

Show HN: Forge - an easy way to take payments powered by balancedpayments.com - jordanmessina
https://www.forgesimple.com

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minouye
Congrats on launching! Really like the design and prominent example. One
question: what's the advantage of this over Gumroad/Ribbon.co? Lower fees?

Also, you mentioned that this is targeted at a non-technical market. I'd
definitely think about revisiting the homepage copy/selling points. To me it
still feels targeted toward a developer audience. Perhaps a couple of use
cases would be helpful to show off the types of businesses that would find
Forge useful? (<http://goodsie.com> and <http://shopify.com> come to mind as
decent examples of this).

Good luck!

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jordanmessina
Thanks so much! As for the competitors in the space, we have some things in
the pipeline that will differentiate us quite a bit. We needed to at least
catch up, and we wanted to launch as soon as possible.

Now that you point out the homepage, I agree completely. That will be the
first thing we fix up first. Thanks for pointing these out. Adding examples is
a great idea. I think we'll end up showcasing businesses built on top of
Forge.

Thanks again!

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switch33
Is this just another wacky advertisement? Why would people use this over the
more useful/well-known ones like stripe or braintree payments?

Even if it's free, it's not really any better. Running the payment process of
checking/validating cards and all that for your company individually that is
primarily web-based may be more work and end up costing more.

~~~
kevinholesh
Designer of Forge here.

We're aiming to solve the problems of the non-techie market. People who just
want to sell something online shouldn't be worrying about payment gateways,
payment processors or designing a checkout process. Forge handles that.

With Stripe, it's fairly easy for a programmer to write their own payment
processing backend and build a checkout process for it. We're not trying to
serve the people that have the development skills to use Stripe. We're going
after the people who use PayPal Buy Now buttons.

~~~
switch33
This sounds like a good enough idea, but the front page kind of just doesn't
tell any of how it's done, instead it just sort of has an example. Not sure
how that is going to convey the "easyness" of it. That is my main concern
really.

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kevinholesh
That's a great point. Perhaps a demo video explaining how it works would show
the "easyness" of it.

~~~
switch33
That could be a better idea for sure.

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niggler
I'm not convinced that a standalone payments system is useful for anyone: the
type of person who couldn't get stripe or balanced payments to work most
likely will leverage a turnkey storefront solution.

Forge needs to have connectors to storefronts (or build their own system and
market the package). A payment system in absentia makes no sense.

~~~
kevinholesh
I agree. It would be better if we had storefronts for these people, and
product pages they can link to.

That's on our todo list.

