Drop Adds New Weekly Limit for Ongoing Earn Offers [$5/week]

The Drop app has been widely discussed for the ability to earn bonus rewards at top retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Uber, various grocery stores, and more. Over time, rates have dropped (pun intended) and aren’t as good as they were at launch – Amazon isn’t an option for new members and Walmart is down to .2%.

The rollout was rocky as people were earning too much to be sustainable and they froze people’s accounts. Then they added terms to allow them to confiscate points or freeze accounts of manufactured spend or business purchases.

They’ve now tweaked the terms further and included a limit of 5,000 Drop points ($5) per week which can be earned from ongoing spend offers. Here are the new terms (old terms can be found here):

6. Qualifying Transactions

Drop needs to protect the program for all users by ensuring that points are earned for legitimate consumer transactions. Drop users are permitted to earn points with Drop in connection with spending activity for non-commercial, personal and household purposes (“Qualifying Transactions”). Drop users are not permitted to earn points with Drop for commercial purposes (e.g. in connection with a business). Drop users are limited to earning a maximum of 5,000 Drop points per calendar week (Sunday – Saturday) in connection with Drop’s ongoing (as opposed to one-time) offers. Drop maintains the right to review the accrual of points and to determine, in Drop’s absolute discretion, if certain transactions qualify for Drop Offers. Certain spending including, but not limited to, repeat purchases, high-value purchases, purchases of gift cards, and purchases made for commercial, non-personal or non-household purposes, may not, at Drop’s absolute discretion, be considered Qualifying Transactions and may be ineligible for Drop points. Drop may reverse point accruals that have already been processed if a transaction is deemed by Drop, upon review, to not constitute a Qualifying Transaction. Drop may also disable accounts that engage in repeated non-Qualifying Transaction activity.

If your account is terminated or disabled for any reason including but not limited to multiple attempts at non-Qualifying Transactions, then your existing Drop points will be forfeited and any further transactions which might otherwise earn you Drop points will not be deemed to be applicable.

5,000 Drop points would be earned, for example, from spending $200 at Whole Foods and $300 at Target. Once you earn 5,000 points in a week, you won’t earn anything more until Sunday when it resets.

Important Update: According to this comment, the limit is per merchant; you can earn 5,000 points from each of the ongoing offer merchants per week.

$500 in purchases might work for a normal week’s spending, but it does mean that large purchases (e.g. a new computer or TV) or a heavy shopping season won’t get full earnings on Drop – it’ll max out at 5,000 points. And, psychologically, once you put a limit like that,  the program appears less exciting. You can max out at ~$210/yr. in gift cards with the program – which is a nice amount – if your purchases time themselves right on the weekly schedule. Hopefully, there won’t be any more frozen accounts going forward.

The 5,000 ($5) limitation is only for earnings from ongoing spend, not for select offers. The main excitement of the app was always for the ongoing purchases, but over time we’ve seen a few useful one-time offers as well. There’s a $75 bonus for signing up with Wealthfront which many of us did, $20 at Boxed which can stack with the Amex Offer, and a Naturebox deal which stacks with a Swagbucks offer.

In other news, judging from some Twitter discussion, it seems that today many frozen Drop accounts have come back to life today as well. Check yours’ and let us know.