Plastiq bill payment services charges 2.9% for bill payments when paying with credit card. (Bills paid via bank payment are free.) They’ve now added an additional ‘delivery fee’:
- $.99 for ACH payments and bill payments
- $1.49 for check payments
Hat tip to reader Hoang Nguyen
Anybody experiencing issues with Plastiq recently?
I’ve been using $500 MGCs for a long time and never had any issues. Trying to pay my mortgage for February, and getting a message “Your payment was not processed”. Card has correct balance and does not show any attempted transaction.
Any idea if this is a Plastiq issue or Metabank blocking?
Update – heard back from Plastiq support. They confirmed issue with Metabank and Pathway. I’m trying to find out more about the resolution time frame and the nature of the issue.
Keep us posted! Going through the same issue when trying to pay with $200 MCGC’s from Staples. Worked fine until this month and now no payments are going through.
So far Plastiq has not been very helpful. No indication of the root cause. The second person simply told me to talk to Metabank or use another card. I’m pretty sure it is Metabank’s blocking, but why don’t you confirm that for me. I can talk to Metabank and I’m not sure they can legally block this kind of payment, but that would be a very much uphill battle.To me this likely spells the end of using Plastiq – their fees have been too high anyway, but if I can’t use GCs, they’re almost useless.
BHN (it is the servicer BHN that matters here not the underlying bank) MCs started having issues last week. Calling BHN will likely get you no place. I know one person who called BHN and was told incorrectly that you could never use the cards at Plastiq so there was essentially no problem. I am on the fence to the cause though logic would point to BHN which has been on the warpath against MS for sometime so I’d immediately assume them but the error PQ is throwing isn’t what they have shown previously for a declines in my experience.
I agree that I may be jumping ahead of myself blaming Metabank or BHN. The reason is they recently started blocking other transactions and I presume Plastiq might have fallen into the same bucket for them. However, Plastiq is not a cash-out transaction and I don’t believe gift cards can disallow them based on their T&C. However, I agree calling them and talking to front end is unlikely to render any result, especially if their backend decided to do it. It would require much more effort to undo.
Learning from you that Plastiq may actually be an issue is encouraging in some sense. I’m going to try emailing Plastiq CEO, who communicated with me long time ago during early days of Plastiq.
BHN has gone after transactions that aren’t “cash out” before I mean they limit credit transactions which are generally not usable for that at certain retailers. I think BHNs anti-MS stance is about profitability not MS itself per se. It is possible they saw the volume on PQ realized it was mostly gamers and decided to block it. Just a possibility, I have no proof either way.
Clearly they want the money to stay with them as long as possible. Not sure they legally can block transactions, but I’m not taking the route of suing BHN.
I’m getting very much boiler-plate responses from Plastiq. And their founder/CEO is no longer there which makes sense after the bankruptcy.
PQ fees are pretty high, so I’m questioning whether it makes sense for me to spend time on this, or just turn the page and move on.
Same issues for me! I received these two messages from Plastiq support. I had some payments go through on 2/13 and on 2/19 they didn’t work for me.
********
Hi,
We do apologize for any current issues you are having when trying to process payments with Mastercards issued from METABANK or PATHWAY bank. Our team is looking into this issue and we will reach back out as soon as this has been resolved.
Thank you for your understanding and patience.
********
Hello,
Please contact your card issuer directly to ensure there are no blocks in place using the card with 3rd party payer companies like Plastiq.
If you are still unable to use the card on payments after confirming with your card issuer, you will need to use a different card for payment. Sorry for the inconvenience.
If you have any other questions please reach out we are happy to help.
I got the same cookie-cutter. I think Plastiq is taking it very lightly. It does not seem they have anything to share on the results of their team looking into it which makes me feel nobody did. I guess they should know what kind of revenue they are getting from Metabank cards and maybe it’s not worth fighting for, but it’s also possible this did not hit the high level people yet and lower level is just letting it slide.
Experienced same issue late February. It doesn’t appear to be fixed yet?
Haven’t tried recently, but I doubt it is gonna get fixed if Plastiq does not care.
Tried today again, still doesn’t work for PATHWAY/METABANK cards
Has anyone used a VGC/MCGC on Plastiq recently? Today when I try adding a Vanilla VGC to Plastiq, it says “Card Not Recognized”. Someone else reported a problem with Vanilla MCGC a week ago. My card’s expiration is 01/31.
Vanilla GCs since you cannot set the address or even the zip are difficult to use for much online it is very much YMMV.
Just found on Oct 26, rent payment via Plastiq does not count online shopping, the description stays ‘real estate agent and manager- Rentals’ to BofA customer used cash card anymore. Not sure if changing to ‘travel category’ then pay the rent can still get the category bonus?
Do you mean it DOESN’T say “real estate” anymore? If it did, it should’ve counted as online shopping.
Sorry for the confusion. The description of the transaction was still ‘real estate’ but I noticed that the breakdown of the reward was only posted 1x. I am afraid that paying rent through plastiq will not count as ‘online shopping’ anymore. I will set a test transaction at the end of this month to see if the rent can still be counted in the ‘travel category’. Fingers crossed but not much.
Any luck or news with “travel”? I will give it a try too.
I noticed this month that for the SYW Citi, using this card no longer processes as ‘online purchase’ for their targeted promos. Oh well, bigger net loss (Plastiq fees) vs. reward bonus gains for this month. Guess I’ll stop using this card there.
Last month my Citi SYW transaction via Plastiq was:
PQ *CHASE SAN FRANCISCOCA
Merchant Category: Miscellaneous-REAL ESTATE AGENTS AND MANGERS RENTALS
Type: purchase
Transaction Date: 9/21/23
Posting Date: 9/21/23
This month my Citi SYW transaction via Plastiq was:
PPQ CHASE ALPHARETTA GA
Merchant Category: Restaurants-UTILITIES,ELECTRIC,GAS,SANITARY,SEWER
Type: purchase
Transaction Date: 10/23/23
Posting Date: 10/23/23
For the amount of my transaction and Plastiq fees charged, I still come out ahead even if it is only 3% rewards on restaurants that gets credited to me. However, I don’t see why it would not count as online since I don’t see information about online transactions or not in my account. How do you see if it is no longer counting for the “online purchase” promotion?
That card treats UTILITIES as restaurants?
No idea what they would do with actual utilities. Apparently they’re treating a mortgage payment as a Restaurant, and it has now credited to my points as Restaurants (3x) described as UTILITIES,ELECTRIC,GAS,SANITARY,SEWER.
An electric payment:
MERCHANT CATEGORY
Restaurants-UTILITIES-ELECTRIC,GAS,SANITARY,WATER
An internet payment:
MERCHANT CATEGORY
Restaurants-CABLE,SATELLITE,PAY TV/RADIO SERVICES
Both earned 1x points, not 3x.
That’s bull. I worked for a small bank and even there the true ACH fees paid were .09 at volume. 10x markup.
Mainly only have used it to meet SUBs paying mortgage/Auto loan. That an overpaying property taxes (they refund to method paid i.e. Check – on 0% Biz cards and knocking out the SUB ‐ they charge 2.75٪ for CC/Debit GC so its no big deal to use plastiq
.
Stop complaining. They had to reorganize, so obviously the business model was not sustainable. There is a fixed cost of processing a transaction, as well as a variable cost depending on transaction amount. Clearly this change meant that they were losing money on small transactions. This better aligns their pricing with their costs, so I’m fine with this change if it means not increasing the % fee. It’s $1 more, compared with the $75 or so in fees for my rent payment.
I make small payments b/c I am using VGC/MGCs. The fee is nearly $6 and the $1 or $1.5 increase is about 20% increase in fees. I will have to use them much less if not completely stop.
They need to allow split payments if they’re now charging a delivery fee.
100%. I get that paper checks cost some labor, so let us just drain several cards (one-time software cost) and aggregate one big check
As for me: I buy up the $200s when on sale, but this eats into the rebate significantly. I don’t mind a delivery fee on a split transaction of several cards (let’s say 5), but $1.49 + 2.9% on $200, is just too darn much. There’s no win left on the rebate. Makes more sense to avoid them altogether. How does no volumes work out for their business model?
Gross. And I was just about to set up 25 insurance payments a week with the Robinhood cash card.
Didn’t robinhood just end that program lol. Sadly I just began doing it just before the ended it. I guess this is what I get for being lazy
Updates to the Round-ups match
Starting on August 22, 2023, round-ups will no longer earn a weekly match. But you can still invest or stash the rounded-up change from your Robinhood Cash Card purchases at the end of each week.
Not really worth it anymore thou right. Because plastiq takes 2.85 percent fee for every transaction. And then they stacked the new per transaction fee so unless your doing large volume I don’t think there is any benefits in plastiq. RIP
could i use plastiq to buy a car with my amex?
Until today, I was a heavy user of Plastiq and I like to use it for mortgage payment using MasterCard GC. After the $0.99-$1.49 fee for each MasterCard GC, it doesn’t make sense for me to use the service anymore.
May I know what type of MCGC you used for the mortgage payment? Is it BH/ Pathward or Vanilla one?
I used the ones issued by US bank.
Thank you sir!
Where do you buy US Bank issued MCGC?
How and where do you buy these gift cards ?
Thank you
I buy them in grocery stores.
My bank automatically treats less than the entire mortgage payments as “principal paydowns” and I have to call them to manually reverse the payments to mortgage payments. How does your bank handle this?
I used to do that but now I always pay a couple of days past the due date so it will be counted towards monthly payments. My due date is 1st of each month and my payment usually arrives on 3rd or 4th.
$1.50 seems a bargain to cash out a GC.
At little confused here. I thought they had a >2.5% fee (now at 2.9%) on the GC’s as well (for the last 2-3 years or so after raising it from 1%). That % fee already had me balking. Are you implying that $1.50 is the only fee you’re facing (still a bargain) or is it the $1.50 on top of the 2.9% that has broken it for you?
If it’s just the $1.50 fee, how are you getting that to work?
No, it’s $1.50 on top of 2.9%. So on small amounts that’s a huge percentage. Unfortunately only the $200 VGCs/MGCs are commonly found without fees on the buy side. If you find $500 or $1000 with reduced fees this might still make sense, but kinda kills plastiq as means to liquidate