Dosh has announced a customer-unfriendly move as they’ll now charge your cashback balance $4.99 per month if your account is inactive for more than 12 months.
They won’t ever charge any debit or credit cards that you’ve linked in the app – they’ll simply deduct that fee from any cashback you’ve earned in the past that’s still sitting in your account. Once your account balance reaches zero, no additional fees will be deducted, so you won’t end up with a negative balance.
Here’s how Dosh explains it:
Account maintenance fees are drawn from your Dosh wallet balance, never from your personal bank account or credit card. Although the Dosh application is free to download, there are costs associated with the creation and maintenance of your user account with us. Those costs are covered by the fees Dosh earns when you complete eligible transactions.
In order to recover the cost to maintain your Account in the ordinary course of business, if at any time your Account becomes Inactive for longer than twelve (12) months (an “Inactive Account”), we reserve the right to debit a monthly Inactive Account Maintenance Fee of the lesser of (i) $4.99 USD, or (ii) the amount then reflected in your Account (the “Inactive Account Maintenance Fee”) from your Account.
The Inactive Account Maintenance Fee shall be assessed each consecutive month that the Account remains Inactive. Inactive is defined as failing to either complete an eligible transaction or redeem DOSH from your Account in the trailing twelve (12)-month period. Each time you complete an eligible transaction or redeem DOSH from your Account, you will reset the twelve (12)-month period by which we measure activity. Account maintenance fees are only deducted from an inactive Dosh account wallet – as mentioned, you will never be directly charged any fees to your personal bank account or credit card.
Though not required, we will use best efforts to notify you prior to your Account becoming Inactive so that you can avoid the assessment of any fees.
Still, that’s a crappy policy. Dosh isn’t like the TopCashback shopping portal which passes on the full 100% of cashback they earn to you. Instead, Dosh takes a cut of the earnings you generate when spending through the app or on a card linked in the app, so it’s not like they’ve not already earned money from your past activity.
Besides, customers with a zero account balance won’t be charged the $4.99 fee, so why should customers with an actual balance be charged that as an ongoing fee? It’s not like it’s costing Dosh much more to administer accounts with a balance. (n.b. there’s presumably some additional cost involved due to them needing to account for the liabilities of outstanding cashback on accounts with a balance, but not worthy of the $4.99 monthly fee).
What’s even worse is that the $4.99 fee is a monthly fee. I could almost, just about, but not quite, understand them charging a $4.99 annual fee for inactive accounts. But deducting $59.88 from account balances over the course of a year (after a year of inactivity) is some BS.
I’ll hopefully be unaffected as I tend to generate some kind of activity on my Dosh account each year, such as stacking deals to get a profitable Costco membership or earning 6% cashback on online Staples purchases.
Despite probably not being affected myself, it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth that they’re pulling this kind of stunt. Charging a subset of users up to $60 a year for not using their service is very poor form, especially seeing as you have to earn at least $25 in the app in order to cash out your earnings which might be one reason some users have gone inactive.