

Agree! Congrats to Bryan, Bill, and the whole Braintree team. They've built a great company and operate with integrity.

COGS for your standard photosharing app are much lower than for a payment processor and they don't have to deal with crazy amounts of risk (CC chargebacks). But yes, I get your point.

Click the "Select your country" button at the bottom of Braintree's site. It looks like they're available in US, CAN, AUS, and 40+ countries in Europe, but yes, PayPal owns the rest of the world, could help Braintree expand faster.

Spreedly supports Balanced [1] and Balanced specializes in payouts [2]

[1] https://core.spreedly.com/manual/payment-gateways/balanced

[2] http://blog.balancedpayments.com/announcing-balanced-payouts...

Why would merchants looking to switch from Braintree expect Stripe's fate to be any different (i.e. acquisition)?

No on the footer of Braintree's site it states: > Braintree is a registered ISO/MSP of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A

This means Braintree is using WF as a banking service provider, but is not owned by them.