Daddy Goverment

[Logester]

Well, a key thing for any private server when comparing "balance" to the official servers is the rates.
iRO is 1/1/1
heRO is 5/5/3
The last server I played was 13/13/7
Now I know math can be hard for some people, but...
1=1
5=/=3
13=/=7

Any custom server is not going to be balanced because the power level of players [mostly new ones, which brings about a new topic of keeping servers thriving and alive with fresh blood] is not equal to the amount of money they have due to drops.
However, every server has its own specific balance point; iRO's is lower levels (about 30-50, due to it slow rate), my old server was about 70-80. (Now sure about here, as I've only been here a week)

Also, while I haven't played iRO in about 5 years, I would say it's far from balanced! Back when I played, the whole economy was based around OBB. There was a quest in Comodo where you could make them (usually I check the position of the quest on a server for the NPC before I state this... but meh), where you could make OBB out of 50 cyfer, 10 brigan, 5 clam flesh and 5 shells of some sort (the latter two being npc buyable in Comodo); and then you could vend OBB for 110k a piece in their prime when I played on iRO.

Regardless of the customization, unless it's ground shakingly game breaking; there's always going to be some 'imbalance' in the game. And heck, if you're going to throw real life economics into this; not even in real life is there a perfectly balanced economy.