Treats is a new prepaid rewards debit card with a bit of a twist that is offered by Clinkle, who have raised over $30 million in venture capital (funding coming from Richard Branson, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Index). The treats prepaid card works like most prepaid cards, you can add funds to it via your regular bank account and then spend those funds as you normally would. You can also easily send money to other treats/clinkle users.
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Rewards Program
The rewards program is much different than usual though, when you swipe your treat card seven times you fill the rewards meter which unlocks a treat. You can then send those treats to your friends who are also using the service, when your friend swipes their card they are able to open the treat.
Once you open the treat, it’ll will let you know if you’ve received a refund on your last purchase. In some cases it’ll refund the full amount, whereas in other cases it will refund a portion of your last swipe or no refund at all. You can’t open your own treats, so there really isn’t any rewards program unless you have other friends using the card.
In some cases instead of receiving a refund on your last purchase, you’ll receive a freebie. Here are some of the freebies we’ve seen people report:
- Free chipotle
Fees
The home page of Clinkle proudly displays that they are not into fees. That said they do charge fees and don’t exactly make it easy to see what fees they do charge. It’s buried at the end of their cardholder agreement. Here are some of the fees they charge:
- $10 card reissue fee
- $5 document request fee
- $1 ATM withdrawal fee ($2 if international)
- $1 ATM balance inquiry fee ($2 if international)
- $1 ATM decline fee ($2 if international)
- 3% foreign currency exchange fee
Homepage of clinkle.com
Loading Your Account
You can load as little as $0.01 and as much as $2,500, although this varies based on the funding source. You can have a maximum of $10,000 on your account at any one time and the maximum you can spend per day is $2,500.
- ACH Transfer: No fee and you can load up to twenty times per day and $2,500 per load
- Debit card: 50¢ up to $1,500 per transaction and $5,000 per any 60-day period (note: you’ll be charged at credit card rates if you use a debit card that is exempt from federal standards hat apply to the interchange fee paid by merchants. You will be told about this before you load)
- Credit card: 2.9% + 30¢ up to $1,500 per transaction and $5,000 per any 60-day period
You cannot send checks or money orders to load the account. Keep in mind that this product is issued by Bankcorp, so the chances of shut down are pretty high if you use it for manufactured spending purposes.
Signing Up
You cannot sign up for Treats/Clinkle directly, at the moment you must have an .edu e-mail address and have to join a wait list (which is currently 150,000+ people long). To join the wait list, you must download the application first.
Referral Program
They also offer a referral program, if you refer a friend you’ll receive a $10 bonus and they will also receive a $10 bonus. Unfortunately you still need to join the wait list, even if you have a referral code. You might be able to jump the wait list by sending them an e-mail. People have had the most success simply asking where to input their friends referral code to jump the wait list.
Thanks to blackcomedy from reddit.com/r/beermoney via Maximizing Money for making me aware of this referral program. Blackcomedy’s referral code is CQUX477 so you might want to consider using that, feel free to share your referral ID in the comments but you must let us know how many treats you’ve opened and what you received.
Final Thoughts
I can’t sign up to this service because I don’t have an .edu e-mail address. If I did have an address, I probably would sign up as long as I could ensure it was a soft pull to open an account. It should be fairly easy to game getting 7 debit card transactions without making large purchases, but it will be interesting to see if Clinkle ties the value of the reward to how much you spent on each individual transaction or not.
If you have any personal experience with Clinkle/Treats, then please share them in the comments. As mentioned previously, you can share your referral codes but make sure you also share some useful information as well otherwise I will delete your posts.
