Sift has just announced funding of $1.5 million, their stated aim is to help consumers unlock hidden credit card benefits. I’d hope readers of this site understand the benefits each card offers and I suspect that most do, that being said Sift seems to focus on things such as price protection, return protection & extended warranties rather than what card earns the most on specific categories.
The thing that I find most interesting is automating price protection, I’ll usually actively do this on high value items but I don’t really bother on other items because I’m lazy. If an app is able to automate this process for me, then it would be greatly appreciated. At the moment this automation is only possible on Citi & Chase cards (I’d recommend that they add Discover as well).
Paribus offers a similar feature for online stores and that’s extremely useful. It doesn’t look like Sift currently monetizes in the same fashion (e.g taking a % of your refund). They claim that they currently have 5,500 users with $4 million in transaction volume and have already processed $200,000 in refunds. If that’s true they are getting a 5% return for their users. Unfortunately their app is currently only on iOS and I don’t have access to such a device, I’d like to know what you think about Sift in the comments.
They are currently offering a referral bonus, whoever refers the most people (only e-mail is required) will win a $500 Amazon gift card (2-5 will win $50 gift card and 6-10 will win $25). Here is my link. I’ll give away the gift card to readers of this site if I do win it.
Restarted this a few weeks ago and found a few bugs.
Their system won’t ask for reimbursement of less than $3 (per service rep) or on items less than $10. It also generously classifies things as consumable and won’t attempt reimbursement.
Not really working well.
Just read about Sift and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole, as they used to say. Just another attempt to harvest my data while not offering me anything I can’t do on my own. Rather diabolical.
Nope. No access to my email thanks anyway.
http://www.earny.co does a very similar process, using both merchant price protection and credit card price protection. I’ve got three paper checks between $1-2 automatically on price drops on things like coffee creamer and instant rice from Amazon and jet.
the only thing i would find really valuable is an app or one location to see ALL my CC features and benefits in real time as they change TC. i have always wanted this and there are reddit coders who are working on this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/4vb8j2/meta_im_building_an_app_for_churners_and_taking/
https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/5wxjr1/churningpal_finally_an_app_made_for_churners/
but yea, data mining your shit in exchange for virtual assistant? cool for some i guess.
Hey Ninja!
Thanks for the ChurningPal shout out. We’re actually going to be working on some great features sooner, not later, that will encompass even more. Can’t give away too much right now but check back often. We’re moving as quick as possible.
I’m gun-shy on Paribus since it wants full access to my email. Probably if I shopped enough, I’d just create a new email account for shopping-only, but I doubt it’d be worth more than ten bucks a year for me, and as it is that’s not worth the effort.
Not sure how Sift works (I’m also IOS-less), but I think it’d require some kind of access that’d also seem like too much for the return. At least at my level of shopping.
Soft also requires full access to your mailbox. That’s a no for me. Too much hassle. For large purchases I already pay attention to those.
Please don’t promote this, it looks like they are simply trying to harvest credit card spend data. There’s no way that they are providing price protection on brick and mortar stores so why not just use Paribus?
Interesting to see what Paribus got acquired by CapitalOne recently though.
I don’t really see why brick & mortar stores is impossible, just take a itemized receipt picture and use OCR to convert that into something searchable. Paribus leverages each stores internal price protection policy, Sift uses the credit card’s price protection policy is they are a bit different.
Searchable against what though?