Stripe vs Balanced
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.
Answer
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:
- Authorize and charge cards
- ACH payouts
- ACH debits
- Fully API driven merchant signup
- Escrow account
- Recurring billing
- Webhooks
- 2.9% + 30¢ per charge, 25¢ per ACH credit (volume pricing calculator)
- Funds are available immediately for payouts (vs Stripe's 7 day rolling reserve)
- Charges in USD
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.