That 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.
Probably 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.
I'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.
I'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.
You 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.)
Profitable 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.
Tons 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.
Getting a money transmitter license in virtually every state, many of them requiring six-figure surety bonds, is just one of the many hurdles before you can take your first customer. First you have to raise the cash, then you have to deal with at least this many government agencies:
Was 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.
It'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.
hi 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
This 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't be such a jerk. First, contact Stripe support which is typically very responsive. Second, if you're going to post here, best to assume positive intent.
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.
By default support@balancedpayments.com can help you out, since they have more info on your account. If you have questions that you'd rather direct my way, feel free to ping me at bkrausz@stripe.com
Since 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 :).
Balanced will be providing a link to migrate your account over to Stripe. This will automatically enable ACH for that migrated account.
If you want to migrate into an existing account you should email support@balancedpayments.com, they can help you out and make sure we put the right settings onto your account.
We're a marketplace that uses Balanced's ACH + escrow for moving money between buyers and sellers. I am glad to hear you will be supporting this on Stripe, but since I only have 90 days to migrate when will api/ruby support be ready and where can we find docs?
Perhaps the docs are available as soon as I migrate? I am hesitant to start that process until I have code written to support Stripe. I don't want to end up with my data on Stripe going stale while I am still using Balanced to move money. Of course I am only assuming that scenario is what would happen, the announcement is pretty thin on details.
The Ruby bindings already support ACH via the "source" parameter (see https://stripe.com/blog/unifying-payment-types-in-the-api). We're putting the finishing touches on a guide to make migrating code from Balanced to Stripe as easy as possible: it should be out soon.
I contacted forte a while ago when i was considering switching from balanced - Their prices were higher than balanced offered:
$19.95 a month for ACH/E-Check
$.24 per check verification
$.25 per ACH transaction
$2.00 Per rejected item fee for ACH
Customer Support & Training Included
Free Recurring Transaction Manager
That'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.
The 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.
What 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.
Huge 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.
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.
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 :/
This 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.
Really 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.
I 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.
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.
Sorry 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.
Spreedly 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.
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.
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.
I think it's generally better to code directly to one provider and in the very rare instance you need/decide to change, go ahead and do the relatively easy work.
I 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?
188 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadAdditionally, 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.
I'm not sure why you say Balanced(ACH) and Stripe(CC) when both do both, though.
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/licenses
I was gonna swing by the office when I'm in SF in a month or two, oh well :/
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.
The only reason they've said is that they weren't big enough to be as innovative as they wanted.
No matter how you slice it, competition is good and necessary, and it really sucks to see this happen to a good team.
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.
Greetings from a fellow "Limerician" btw :)
I want to start the migration, but don't want to lose access to Balanced all together until we're ready...
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.
Specifically, for those in the ACH beta you can put a customer's bank account token in that field to charge their bank account.
(I currently have this ability with Balanced. Also have very low fraud, chargeback, etc.)
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.
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.
https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm
Wasted 2 hours on the phone with the bank to find out it was all Stripe's fault.
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.
Should I email again?
If you want to migrate into an existing account you should email support@balancedpayments.com, they can help you out and make sure we put the right settings onto your account.
Perhaps the docs are available as soon as I migrate? I am hesitant to start that process until I have code written to support Stripe. I don't want to end up with my data on Stripe going stale while I am still using Balanced to move money. Of course I am only assuming that scenario is what would happen, the announcement is pretty thin on details.
https://www.forte.net/
$19.95 a month for ACH/E-Check $.24 per check verification $.25 per ACH transaction $2.00 Per rejected item fee for ACH Customer Support & Training Included Free Recurring Transaction Manager
http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payments-operation...
[1] https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers
Stripe has now certainly solidified a dominant market position.
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.
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 :/
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.
Wish Matin and the team at Balanced the very best for their future endeavors.
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.
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.
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.
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.