[chrisduesing]

It appears they use ACH for payments, but not debits (credit card only it appears). We run a marketplace with 5-6 figure transactions and use Balanced Payments. Their documentation is fairly terrible, but they cap ACH fees at $5, which is key, because we are passing the money through and would go out of business if we had to give 3% or whatever to a 3rd party.

[steveklabnik]

Hey Chris! I work at Balanced.

We actually just rolled out a new version of our API last week, and put a _significant_ amount of effort into improving the documentation. Check it out: https://docs.balancedpayments.com/1.1/overview/

[cristinacordova]

We have a beta of ACH-in (instead of just ACH-out, which is public). You can email [e-mail] for access.

[ericd]

Oh that's nice. $5 still might be a barrier for the use case I have in mind, though. I wonder if there's any higher level of identity verification that one could do to reduce it further.

[steveklabnik]

Hey ericd! I work at Balanced.

The price of ACH debits is 1% + 30¢, _capped_ at $5. So a $10 debit would cost you 40¢. I know you've said you're doing high-dollar transactions, just wanted to make sure that it was super clear, as we try to be with all of our pricing.

https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing

[ericd]

Hey Steve, thanks for the clarification. I understood, but it's probably useful for others. My transactions would all be maxing out that cap, just not sure if users will be willing to replace their paper checks if they have to pay $5 more.

[steveklabnik]

Totally. Our experience around checks has been interesting: basically, there are some customers who absolutely do not want anything but a check. They've been using checks their entire life, and they don't want to change. Fair enough.

Some other people just simply don't understand how _quickly_ they can get money via ACH. It's a matter of venturing into the unknown vs. what's tried and true. So when we say "You'll get your money today, in your bank account, if you use Wells Fargo, and tomorrow otherwise," they say "really?" And decide ACH is good enough for the cost. Then again, that's on the payout side rather than the pay-in side, though I guess if your website accepted payment via check, it'd be much faster there, too.

There are also all kinds of other complications in dealing with paper checks that may make it worth the $5. Here's the issue where we talk about Balanced and paper checks, and this comment in particular is very insightful: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/69#issuecomm... Checks are also not reversible, which we feel is a significant drawback.

Anyway, no matter what you do, feel free to ping me if you have any questions payments related: I've really enjoyed learning this domain, there's so many details, and they're all so important...

[patcon]

Really? Balanced has terrible docs? I'd only heard good things...

[chrisduesing]

They have very pretty docs, but in the case of ACH their sample code and directions did not work. Luckily their dashboard uses their API and keeps logs, so I was able to reverse engineer the proper way to set up a customer and bank account.

Steve mentioned below that they have new docs, I have not had the chance to check them out yet.