Jasper 6% Credit Card – A Bloggers Card. Stay Away.

Jasper is offering a credit card with up to 1-6% cashback. Here is an article telling you why you shouldn’t get it and why you definitely shouldn’t be pitching this to your friends.

1. You’ve to invite other people to get bumped to a higher tier of cashback. Initially you start with 1% cashback but for every referral you get bumped up by 1% until you hit 6%.
2. You can earn reward on purchase up to your monthly credit limit. The maximum credit limit is $15,000. In other words, if you managed to sell this card to 5 other sucks and have $15,000 credit limit, the maximum cashback you can earn in a month is 900. I suspect it is going to be a little hard to get $15k credit limit.
3. The boosted cashback will only last 12 months. After 12 months, you need to find 5 more suckers to sell the card to.
4. Their terms and condition not only defines manufactured spend but also does so as “transactions deemed, in Our sole discretion, to have been initiated for the primary purpose”. So the question you need to ask is do you want to go through the hassle of finding 5 other people to sell the card to only to tip toe around them?
5. The card does come with a $100 signup bonus (just google) but $100 is too low of an offer to begin with.

Now, it is worth noting that similar scheme have existed in one from or another. For example, in a banking app called BEAM (which I had called a bloggers bank) one could bump their APY with each referral. Then there was Zero Debit Card where you could earn up to 3% cashback by referring others. The saving grace of Zero was that you could have self-referred to get to the highest level and I wrote about that in a private post a while back. Anyway, the point I am trying to make is both of these programs are dead.

Closing Thoughts

I should say that If this card has an starting (and permanent) cashback of 2%, it would be a whole different story. The fact that they didn’t do this shows that they lack the knowledge and vision of cashback space. You often cannot succeed by just creating a product for bloggers and influencer. The best strategy is to create a product that bloggers can shill without appearing as an obvious shill who’s shilling a far inferior product.

If this was a 2% card, every blogger, and their mom would be pitching you this card and it would be slightly harder to argue against it. Why? Because then the card would be competing with the 2% earning cards which are notorious for not having signup bonus or having small signup bonus. They could have made it a 2, 2.5, 3, 4,5 and 6 % tire card for all I care.