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Balanced payments is shutting down
- minimaxir 12y agoIt's worth noting that Balanced Payments was YC W11, which probably made the transition to Stripe a little smoother.
- revisedallocute 12y agothey also share same bank. that is bigger contribution to ease of transition.
- downandout 12y agoThat sucks. They were the only people in the payments industry that could (or would) do same-day transfers to your bank account. The best Stripe will do is a 2 day rolling schedule.
- tomasien 12y agoStripe does that now too which may have contributed to this.
- downandout 12y agoHow do you get that to happen? There is nothing in the docs about it.
- vampirechicken 12y agoProbably by becoming a highly-trusted, low-risk customer. Payment balance float is all about holding some money in reserve in case of chargebacks. The better your stats are, the less money a processor will insist on holding in reserve.
- downandout 12y agoBalanced did it by default.
- vampirechicken 12y agoI'm not familiar with the volume of data that balance collected at signup. But I am familiar with the volume of info in the PCI's "Know Your Customer" initiative. I i'm going to speculate wildly that balanced got to know their customers during onboarding, rather than waiting until after they started processing payments. Additionally, I think that a company's level of trust with their customers involves some 'coefficient of risk' regarding potential losses to chargebacks against a low or non-existent reserve. I find the topic interesting, especially the consequences at a federal level if you guess wrong and the "customer" turns out to be laundering money.
- nandemo 12y agoUnless you're a large operation that can benefit from the float, it's hard to see how that makes a significant difference.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bbissoon 12y ago... Wow, after all that work building a product on Balanced.
- ryduh 12y agoI'm so bummed about this. We choose Balanced for www.seedwise.com specifically for its per order escrow feature. We'll be missing that in Stripe as we move over.
- revisedallocute 12y agoyou won't notice difference.
- pc 12y agoYou can fully control the transfer schedule for any recipient with Stripe -- I think this should do what you want. (Feel free to drop us an email if you're having trouble; I'm patrick@stripe.com.)
- icelancer 12y agoWas worried about this for some time. They didn't support major third party shopping carts and ignored Github support tickets for months on end despite IRC help staff suggesting to submit them. They had great payout rules but when Stripe cut down on those times... Balanced was in a bad spot. Happy to see they will transition smoothly to an industry leader, even if their platforms aren't even close to being the same.
- tonyhb 12y agoIt's such a shame. They had a really good way of working. Their open API and product roadmap on Github was awesome. They had future plans for cryptocurrency and foreign markets. Their API worked beautifully. The only reason they've said is that they weren't big enough to be as innovative as they wanted.
- jareau 12y agohi icelander, Sorry to let you down. If you're a Balanced customer, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the transition: jkwade@balancedpayments.com
- steveklabnik 12y agoSad to hear this news. I had a wonderful time at Balanced. Payments is a very, very hard space, business-wise. All my best to my former co-workers.
- revisedallocute 12y agoACH(Balanced) is unprofitable if it doesn't have massive volume (fixed$/trans) . CC(Stripe) is more profitable - %rates are toggled.
- steveklabnik 12y agoAs a former employee, it would be bad form to respond to speculation by a 4 minute old HN account about the specifics here, so I will not. I'm not sure why you say Balanced(ACH) and Stripe(CC) when both do both, though.
- revisedallocute 12y agoProfitable companies don't shut down. Also it's not unusual for ACH processor to shut down. it's difficult. they certainly lasted longer than the any startup in the "old boys" space. Stripe will ingest it, has the buffer for the bad margins and will crush the old boys space. this is a good thing. didn't mean to offend.
- revisedallocute 12y agoDoing both is not same as doing both well (what contributes most to gross margin or keeps the lights on)
- arthurcolle 12y agoWhy is it hard, specifically?
- steveklabnik 12y agoTons of stuff. Random example: doing international payouts basically requires having a subsidiary in each country you want to pay out to, thanks to the credit card company agreements. This is a pretty high barrier to entry for anyone who wants to get started in the space.
- nhangen 12y agoThis felt like an April Fool's joke at first. I mean...I understand that Stripe is crushing it, but Balanced has a great product, and it really felt like they were making incremental gains in the marketplace. No matter how you slice it, competition is good and necessary, and it really sucks to see this happen to a good team.
- pc 12y agoStripe 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.
- keithwhor 12y agoAny plans for escrow services? That was the one pain point balanced tackled that Stripe has yet to provide a solution for.
- pc 12y agoYou 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bbissoon 12y agoIt'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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- outericky 12y agoFrom where I sit... that's 90 days.
- tghw 12y agoIt's too bad. Balanced was the only service of it's kind to provide ACH payments. Hopefully Stripe or Braintree will pick up this feature.
- bkrausz 12y agoStripe has an ACH beta we're letting all Balanced customers into.
- tonyhb 12y agoHow can we get in touch about this?
- dd36 12y agoWhat's the cost?
- bkrausz 12y agoSince it's still in beta we haven't solidified the cost yet. Feel free to reach out to sales@stripe.com if you wanted to discuss pricing for your account. We're honoring existing Balanced pricing, so it'll be at least as cheap as what you're currently paying :).
- tbrooks 12y agoI emailed Stripe this week and got turned down. Should I email again?
- ewang1 12y agoThe inability to transfer funds into Stripe makes it hard to use it as a payouts mechanism like you can with Balanced.
- dvirsky 12y agoThat's sad. I haven't used their product but I remember them fondly for their excellent blog post about their rigorous unit testing and continuous deployment methodology. http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payments-operations-automated-testing-continuous-deployment-jenkins/ http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payments-operation...
- bbissoon 12y agoThe problem is that Stripe requires sub merchants to create an account as well. Whereas Balanced, the account process was part of the API so your customers stayed in your application. That's going to be the biggest blow to the UI.
- rebelidealist 12y agoStripe has end to end white labeled marketplace features as well. https://stripe.com/us/marketplaces https://stripe.com/us/marketplaces
- bkrausz 12y agoWith our Transfers API[1] you can send funds to recipients in the US without requiring them to sign up for a Stripe account. [1] https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers
- dirtyaura 12y agoWhat are the reasons that you don't support Transfer API in Europe? We would need that but are forced to operate with a different model on a top of Braintree at the moment.
- shurcooL 12y agoSad to hear. I really wanted to see them succeed because of their open company approach, and hoping it would catch on.
- keithwhor 12y agoHuge win for Stripe. As a technical lead, I will (personally) never rely on smaller players for payment processing from this point forward. This just cost our engineering team three weeks of work, when we were debating just transitioning an old product to Stripe to begin with. We decided to stick with balanced. Stripe has now certainly solidified a dominant market position.
- jareau 12y ago(Balanced co-founder) Hi Keith, sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you and the Storefront team. Feel free to email me if you need any help with the migration: jkwade@balancedpayments.com. I sincerely appreciate the faith you placed in Balanced. I'm sorry we couldn't keep it going, but you're in good hands with Stripe.
- tbrooks 12y agoReally, really bummed. My v1 was orignally built on Stripe and I moved to Balanced quickly after they launched, because they offered ACH and escrow balance, etc. Whenever I moved over, Mahmoud (Balanced CTO) stayed up past 1am to help me migrate. That instantly won me over. The entire team was super responsive and every interaction I had with the Balanced team was superb. Sorry to see this company go away (tear). We run a non-significant amount of money through Balanced and hope that Stripe is a good fit. Not looking forward to re-writing our payments engine from the ground-up in 90 days :/
- bkrausz 12y agoYea, Patrick phrased it well when he said it's a bittersweet day for Stripe. We have a ton of respect for the team and what they've built. Hopefully we can make the transition as smooth as possible. If you run into any trouble, feel free to email me at bkrausz@stripe.com.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jesalg 12y agoThis is truly surprising. Balance was indeed a worthy competitor to Stripe. We chose them in my previous company because of their escrow feature and overall focus on building marketplaces.
- kpowerinfinity 12y agoReally unfortunate development. I preferred using them to Stripe earlier primarily because they made the job so much easier (order level escrow so we din't have to maintain them ourselves). Not looking forward to the migration! Wish Matin and the team at Balanced the very best for their future endeavors.
- crsmithdev 12y agoI nearly joined Balanced a little over a year ago, but went another route. I was really impressed with their founding team and employees, very much a class act with some smart, passionate people. Sorry to hear.
- ijohn50 12y agoStripe are definitely kicking ass at the moment. Paypal's login process is not very well thought out atm. If you go to paypal.com log in, then 90% of the screen is taken up by an ad asking you to sign up ( even though you are logged in ). You need to click on "My Paypal" that takes up 3% of the screen, before you see your dashboard.
- flangston 12y agoSorry to see Balanced go. They were definitely the most flexible platform available and always pushed the envelope. If you're not using Spreedly, I recommend it because it's a big help in this situation because it allows you to seamlessly switch services without losing any of your customer card data.
- dd36 12y agoACH support?
- ntalbott 12y agoSpreedly already supports vaulting bank account information, and while the number of gateways that we support passing bank account info to is still limited, we're growing that rapidly at the moment. Our gateway support is heavily influenced by customers, so anyone who has a gateway they'd like to pass bank account info to that we don't support today shouldn't hesitate to drop us a line.
- dd36 12y agoThx.
- patio11 12y agoIf you're not using Spreedly, I recommend it because it's a big help in this situation because it allows you to seamlessly switch services without losing any of your customer card data. Strongest possible +1 for this. I did a live migration from Paypal to Stripe in under 30 seconds once. Spreedly made this as easy as flipping a configuration switch. As far as I can tell, we didn't lose any business as a result of the migration. I don't see any reason I'd ever move off Stripe (+) but it's more than worth just preserving the convenient-doesn't-require-app-rewrite option to do so. + Edit to add: Ooh, got one: an acquirer can dictate a move to their favored/house processor as a term of an acquisition, and "Sure, give me six weeks to do engineering work" is not something you want to have to worry about when putting that deal together.
- martinshen 12y agoI think it's simply amazing what they built with a very limited amount of funding ($3.6M announced). Looking at there fundraising efforts, it looks like they never managed to get to a Series A. I wonder why?
- dblock 12y agoWe are very sad to see Balanced go at https://www.artsy.net https://www.artsy.net - we were an early and loyal customer. Balanced has been very good to us throughout the years. Thank you. We've actually had some support for Stripe too for a small service, an experiment, but were going to delete it and continue using Balanced 100% of the time.
- bkrausz 12y agoI'd love to hear why you were going to stop your Stripe usage. Totally understand if it was for the sake of consolidation, but if there were product needs that we weren't hitting it'd be great to know :).
- Flipperbw 12y agoLack of prefunding and escrow was/is a huge one for us.
- popnfreshspk 12y agoWithout pre-funding and escrow it's really hard to manage B2B relationships with the Stripe feature set. Ease of disbursement is a use case that made us choose Balanced over Stripe in the first place
- dblock 12y agoDefinitely consolidation. And we were generally happy with Balanced. Lack of pre-funding/escrow was not a big factor, but I can see how it can become one.
- bbissoon 12y agoDuring the migration, is our information ported over to Stripe or is it replicated? I want to start the migration but it doesn't specify whether or not it will cause Balanced users to lose access to the API all together.
- bkrausz 12y agoInformation will be replicated, including newly added information. You can click the migrate button, integrate over the next 90 days, and switch over to Stripe with no discrepancy in information. Balanced's meta fields will contain the Stripe IDs they were ported to, so you can migrate over to new objects incrementally.
- bbissoon 12y agoDuring the migration, is our information ported over to Stripe or is it replicated? I want to start the migration but it doesn't specify whether or not it will cause Balanced users to lose access to the API all together.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- buro9 12y agoI never used Balanced, but I want to really commend this announcement. It is the first announcement of such a kind that comes with a well-considered and already provided migration plan for customers to ensure no loss of service. That's a great standard to work to... leave yourself enough runway to look after your customers. The Balanced team should feel incredibly proud of managing such a co-ordinated shut down whilst under the stress and emotional turmoil of closing a company. It speaks volumes.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pnathan 12y agoYes, they should! This is a very mature and responsible shutdown (I'd also expect it to be mature and responsible, since payments are Very Important, but, on the other hand...). +1 to the Balanced executives for being mature.
- Pyxl101 12y agoDefinitely a mature approach, and it's definitely better for Balanced customers to have a migration plan. However, I don't think we can assume that Balanced "[left itself] enough runway to look after [its] customers" or that the primary motivation is maturity. Balanced may have offered to sell their customer base to Stripe (or sell the company to Stripe, which presumably was refused). If Stripe accepted a deal to purchase Balanced's customer base, then it might have provided as payment, in part, an injection of cash to keep Balanced running for 90 days to implement the migration and hold up their side of the deal. Balanced might have suspended operations already if not for the hypothetical cash payment. I'm not saying it would be wrong for Balanced to make that decision -- it's certainly better than shutting down! I'm just pointing out that Balanced may have other/more complex motivations for doing this than maturity, altruism, and leaving behind a good legacy. Balanced might be equally looking after its own shareholders by selling its (perhaps) most valuable asset: the customers. (The value of that asset crashes once Balanced ceases operations or announces its intention to do so, since its customers will immediately move to a competitor. Thus, this asset can only be sold while Balanced is still operating.) I have no data - I'm just speculating. However, would a responsible board allow a company to continue to operate and burn cash for 90 days solely for the purpose of migrating customers to a competitor, and taking further losses in the process, when it could shut down instead and disburse its remaining assets to shareholders and creditors? (I do not intend to cast asperions on Stripe or Balanced. There's nothing wrong about this if it's what happened - it's rational and in everyone's interest.)
- jfoster 12y agoInteresting. Google Wallet for Digital Goods shut down last week. It was a service whereby a business might have subscribers on a monthly subscription. Google offered no migration path; businesses had to inconvenience all subscribers by getting them to re-subscribe. It's fascinating that a startup which is going out of business acts in a more responsible manner than a huge tech company. Kudos to Balanced for doing the right thing.
- eviluncle 12y agoI'd like to be as optimistic as you are about this act by balanced, but I can't help but suspect there was some kind of deal between the two companies. After all, this will bring new business to stripe...
- lbotos 12y agoEven if so, is Google above handing off their customers to a service that is similar?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jfoster 12y agoSure. At a minimum, the people running Balanced are preserving their personal reputation by doing this. I like to take the pragmatic view about such things. Motivations aside, at the end of the day & in similar situations, Google decided to screw customers whilst Balanced decided to offer a smoother migration path. Even if Balanced's customers don't like Stripe, Stripe has a free data portability clause that will allow them to continue on to the payment processor of their choosing. (https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-if-i-decide-to-leave-stripe-can-i-export-card-data https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-if-i-decide-to-lea...)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jordanthoms 12y ago
- 1viquas1 12y agoWonder why I don't see "YC XX" after the company name like we usually see in other recruit or fund raising posts from YC backed company.
- santiagobasulto 12y ago90 days doesn't seem enough time at all. We run a big system on balanced. We're fucked.
- tbrooks 12y agoBig WFIO moment. http://scott.a16z.com/2014/03/24/were-fd-its-over-coming-back-from-the-brink/ http://scott.a16z.com/2014/03/24/were-fd-its-over-coming-bac...
- treeface 12y agoThis is one of those moments where good programming architecture and integration testing becomes obviously useful. We have a payment gateway interface and the transition to Stripe will be relatively painless after accounting for some accounting differences in how fees are charged.
- santiagobasulto 12y agoTotally true. We didn't do a great job in this case. At the end, programming can be summarized in two words: interfaces and abstractions.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- chrischen 12y agoI agree, it really shouldn't be that painful, unless you hardcoded balanced API calls everywhere and have no abstractions at all.
- itzmeank 12y agoSure we can help, alternatively you may consider https://sudopay.com https://sudopay.com as well ? Just trying to be helpful..
- seivan 12y agoWhat a class act from Balanced. I've never seen anything like this before. I just archived the site.
- Cieplak 12y agoBalanced engineer here. I wanted to say that it's been an invaluable experience to be here at Balanced. In spite of the bad news, I can't but help but be grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the small but extremely competent team here. I've grown immensely and want to give a shout out to @mahmoudimus, @mjallday and @msherry who are the most talented engineers I've ever met. The saddest thing for me is prospect that I might not be working with them in three months from now, but at least I know that they will surely go on to do amazing work.
- q2 12y agoCompared to stripe[0], balanced[1] took very less funding as per the data. Reading from the comments here, their service seems to be liked by users. In that case, may be they should have looked into funding aspect rather than shutting down and funding might have helped them to become large,independent player as they wished. Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seeing from outside. Am I missing anything here? [0] https://angel.co/stripe https://angel.co/stripe [1] https://angel.co/balanced https://angel.co/balanced
- tim333 12y agoI guess it may have been too late in the end to get further funding but it they had raised something like Stripe's $100m rather than their $1.55m things could have been different. Not sure what this says about startup strategy - maybe bootstrap if you can but if you raise, raise big?
- patio11 12y agoSo let's not make this story about Balanced, but let me spin you a yarn of a totally hypothetical company named FooCorp, which has a plan to disrupt a sclerotic two-sided marketplace. FooCorp has a team of talented product people working for it. They've got a gleam in their eye and a story on how they're going to attack a ridiculously large market. FooCorp easily sails to an angel round sized in the high six or low seven figures based on this. FooCorp then hires, say, a half-dozen engineers to help their founders build things out. These engineers have AmaGooBookSoft pedigrees and cost $8k apiece... every two weeks. FooCorp's product is quite beloved by early users. They accelerate hiring and marketing. Things are going swimmingly. The founders of FooCorp, having the best of advice from mentors and friends, start trying to put together an A round, which will be millions or tens of millions of dollars raised from professional investors. "People love us." "How many?" "... Well, a growing number." "What's the monthly growth rate." "We've got a wonderful graph." "Kid, I'm a professional at this and have heard every possible dodge. Give me numbers. What's your marketplace volume?" "Millions." "NOT A RESPONSIVE ANSWER." "... Two million." "Per what?" "... Total." "Cool. OK, I think we have what we need here. Keep us apprised of your progress. We really like you and the team." which is VC for "We will not invest but if you want to give us a free no-obligation option on investing because you're new at this then we'll take it." Seed is raised on the dream. A rounds are raised on the metrics. If you don't have the metrics, you don't raise an A round. If you've hired in the expectation of an A round, and you don't either hit profitability before your money runs out or hit metrics which justify an A round, your company unceremoniously dies. This is by far the most common outcome. This is sort of the talk-of-town right now, generally phrased as "Series A Crunch."
- joshstrange 12y ago90 days to rewrite your payment stack.... Damn, I feel sorry for any startups using Balanced. A startup I worked on used Balanced but went under well before this announcement but had I still been working on it this would have been terrible news (it still is). I really liked balanced and "kickstarted" their debit card push stuff (I have a t-shirt from it). I'm sad to see them go, really wish they could have given more than 90 days though, that's a lot of work in 90 days and god forbid the person who wrote your payment stack is no longer with you...
- vertis 12y agoI have a lot of respect for a company that provides a clear way forward for their users.
- samora 12y agoThis is kind of sad. Balanced Payments is one of the companies I look up to. Very sad when you lose a role model.
- zrail 12y agoNot sure how I feel about this. Balanced has, until recently, seemed like the more flexible, DIY option in the payments space. Their API had some pretty neat features that I hope Stripe picks up at some point. <shameless plug> If you're looking to migrate a Rails app to Stripe, I wrote a short book that may help you out. https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/ https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/ </plug>
- rl3 12y agohttps://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/commits/master https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/commits... Even in death, Balanced's radical commitment to transparency lives on. I'm not aware of any other companies with similar traction that have literally put their main website on GitHub. What a sad day.
- lgas 12y agoSorry to hear this guys. I really wanted to see you guys triumph.
- hoboon 12y agoI interviewed with these guys a few years ago. Nice people, good people. I don't have a web background but they gave me a fighting chance anyways. I wish them the best.
- ZeroMinx 12y agoBefore this announcement, I'd never heard of Balanced. Reading comments, some people are saying it was a great service. But, it's shutting down, while services less great carry on. This is hard for dev people (like myself) to realize, but if you're looking for commercial success, marketing is generally worth more than the quality of your product.
- frabcus 12y agoGood marketing is part of a quality product. A key stage is hearing about a product at all - it is completely useless if you never hear about it. See my blog post "How to use time-travelling anthropologist pollsters to tell good from evil marketing": http://www.flourish.org/2013/04/how-to-use-time-travelling-anthropologist-pollsters-to-tell-good-from-evil-marketing/ http://www.flourish.org/2013/04/how-to-use-time-travelling-a...
- jacquesm 12y agoBig payment providers can die as well, this has happened 3 times over the last decade alone and the collateral damage of those failures is immense.
- jackgavigan 12y ago> This is hard for dev people (like myself) to realize, but if you're looking for commercial success, marketing is generally worth more than the quality of your product. Disclaimer: I have an MBA. I don't think that's the case. The factors that contribute to commercial success very much depend on the market that you're operating in and on your company's individual circumstances. They can include product quality, marketing and PR, cost structure, reach, scale (and economies thereof), revenues, growth, cash flow, and management's ability in a range of areas from crisis management and dealing with bad publicity, to setting the strategy and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise. For startups who will need to raise more investment rounds, attractiveness to investors also becomes a factor. Processing credit card payments is a mature market with a commoditised product/service and clear business model. Everyone pretty much offers the same service and, for most customers, price (i.e. how much commission they charge) is the most important differentiating factor[1]. It's a very different market from, say, smartphones, where people are prepared to pay a premium for a "better" product (e.g. the iPhone) despite the fact that they all have the same basic functionality. When it comes to competing on price, you ideally want to have a lower cost base than your competitors, so you can lower your prices (i.e. charge lower commissions), while still making a profit. One way of reducing your cost-per-transaction (or cost-per-customer) is to exploit economies of scale. You achieve economies of scale by getting more customers and transaction volume. Marketing is an obvious way to achieve this. And, in a zero-sum market like credit card payments, every customer you win is a customer your competitors can't have. That's why companies like Stripe are focused so much on growth and expanding into different geographical markets. If they can achieve scale quicker than their competitors, they'll have a competitive advantage and they'll be able to undercut competitors who haven't managed to achieve the same scale (e.g. Balanced). Other markets are different. In some, customers discriminate on product quality instead of price, or technical excellence (i.e. efficiency) enables a lower cost base. 1: Occasionally, a payments processing company will distinguish itself by establishing a lead in a particular area (e.g. ease of integration) but the competitive advantage is usually short-lived. On this thread, there's much commentary about specific features but these don't matter to the vast majority of customers.
- billclerico 12y agoOne side note (from a cofounder of WePay here). WePay is 100% focused on serving the needs of two-sided platforms like marketplaces - and now we're the only company that can claim to do so. We're bummed to see Balanced go, as I think they have a great product - indicative of what a focus on the space can produce. But we're excited to carry the torch forward. We process billions annually and have crossed the scale chasm that the article describes (and have raised a fair amount of money to boot). If any Balanced customer (or other marketplace) would like to chat, I'm happy to do so. Shoot me a note at bill@wepay.com
- untilHellbanned 12y agoNormally I don't like these types of ransacking infomercials, but I think you, like PC of Stripe, struck the right notes with your tone. I'm a long-time Stripe user but I'll look into WePay. Good luck to your team!
- payvy 12y agoWhat is your ACH pricing, you don't display it on your website.
- vasusen 12y agoOur ACH pricing is 1% + 30¢ - https://support.wepay.com/hc/en-us/articles/203609623-What-are-WePay-s-fees- https://support.wepay.com/hc/en-us/articles/203609623-What-a...
- ianhawes 12y agoAs a former customer of WePay, I'd like to warn everyone considering using WePay that their compliance department will shut you down multiple times, decline to specify why, then freeze all funds within your account. WePay is completely out of touch with their customers, and I would recommend Stripe over WePay any day.
- ianlevesque 12y agoSounds like PayPal all over again
- retreatguru 12y agoOur startup Retreat Guru is using Balanced and we were impressed by their vision and support. Sorry to see them go but looking forward to working with Stripe. I wish them all well in their future ventures.
- retreatguru 12y agoOur startup Retreat Guru is using Balanced and we were impressed by their vision and support. Sorry to see them go but looking forward to working with Stripe. I wish them all well in their future ventures.
- daryn 12y agowow, this is a real bummer. Good luck guys. p.s. Classy move on the migration plan.
- itzmeank 12y agoMigration Woes ? Sudopay once and then keep switching payment gateways easily... :)
- lostpixel 12y agoThis is indeed very sad news. We at BillForward (YCS14) found the Balanced payments platform for ACH very well designed. Plaid and Stripe certainly have caught up and both and offer good ACH alternatives. Best of luck to those migrating. Happy to chat with anyone who is interested in help with gateway independent ACH payments and subscription management. I'm on ian AT billforward . NET
- nodesocket 12y agoI'd argue the Balanced dashboard (Ember.js) is superior to the Stripe dashboard. Their technology, design, and engineers are exceptional, but just shows how important market, positioning, and being first is. The "startup game" is brutal. They had everything in place... YC company, top tier investors (Andreessen), great product... The market just overwhelmed them.
- shavenwarthog2 12y agoI'm sorry to see Balanced go. As CTO, I used their service and was always impressed. The site and docs were clean and obvious, really helpful when dealing with scary things like money. Kudos, Balanced!
- colmvp 12y agoI just want to say to anyone who works at Balanced that your work was exceptional and as a user, it was a huge blow to hear this news.
- patcon 12y agoI am unreasonably bummed about this. Balanced was outrageously wonderful to Gittip/Gratipay, which is near and dear to my heart... I would say more, but I'm on mobile and quasi-drunkenly eating a Subway sandwich :/
- 1945 12y agoBalanced really had a nice web app. Kudos to their team.
- ChuckFrank 12y agoLong shot. But if any engineers or developers from Balanced find themselves with time in their lives and are interested in working on a marketplace that optimizes prices discovery, I'd be excited for the opportunity to talk to them. Drop me a line, I'm in town and I'd love to take you out for beers.
- thinkingkong 12y agoCan I just say how goddamned responsible that is. Thank you.
- fermigier 12y agoIs there any chance that the full code base (not just the API and supporting projects) will be open sourced ?
- johnx123-up 12y agoCouple of months back I made a comment on why SudoPay looks quite useful in this volatile payment domain. This again proves my point.
- kalu 12y agoWhat are the chances that Stripe paid Balanced to shut down? For Stripe, it seems like good business to "buy" your competitors when they are young. Plus, they would get a bundle of customers. And for Balanced, if the payment was high enough, a decision to wind down could make sense for the investors. Competition is generally good for customers. In the short run it seems trivial... but in the long run it could matter in a big way. Stripe: did you pay for Balanced's customers? If so, was it your idea to buy or did Balanced bring it up?
- sumedh 12y agoI dont think Stripe paid Balanced to shut down because the both the parties would look bad. Stripe could have just acquired Balance allowing the founders of Balanced save face and Stripe gets Balanced's customers very cheap.