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> The competition in this space has provided some wonderful innovations in a very short period of time.

This is absolutely true! Let's do a feature comparison of when Balanced and Stripe have launched some new features:

                                Balanced    Stripe
        MP payments             11/16/12    2/24/14
        ACH Payouts             2/14/13     6/24/13
        Push to Card            1/24/14     5/22/14
        Bitcoin                 2/20/14     3/27/14
        ACH Debits              2/28/13     (in private beta)
        metadata                11/16/12    10/30/13
        auth/capture            11/16/12    6/20/13
        same-day payouts        2/25/13     (2 day payouts in private beta)
        Dynamic Soft Descriptor 11/16/12    3/14/14
Everyone wins.

It's tough because we (I've actually just left Balanced, and, in the interest of full disclosure, have been a Stripe customer for a few years) are so open, our roadmap is basically public. Today is the day we originally said we'd launch production push to card, not beta, so it's fun to see Stripe launch this feature today.



Hm. There are actually a bunch of inaccuracies in the above, but I don't think there's much point arguing about the details -- specifics aside, I agree that Balanced has quickly launched some cool stuff. Congrats on your time at Balanced and good luck with whatever comes next!


Thanks Patrick! And thanks for Stripe: it's great that you all kicked off this 'let's make a better payments API' space. And giving people good APIs in general.


Happy to ask Steve to correct any inaccuracies here, Patrick. Feel free to email me.


> I've actually just left Balanced

Does that mean you might have some free time to work on your Designing Hypermedia APIs book?


Yup. I'm in the final editing stages for Rails 4 in Action, and then I'm hitting that hard. My time at Balanced has certainly given me a lot of good examples for it.




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