brackishlake

This is something we experienced on The Wedding Favor. It was a trade-off we were aware of. On the other hand, it did trouble me that we were able to transfer money same-day to Chase bankholders with Balanced. It sounds great, but somewhere along the line that means that Balanced was "floating" our credit card charge and fronting the money to pay out to the end-recipient. While I appreciate this, and we benefit from very low chargeback rates (our users are friends and family), this seemed like a "too good to be true" risk.

In Stripe's case, you can make the business choice in your logic to pay out quicker to your end user, so long as you understand the risks (which you assume) and keep a comfortable account balance to cover it. Payouts to you, the Stripe account holder, is another matter!

Right, so the important thing to keep in mind (and this is different from Balanced), is that you are making a standard Charge object. It's business as usual.

When you pay money out to users, it is deducted from your Stripe balance. In that sense, the initial charge, and the transfer later, are not explicitly connected to each other. It's up to you to persist some business logic on the application side.

In our case, we build in Stripe's fees (the standard 2.9% + $0.30) and make an assumption about our transfer fees (25 cents per transfer) to make sure we come out on top. The payer (when we create the Charge object) is paying this fee.

That way, when I gift money to a couple, they are receiving EXACTLY what I intended to send them. We don't want the couple feel in any way like there's a "gotcha" — someone sent you $25, but you can withdrawal only $22! We are, of course, transparent to the payer about the additional fees they're covering.

We let users withdrawal their full amount. This is in part to encourage fewer transfer fees, but it also simplifies things for our end-user.

It's been great to work with Stripe. I can't say enough about the quality of their staff and the love and care they put into their API. It's something we should all appreciate and replicate.

Chris