Show HN: Forge - an easy way to take payments powered by balancedpayments.com

Congrats on launching! Really like the design and prominent example. One question: what's the advantage of this over Gumroad/Ribbon.co? Lower fees?<p>Also, you mentioned that this is targeted at a non-technical market. I'd definitely think about revisiting the homepage copy/selling points. To me it still feels targeted toward a developer audience. Perhaps a couple of use cases would be helpful to show off the types of businesses that would find Forge useful? (<a href="http://goodsie.com" rel="nofollow">http://goodsie.com</a> and <a href="http://shopify.com" rel="nofollow">http://shopify.com</a> come to mind as decent examples of this).<p>Good luck!

Is this just another wacky advertisement? Why would people use this over the more useful/well-known ones like stripe or braintree payments?<p>Even if it's free, it's not really any better. Running the payment process of checking/validating cards and all that for your company individually that is primarily web-based may be more work and end up costing more.

I'm not convinced that a standalone payments system is useful for anyone: the type of person who couldn't get stripe or balanced payments to work most likely will leverage a turnkey storefront solution.<p>Forge needs to have connectors to storefronts (or build their own system and market the package). A payment system in absentia makes no sense.