So I was reading about clinkle last night and I was thinking "What a joke!", but as they now have a product I decided to try and check it out.
Obviously, I'm curious of what I have to pay. Encouragingly, there's text that says:
> Clinkle has no minimums, no monthly fees, and no fee to get your card. There’s no fee to load funds from your bank account, and no fee to use Treats. That’s the way we like it.
But then, in smaller letters with font color that almost matches the background, it says:
> Read more about the few fees we do charge in our Cardholder Agreement.
Does this seem disingenuous to anyone other than me? The first impression is no fees, and then I realize that I know nothing about what fees they'll charge. No thanks.
Hey! Engineering manager here. We have to date never charged someone a fee, and in most app usage you most certainly will not encounter them.
We are, however, often charged heavy fees by the ATM and Credit Card companies (for unloading your money at an ATM, or loading your prepaid card with a credit card, specifically), and we went with the prepaid card market norms here around which of those we don't cover on your behalf. Legally, because we do reserve the right to not cover these fees, we have to have the footer text there on the site.
As we ramp up our revenue, we hope to begin covering more and more of these fees for our users.
Your verification sucks big time! You never sent text messages and I'm locked out of my invite as you have a limit of 3. I signed up with my Google Voice and now I'm in some queue of 150K suckers. How can you design this so poorly? I understand text messages cost you pennies, but you can only turn away early adopters this way, because who else cares about your service at this point? Also, when I switch to my SMS app to get the code and switch back to your app, you're return me to the phone number entry screen and waste another text message. How can I receive I text message from you, when you're in full-screen mode (without any reason, by the way) without switching to my SMS app to see the code?! And why does it need to be a 6-digit number, really? And because of your fancy input, I cannot even paste! This is some poor UX, guys, no offense, but it's like people who never touched this app coded it!
Oh hi! Thanks for the response. prostoalex wrote this on the thread:
> It's a prepaid debit card with rewards program.
Is that correct, but with the ability to load it with a credit card? Essentially, if I buy into it and use only my debit card and cash with it, it's a prepaid card with bonuses and no fees?
Yup! Credit card integration is in the works, but until then ACH linking is totally free (& faster than most, as we don't use the 3-day delay "challenge amounts" system most competitors use except as a fallback)
Clinkle had become a bit infamous in startup circles over the young age of its founder, the large amount he raised from top-tier VCs, and his failure to launch anything. That they have actually launched something is big news to anyone that had been paying attention.
As 21echoes (sp?) points out, it has a lot to do with their funding. They apparently set a record for some stage of funding (seed?) for startups. I read about them yesterday because someone here on HN mentioned them along the same vein
The press went ape-shit about our funding round announcement a year ago. The site's actually been live for a week now, but we didn't want any attention on it until we were further along in our roll-out :(
Obviously, I'm curious of what I have to pay. Encouragingly, there's text that says:
> Clinkle has no minimums, no monthly fees, and no fee to get your card. There’s no fee to load funds from your bank account, and no fee to use Treats. That’s the way we like it.
But then, in smaller letters with font color that almost matches the background, it says:
> Read more about the few fees we do charge in our Cardholder Agreement.
Does this seem disingenuous to anyone other than me? The first impression is no fees, and then I realize that I know nothing about what fees they'll charge. No thanks.