Imho. How to lose money with Rewarble

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

1. You pay initial card creation fee of 3.5$ + 5.5%
2. 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.
3. You pay 0.3$ for every transaction. 
4. 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. 
5. You run out of money and your card is paused again. So you also lose the money you paid for activation.
6. 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.
7. 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.