Oh, I just noticed that you are a co-founder of Balanced!
I will say this - and I mean this in the most respectful way possible: it is unlikely I would encourage us to switch to you folks until (frustratingly!) you all are more established!
[Also, I don't mean to single you out specifically: I'm talking about any company who wants to be an integral part of our infrastructure, but the topic at hand happens to be payments.]
I have personally been burned by choosing a neato new startup for critical parts of our infrastructure. Burned in the sense that these startups change their model and pivot quickly, and since we have made them an integral part of our infrastructure, it is frustrating and difficult to change. (Dotcloud, for example, got rid of their free sandboxed tier this past year. This was a great move on their part, but also left a sour taste in my mouth and unexpectedly increased our expenses.) We also get burned when a new company has bugs - because while I personally might understand, our customers are the ones who are affected. It also called into question my ability to evaluate different solutions, and forced me to realize that, for non-personal projects, it is important to use something established.
This is somewhat ironic, since we ourselves are a startup - so I feel the pain of finding customers (or even developers!) every day!
Sorry I didn't disclose that I'm a Balanced co-founder. HN won't allow me to go back and edit now.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Jay, and I appreciate the honest feedback. I'd be concerned if you didn't take seriously your choices about core pieces of your infrastructure, especially ones that are so closely related to your revenue.
I will say that Balanced has been processing live transactions for over 3 years, works with hundreds of marketplaces and crowdfunding platforms, and has been growing as fast as we can (~780% y-o-y). Unfortunately, there's not much we can do to become more established besides exist longer and continue growing. We're not planning on going anywhere, so we'll keep improving in that dept. as well. :-)
Braintree. Being able to change soft descriptors was useful to us, because we sell merchandise (eyewear) on behalf of different brands. I believe they gave us a better rate. (interchange + basis points, rather than percentage + basis points.)
Because we have these different brands for which we do eyewewar, we found that they had slightly better dashboard and reporting tools. There were also differences in being able to do do "authorizations" separately from "settlements" but I think both now support that process fairly well.
It was also nice that Braintree was able to boast of many established companies, which we already use and trust, for payments. One thing I've learned is to always ask for references!
Between the two, both have a great API. Things have probably changed with Stripe in the intervening year too. Stripe was certainly hungrier - they did a better job returning our calls, understanding our business, etc - but the former ended up having a better rate and the feature set we needed at the time.
But I'm always re-evaluating (fortunately - or maybe unfortunately - if another processor is better for some reason, then given our volume, it is usually worth it for us to switch.) So this is why these kinds of features are exciting to me!
