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.
I never used Balanced, but I want to really commend this announcement.<p>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.<p>That's a great standard to work to... leave yourself enough runway to look after your customers.<p>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.
Interesting. 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.<p>Kudos to Balanced for doing the right thing.
Really, really bummed.<p>My v1 was orignally built on Stripe and I moved to Balanced quickly after they launched, because they offered ACH and escrow balance, etc.<p>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).<p>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 :/
One 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.<p>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.<p>We process billions annually and have crossed the scale chasm that the article describes (and have raised a fair amount of money to boot).<p>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
Balanced 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.
<a href="https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/commits/master" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/commits...</a><p>Even in death, Balanced's radical commitment to transparency lives on.<p>I'm not aware of any other companies with similar traction that have literally put their main website on GitHub.<p>What a sad day.
Compared 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.<p>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.<p>Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seeing from outside. Am I missing anything here?<p>[0] <a href="https://angel.co/stripe" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/stripe</a>
[1] <a href="https://angel.co/balanced" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/balanced</a>
Sorry to see Balanced go. They were definitely the most flexible platform available and always pushed the envelope.<p>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.
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.<p>They had great payout rules but when Stripe cut down on those times... Balanced was in a bad spot.<p>Happy to see they will transition smoothly to an industry leader, even if their platforms aren't even close to being the same.
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.<p>Stripe has now certainly solidified a dominant market position.
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.<p>No matter how you slice it, competition is good and necessary, and it really sucks to see this happen to a good team.
Before this announcement, I'd never heard of Balanced.<p>Reading comments, some people are saying it was a great service. But, it's shutting down, while services less great carry on.<p>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.
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.
During 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.
We are very sad to see Balanced go at <a href="https://www.artsy.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.artsy.net</a> - we were an early and loyal customer. Balanced has been very good to us throughout the years. Thank you.<p>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.
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?
I'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.
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.
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.
90 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...
This is indeed very sad news. We at BillForward (YCS14) found the Balanced payments platform for ACH very well designed.<p>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
Stripe are definitely kicking ass at the moment.<p>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.
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.
I'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!
What 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.<p>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.<p>Stripe: did you pay for Balanced's customers? If so, was it your idea to buy or did Balanced bring it up?
Not 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.<p><shameless plug><p>If you're looking to migrate a Rails app to Stripe, I wrote a short book that may help you out.<p><a href="https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/</a><p></plug>
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.<p><a href="http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payments-operations-automated-testing-continuous-deployment-jenkins/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payments-operation...</a>
Long 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.
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!<p>Wish Matin and the team at Balanced the very best for their future endeavors.
I 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 :/
Our 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.
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.
I 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.<p>I wish them the best.
Wonder 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.