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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I never used Balanced, but I want to really commend this announcement.
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.
That's a great standard to work to... leave yourself enough runway to look after your customers.
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.
Yes, they should! This is a very mature and responsible shutdown (I'd also expect it to be mature and responsible, since payments are Very Important, but, on the other hand...).
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.
Not only did Google have no migration path, they emailed all our customers saying their subscription was cancelled with no explanation why, leading to panic.
I'd like to be as optimistic as you are about this act by balanced, but I can't help but suspect there was some kind of deal between the two companies. After all, this will bring new business to 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 :/
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.
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.
We process billions annually and have crossed the scale chasm that the article describes (and have raised a fair amount of money to boot).
If any Balanced customer (or other marketplace) would like to chat, I'm happy to do so. Shoot me a note at [email protected]
As a former customer of WePay, I'd like to warn everyone considering using WePay that their compliance department will shut you down multiple times, decline to specify why, then freeze all funds within your account. WePay is completely out of touch with their customers, and I would recommend Stripe over WePay any day.
Normally I don't like these types of ransacking infomercials, but I think you, like PC of Stripe, struck the right notes with your tone. I'm a long-time Stripe user but I'll look into WePay.
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.
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.
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.
Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seeing from outside. Am I missing anything here?
So let's not make this story about Balanced, but let me spin you a yarn of a totally hypothetical company named FooCorp, which has a plan to disrupt a sclerotic two-sided marketplace.
FooCorp has a team of talented product people working for it. They've got a gleam in their eye and a story on how they're going to attack a ridiculously large market. FooCorp easily sails to an angel round sized in the high six or low seven figures based on this.
FooCorp then hires, say, a half-dozen engineers to help their founders build things out. These engineers have AmaGooBookSoft pedigrees and cost $8k apiece... every two weeks.
FooCorp's product is quite beloved by early users. They accelerate hiring and marketing. Things are going swimmingly.
The founders of FooCorp, having the best of advice from mentors and friends, start trying to put together an A round, which will be millions or tens of millions of dollars raised from professional investors.
"People love us."
"How many?"
"... Well, a growing number."
"What's the monthly growth rate."
"We've got a wonderful graph."
"Kid, I'm a professional at this and have heard every possible dodge. Give me numbers. What's your marketplace volume?"
"Millions."
"NOT A RESPONSIVE ANSWER."
"... Two million."
"Per what?"
"... Total."
"Cool. OK, I think we have what we need here. Keep us apprised of your progress. We really like you and the team." which is VC for "We will not invest but if you want to give us a free no-obligation option on investing because you're new at this then we'll take it."
Seed is raised on the dream. A rounds are raised on the metrics. If you don't have the metrics, you don't raise an A round. If you've hired in the expectation of an A round, and you don't either hit profitability before your money runs out or hit metrics which justify an A round, your company unceremoniously dies. This is by far the most common outcome.
This is sort of the talk-of-town right now, generally phrased as "Series A Crunch."
I guess it may have been too late in the end to get further funding but it they had raised something like Stripe's $100m rather than their $1.55m things could have been different. Not sure what this says about startup strategy - maybe bootstrap if you can but if you raise, raise big?
Wow I am shocked to see how little money Balanced raised. Considering their pedigree and name recognition I would have expected a lot more. They must have either not been interested in raising funds or had really bad financials that scared off any Series A prospects. Hopefully we get some kind of post-mortem once the dust has settled.
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.
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.
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.
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: [email protected].
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.
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.
Before this announcement, I'd never heard of Balanced.
Reading comments, some people are saying it was a great service. But, it's shutting down, while services less great carry on.
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.
Information will be replicated, including newly added information. You can click the migrate button, integrate over the next 90 days, and switch over to Stripe with no discrepancy in information.
Balanced's meta fields will contain the Stripe IDs they were ported to, so you can migrate over to new objects incrementally.
We are very sad to see Balanced go at https://www.artsy.net - we were an early and loyal customer. Balanced has been very good to us throughout the years. Thank you.
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'd love to hear why you were going to stop your Stripe usage. Totally understand if it was for the sake of consolidation, but if there were product needs that we weren't hitting it'd be great to know :).
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?
[+] [-] pc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akoumjian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithwhor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elwell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plug|11 years ago|reply
Greetings from a fellow "Limerician" btw :)
[+] [-] tbrooks|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] natemc|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quadrangle|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] buro9|11 years ago|reply
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.
That's a great standard to work to... leave yourself enough runway to look after your customers.
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.
[+] [-] pnathan|11 years ago|reply
+1 to the Balanced executives for being mature.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jfoster|11 years ago|reply
Kudos to Balanced for doing the right thing.
[+] [-] jordanthoms|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eviluncle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tbrooks|11 years ago|reply
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 :/
[+] [-] bkrausz|11 years ago|reply
Hopefully we can make the transition as smooth as possible. If you run into any trouble, feel free to email me at [email protected].
[+] [-] billclerico|11 years ago|reply
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.
We process billions annually and have crossed the scale chasm that the article describes (and have raised a fair amount of money to boot).
If any Balanced customer (or other marketplace) would like to chat, I'm happy to do so. Shoot me a note at [email protected]
[+] [-] ianhawes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untilHellbanned|11 years ago|reply
Good luck to your team!
[+] [-] payvy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cieplak|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rl3|11 years ago|reply
Even in death, Balanced's radical commitment to transparency lives on.
I'm not aware of any other companies with similar traction that have literally put their main website on GitHub.
What a sad day.
[+] [-] q2|11 years ago|reply
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.
Since YC backed, funding should not have been much difficult either. So it is surprising,seeing from outside. Am I missing anything here?
[0] https://angel.co/stripe [1] https://angel.co/balanced
[+] [-] patio11|11 years ago|reply
FooCorp has a team of talented product people working for it. They've got a gleam in their eye and a story on how they're going to attack a ridiculously large market. FooCorp easily sails to an angel round sized in the high six or low seven figures based on this.
FooCorp then hires, say, a half-dozen engineers to help their founders build things out. These engineers have AmaGooBookSoft pedigrees and cost $8k apiece... every two weeks.
FooCorp's product is quite beloved by early users. They accelerate hiring and marketing. Things are going swimmingly.
The founders of FooCorp, having the best of advice from mentors and friends, start trying to put together an A round, which will be millions or tens of millions of dollars raised from professional investors.
"People love us."
"How many?"
"... Well, a growing number."
"What's the monthly growth rate."
"We've got a wonderful graph."
"Kid, I'm a professional at this and have heard every possible dodge. Give me numbers. What's your marketplace volume?"
"Millions."
"NOT A RESPONSIVE ANSWER."
"... Two million."
"Per what?"
"... Total."
"Cool. OK, I think we have what we need here. Keep us apprised of your progress. We really like you and the team." which is VC for "We will not invest but if you want to give us a free no-obligation option on investing because you're new at this then we'll take it."
Seed is raised on the dream. A rounds are raised on the metrics. If you don't have the metrics, you don't raise an A round. If you've hired in the expectation of an A round, and you don't either hit profitability before your money runs out or hit metrics which justify an A round, your company unceremoniously dies. This is by far the most common outcome.
This is sort of the talk-of-town right now, generally phrased as "Series A Crunch."
[+] [-] tim333|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsdpython|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flangston|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] patio11|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dd36|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] keithwhor|11 years ago|reply
Stripe has now certainly solidified a dominant market position.
[+] [-] jareau|11 years ago|reply
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: [email protected].
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.
[+] [-] nhangen|11 years ago|reply
No matter how you slice it, competition is good and necessary, and it really sucks to see this happen to a good team.
[+] [-] steveklabnik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroMinx|11 years ago|reply
Reading comments, some people are saying it was a great service. But, it's shutting down, while services less great carry on.
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.
[+] [-] bbissoon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkrausz|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers
[+] [-] rebelidealist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbissoon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkrausz|11 years ago|reply
Balanced's meta fields will contain the Stripe IDs they were ported to, so you can migrate over to new objects incrementally.
[+] [-] dblock|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bkrausz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ewang1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianhawes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] santiagobasulto|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinshen|11 years ago|reply