dclausen

Could you explain more about your "frozen image versioning?"

I work at VGS. Because of our mission is to secure the world’s sensitive information we will never let pricing get in the way of security. So yes, our product really is free. There is a cost for the external auditor and that ranges from 15k-25k for SOC 2.

As far as expectations for 2 above, in my experience, teams really love having a completely separate environment per PR. Gitlab has done this on top of Kubernetes using a dynamic domain such as <truncated-branch-name>-review-app.domain.com. This gives QA and stakeholders the ability to easily review/signoff on changes prior to going live and not getting bottlenecked by a small number of QA/UAT environments. This becomes particularly helpful as the engineering team scales up.

Right, but doesn't that just prove that there's a market for the product? You could build a similar app with a more attractive/relevant UI, make it easier/quicker/cheaper to use, or market it towards a specific niche.

Tableau has a terrible UI and looks like it hasn't been updated since 1995. Go for Looker instead.

and Stripe's former CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thegdb/

As a customer of DO, I'm glad they turned you off. Your ignorance was negatively affecting my service.

Stripe Connect, according to their own website (https://stripe.com/connect) is Stripe's marketplace offering.

Stripe Connect is not a complete white label solution. The user still has to be redirected to stripe.com to complete the OAuth process. We had many issues with users being confused as to who Stripe was, and why were they asking for their personal information when creating an account.

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.

From your example, Balanced will also let you factor in the cost of the processing and include it in your total e.g. 25 + 2.9% + 0.30 + 0.25. Then, you can specify the amount to pay out that is completely independent of the total amount processed.

How is that different?

I've implemented Stripe, Stripe Connect and Balanced, and I consider them to be comparable in offerings if you are a traditional non-marketplace merchant. To say Balanced is inferior save for their Payout speed is not true. Their differences become more clear when you are operating as a marketplace.

It’s been stated before, and I’ll reiterate, Balanced’s merchant account underwriting for marketplaces is performed via their API. This means the marketplace retains complete visibility into the account signup process. With Stripe Connect, you are redirected to their website, which means your potential user may or may not ever make it back to your system for whatever reason.

During merchant underwriting, Stripe Connect requires each merchant to create an account on their system with their own username and password. This means they are free to access their account on Stripe outside of your system. While good for the merchant, it might not be so for the marketplace trying to ensure all transactions continue to run smoothly.

Also, because each merchant account in Stripe Connect is separate, the marketplace does not gain any economies of scale when it comes to pooling together all credit card transactions for volume pricing purposes. Balanced has a single escrow account that all funds are held in and does offer volume pricing based upon that.

In my opinion, Stripe’s focus originally seemed to be on the individual merchant and have recently made changes to make them more attractive to marketplaces. However, Balanced’s approach has been to offer a more complete solution for a marketplace, while still allowing for all the same features to be used as a single merchant.

Could it have something to do with their $100MM sitting in the bank?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into-...