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I'm assisting in development of a backend for a painting service that works with many contractors across the US. We've been using Stripe, but the business has been paying the contractors using their bank's ACH service add-on which takes 3-5 days and has to be done manually.

Balanced seems like it's Stripe + next-day ACH payouts with a great API, automating everything. Is this an accurate description of the service? I'm confused why you'd ever use Stripe over Balanced in that case. This is assuming it's also a merchant account + payment gateway like Stripe if I'm reading correctly.

Still wrapping my head around how to best make this work. Thanks everyone.

Akuta
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    Ben from Stripe here -- You might find [this Quora discussion](http://quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-compare-against-Stripe) helpful: Martin Tamizi (CEO of Balanced) and Amber Feng (engineer at Stripe) described the relative merits and target use cases. Please don't hesitate to [get in touch](https://stripe.com/help/contact) if you'd like to discuss your particular needs in more detail. (I'm sure the Balanced folks would be similarly happy to help.) – brahn Jan 14 '13 at 07:23
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    Stripe now has an API for ACH payouts https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers – JeremyWeir Sep 11 '13 at 03:35

4 Answers4

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Stripe:

  • Charge cards
  • ACH payouts
  • Recurring billing
  • Webhooks
  • OAuth merchant signup
  • 2.9% + 30¢ per charge
  • Holds funds for 7 days before you can pay out
  • Charges in USD or CAD

Balanced:

In a nutshell the fundamental difference is that Stripe focuses on bringing money in to your account, Balanced focuses on bringing money in, holding it until an order to fulfilled, and paying out to your merchants.

You can use Stripe to collect money and Balanced to pay out easily enough, the biggest problem you'll run into is that there will be a liquidity problem as you have to transfer funds from your Stripe to Balanced before you can pay out or create a float of 7 days.

Mahmoud Abdelkader
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mjallday
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  • The only way to get funds from Stripe to Balanced is to ACH deposit after it's cleared from your bank to Balanced correct? – Akuta Jan 15 '13 at 11:47
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    Akuta, that's correct. Balanced supports adding funds to your bank account using your bank account, but it will take up to 4 days for it to clear. So, with Stripe, it will take 7 business days to enter your bank account. Then, it will take an extra 4 days to clear for Balanced, in total making it 11 business days to clear. However, if you use Balanced for credit card processing, your funds are available immediately for use. – Mahmoud Abdelkader Jan 15 '13 at 22:24
  • The "fundamental difference" mentioned in this answers no longer really applies, now that Stripe supports ACH payouts (https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe) – Russell Davis Sep 13 '13 at 05:46
  • balanced does not have recurring billing, Billy is in beta and cannot be used for production at this time, so effectively Balanced is without recurring billing which is sad since I wanted to use them as payment processor b/c of ACH support – AppDeveloper Nov 30 '13 at 06:13
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    For anyone coming to this page now, Balanced has been shut down. – Corey Dec 06 '15 at 17:52
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Stripe is also great if you have sub-agents or affiliates that you want to have run the sale, but where you take a percentage of the total charge as well. We recently implemented this for a cause oriented site that supports the collection of donations for smaller and more personal causes. It is one of the more interesting features of the Stripe API. Sub accounts can be created on the fly and activated via a simple email validation creating a one-stop shop for configuring online affiliate programs.

Mary Camacho
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  • Ah yes, but you have to redirect your users off your website to go to Stripe.com. With Balanced, that's not required. The user stays on your website. This allows you to maintain your brand. – Mahmoud Abdelkader Feb 23 '13 at 21:54
  • @MahmoudAbdelkader at what point in what Mary described would the user go to Stripe.com? – Charlie Schliesser Apr 11 '13 at 19:34
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    @CharlieS, I went to Mary's website, http://incause.com/, and I signed up to collect for a cause and towards step 3 or 4 it redirected me to Stripe. I believe Mary here is referencing Stripe Connect (which requires a redirect to Stripe's website, see docs here: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/getting-started) – Mahmoud Abdelkader Apr 11 '13 at 20:41
  • Agreed that this may take you off - but we incorporated it into the workflow without a problem. The user was directed back into our workflow - similar to how paypal directs you off to pay and then returns you. It was a very low-cost implementation that worked. – Mary Camacho Oct 11 '14 at 13:53
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Both are good for specific things, for example balanced will let you collect money from groups in a single pot (in their escrow), and then pay it out. Stripe is good for automated billing.

Edward Verenich
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Stripe is a established company that has a polished interface and support. Balanced is a fly-by-night.
I have one site with Balanced and one with Stripe Connect, and this is the defining difference.

  • Balanced changed their API and completely broke all transactions. They didn't even send out an email. Never happened with Stripe.
  • Balanced once "held up our site for review". Our marketplace went down with no notice or email. (And no explanation when I emailed them, just a response it was being held).
  • balanced.js can take 10-15 seconds to load, causing the page to hang (we implemented lazy loading just for balanced, but the page is not always ready when needed).
  • IRC support: Balanced has ~40 inactive users and ~10 users online ATM [in the middle of the U.S. night there are no user, and the inactive users have no AI personality]. Stripe has at least 100 active users, and I seem to be able to get an answer whenever I need to.
  • etc.

Balanced has one killer feature - your users can sign up and start selling immediately, they don't need to validate themselves to sell, only to receive money.
They are more likely to follow through if it's easy to get into the system. But the risks are real, and should not be ignored.

Also, if it matters, the fact that Stripe can accept payments in multiple currencies can be a killer feature as well.

SamGoody
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    There are an average of 8 employees present most of the day in IRC support. In fact, there's 1 bot. It's for botbot.me/freenode/balanced/ which logs chat history for convenient searching. The remainder of the persons in the channel are customers or users that wish to hang around. http://cl.ly/image/3W473b2d2R44 Balanced recently released v1.1 of the Balanced API, which is a REST API based on the JSON API specification. This was in beta for several months, nothing sudden about it. Customers may continue using v1.0 and migrate when ready. – Remear Apr 03 '14 at 23:49
  • When I leave my computer connected for three weeks with no interaction on my part, it is essentially a bot that has connected. And you can insist that the API changes required migration - but for us, the site stopped working, and when I went to debug, found that changes to the code HAD to be made. [It may have been ready in beta for those that can afford to run a site using a processing system that is in beta, but when it hit me, it was certainly sudden.] – SamGoody May 01 '14 at 09:28