Bitmo has recently made an improvement to its app which makes it more worthwhile for using when buying third party gift cards.
When they launched, Bitmo only accepted payments from your checking account to reduce their costs. This had three main drawbacks:
- It meant you missed out on earning credit card rewards for gift card purchases.
- Waiting for the payment to be pulled from your checking account meant you sometimes had to wait up to two business days for the payment to clear before they’d provide the gift card number and PIN.
- Some people are understandably concerned about allowing a phone app to pull money from their checking account.
At some point in 2019, Bitmo added PayPal as a payment option. While that in theory meant you could finally earn credit card rewards on purchases in the app, it wasn’t worth using as they applied a ~3% fee to the transaction which, in most cases, meant you’d still be losing out seeing as the points/miles/cashback you earned on your credit card wouldn’t exceed that fee.
That’s finally changed. Reader EW tipped me off on this post seeing as I mentioned paying by bank account but not credit card. I’d left off the credit card option as I thought Bitmo still charged a fee when paying by PayPal. However, when checking in the app, it didn’t list a fee to select PayPal as a payment method.
I wondered if it would add a fee after selecting PayPal, so I chose that as a payment option and clicked through to the next step. The amount in the top right corner remained the same, so Bitmo does indeed seem to have removed the fee for using PayPal.
Bitmo has been running a bunch of gift card deals recently but apart for posting about them here, I haven’t really taken advantage of any of them. I think some have been break even at times, but that wasn’t worth it when payment would come out of my checking account. Now that I can pay by credit card though, it means there’ll hopefully be more deals in the future that are worth taking advantage of.
For more about how this app works, be sure to check out our Bitmo user guide – I’ll update it with this new information.
[…] Bitmo now allows you to pay with credit cards via PayPal with no fee, so at least you can earn credit card rewards on the purchase. […]