Why We Switched From Stripe To Balanced

This article really should be titled "Why we chose Balanced over BancBox."<p>Stripe quite simply wasn't the service they needed and they made a mistake in initial selection. This article title implies that Balanced is "better" than Stripe when they are quite different services entirely.

&#62; Integrating billing into an app used to be a pain in the ass. I remember integrating BrainTree into a previous startup back in 2008, and it was a four month long process. Applying for a merchant account to even start accepting credit card payments took at least three months to get approved.<p>This is a massive win. I remember trying to setup payments and begin rejected several times by Worldpay and this was a process that took several months and required us to keep funds in escrow. Ultimately we settled on PayPal integration which required sending customers off to paypal.com and hoping they went through with it.<p>I'd love to see some case-studies in terms of conversion rates for completing transactions when it comes to keeping customers on site to do payments versus sending them to a 3rd party.

Huh. Balanced offers same-day payouts to Wells Fargo bank accounts and next-day to others if it's before 3 PM PST. I love Stripe, but I hate the 7 day rolling period. I use Square for my in-person transactions and get the money the next day. Why can't Stripe do this?<p>I wonder if Balanced has good integration with the third-party shopping carts out there...

At my last consultancy I heard great things about BrainTree with Python... however, that was someone else's baby, and I've only ever worked with Auth.net, Stripe, and some awful processors that are better left undiscussed. Stripe is hands-down the easiest.<p>If Balanced is that easy <i>and</i> enables escrow-style payments, that's pretty brilliant. Will definitely be looking into it for future projects.

Hey Balanced, many of your competitors have rolling payouts and/or reserve requirements due to the risk of refunds and chargebacks.<p>How and why are you willing to float that risk?

Why not just batch all your payouts daily and do ACH with your bank for payouts? Costs us $17/mo and takes 5min no matter how many payouts we need per day by uploading a file to our bank.

How hard would it be for all the PSPs out there to standardize on one API, maintaining of course the ability to add proprietary extension to it? There's a shitload of <i>the most boring work on Earth</i> to do for integrating with each... I remember using the PayPal api time ago and even that was <i>hell</i>... and no matter how good an API is designed, it's still hell because it's <i>another</i> one to integrate with... Can't we make something like w3c for payment systems?

I too, looked at both BrainTree and Balanced and decided on Balanced. However I liked that BrainTree seemed to focus more on the international part of payments.

We were actually looking to implement Stripe and didn't see a simple way of handling disbursements. Thanks for sharing the experiences with Balanced.

You only briefly mentioned PayPal, but I'm genuinely curious; did you look into PayPal Adaptive Preapproved Payments (optionally with the embedded flow as seen here: <a href="https://www.x.com/sites/default/files/paypal/imported/lightbox3.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.x.com/sites/default/files/paypal/imported/lightb...</a>)? If so, why did you decide this was not for you?

Did you look at Stripe Apps?<p>I was thinking escrow for my startup originally but stripe apps offer a different approach - i.e. cash goes straight from tenant to customer with fees (including a handling fee paid to you) deducted directly from the tenant.<p>It's a nice alternative to a straight-up escrow setup.

I can only imagine BrainTree was different in 2008. I just integrated BrainTree into a two-platform system. It took the team a week, most of which was integrating with our order system and doing the UI. The API itself is very pleasant in my opinion.

A couple thoughts:<p>I really like the layout of the blog. It's nice looking and clean.<p>The other comments about choosing the wrong tool are apt, but it's also true that this is a part of the payments business. Stripe can choose to do the sorts of holds and escrows these folks are looking for, or not, but I do think Stripe is particularly easy to integrate.<p>I think this piece is really trying to articulate the grouptalent business model to developers and it comes off pretty well to my mind.

I'd be curious to know: Why not have developers have a Stripe account and charge $8K and you charge $2K and exit the escrow business altogether?

Bad timing? Stripe announced their Connect platform for marketplaces last October: <a href="https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-connect" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-connect</a>

From the article - &#62;Mollie, GroupTalent's Director of Happiness,...<p>Ok, I get you want to be hip and all, but Mollie will someday apply for like a real job in the real world, and the company will look at her resume and go "Director of Happiness...very pretentious, are the rest of us Directors of Misery or what...", and that resume meets the shredder.<p>Why not give Mollie a real, you know, non-vacuous title ?