First, I have to mention that Rewarble vouchers cost 5 to 10 percent more than their value according to my country's official dollar rate. But that's another story.
So, you buy a voucher. Then
- You pay initial card creation fee of 3.5$ + 5.5%
- You pay 1$ + 5.5% every time you use your voucher to top up your card.
- You pay 2.5$ monthly fee for nothing, because you still can't use your card.
- You pay 1.5$ more so that you can use your card. It's called activation. So basically to have a normal usable card you pay 4$ a month.
- You pay 0.3$ for every transaction.
- Your activation does not work as soon as you pay for it, so you pay 0.3$ for each unsuccessful attempt several times a day, until your card is manually activated by support team.
- Your balance is not shown correctly so you don't know the real amount you have. If you don't have enough to cover your subscription, you're charged 0.3$ for each unsuccessful attempt several times a day.
- You run out of money and your card is paused again. So you also lose the money you paid for activation.
- Or your card gets blocked because of broken partnerships of Rewarble. You create a new card, losing money on card creation fee of 3.5$ + 5.5%. One of those cases was compensated, the other wasn’t.
- Or your card gets blocked because of ‘suspicious activity’. Even if the only activity was Google play. You create one more card, losing money on card creation fee of 3.5$ + 5.5%.
Let’s see how much I have to spend, let’s say for 1 year of usage, let’s say with 3 purchases amounting to 25$ every month:
5$ for creating new card (because the initial top-up can’t be less than 25$) twice in one year
2.4$ for topping up 25$ every month
4$ for monthly and activation fees every month
0.3$ for every successful purchase 3 times every month
0.3$ for every unsuccessful purchase which happen 5 to 10 times every month because of failed balance update or activation problems or simply me forgetting to top up and activate
So that’s
10$ creation fees
2.4$ x 11 = 26.4$ topping up fees
4$ x 11 = 44$ monthly and activation fees
0.3$ x 3 x 12 = 10.8$ for successful purchases
0.3$ x 5 x 12 = 18$ for unsuccessful purchases in the best case scenario
Which totals to
109.2$ for one year usage ^o^
Some of those charges were on me, some weren’t…
For the same amount of money I could make myself a normal bank card from a foreign bank, but it would last several years and cause less worries. If not for the dire situation we're in, I wish I never used Rewarble.
