(Important Update) Pepper Rewards App: Earn Cashback On Gift Card Purchases (Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart & More, 10% Cashback Initially)

Update 2/8/24: The Pepper app has reached out to advise that the doubled cashback (i.e. 10% cashback) for your first 30 days will be ending on February 15, 2024. If you procrastinated with not enrolling in this app yet, this next week will likely be the best time to do that as there’s no knowing if the 10% cashback rate for 30 days will return in the future. If you do sign up, I’d appreciate it if you use referral code 588157.

There’s a new app called Pepper Rewards which offers cashback when buying gift cards in the app. This is one of the most compelling gift card buying options I’ve seen in a long time because of how generous their cashback rate can be, especially in your first 30 days. It’s likely that they’ll have to make changes in the future as it’s not sustainable, but for now it’s an excellent opportunity.

Pepper Rewards Referral Link

At the time of publishing this post, Pepper is offering $20 worth of points to both you and me if you use my referral link and spend $100.

You can download the app here or from the Google Play Store or App Store. When signing up, you need to use referral code 588157 in order to earn that bonus.

(Side note: I don’t have any kind of affiliation with the app other than my referral link, despite my last name being Pepper and this site being one that covers gift card deals! It’s just a happy coincidence that they’ve seemingly named the app after me.)

There’s an alternate offer via Swagbucks giving only $15 cashback rather than $20. Although that cashback rate isn’t as generous, it only requires a $25 gift card purchase rather than $100 of spend. Swagbucks lists Walmart, Target, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe’s or TJ Maxx as the options for that offer. If you don’t currently have a Swagbucks account, I’d appreciate it if you used my Swagbucks referral link.

It might be possible to stack the two by clicking through from Swagbucks and entering my wife’s 588157 referral code in the appropriate box. At worst, you’d presumably earn $20 in points after spending $100 on gift cards; at best, you’d get the $15 worth of Swagbucks too. Update: It looks like Pepper is no longer listed on Swagbucks.

How Pepper Rewards Works

As mentioned earlier, Pepper is an app where you can buy gift cards for a wide range of retailers and earn cashback. At the time of publishing this post they seem to be offering a flat 5% cashback rate across all brands.

For some brands that’s not a great rate as you can get more substantial discounts elsewhere. However, the reason I said earlier that it’s such a compelling app is because of some of the high value brands that you can buy and earn 5% cashback. That includes Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Target, Nike, Home Depot and more – all brands that aren’t normally available at a large discount.

Earn 10% Cashback For The First 30 Days

Earning 5% cashback on those high value brands is good. What’s even better is that for your first 30 days you earn a whopping 10% cashback on all purchases (i.e. an additional 5% cashback on all your purchases).

That’s nuts and isn’t going to be sustainable in the long term. However, it seems like they have venture capital to burn (more about that in a subsequent section), so hopefully that’s honored without any issue.

The additional 5% cashback isn’t awarded instantly though, so it’s up to you as to how hard you want to hit it. If 5% cashback on Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy or Sam’s Club gift cards sounds good to you regardless, it could be worth hammering the 10% opportunity and counting an additional 5% bonus cashback as the icing on the cake if it does indeed pay out.

I’m heavily caveating that not because I think the app will cease to exist all of a sudden, but because the company behind Pepper might decide to implement some kind of unannounced limits, such as a cap on the 10% earnings.

How To Buy Gift Cards In The Pepper Rewards App

The process for buying gift cards is very straightforward. You add one or more payment cards, select the gift card brand you want to buy, enter the value you want to purchase and go ahead and buy it.

Pepper Rewards issues gift cards instantly, so you can use the card immediately. That’s particularly useful for in-store purchases when you’re standing at a checkout ready to pay, especially because it gives a barcode that can be scanned by the cashier. The process is notably faster than the Fluz app, so if cashback rates were similar in the two apps, I’ll be more inclined to buy the gift card from Pepper.

Another useful feature of Pepper is that you can buy any value of gift card – it doesn’t have to be round numbers. If you’re shopping at Walmart and your cart comes to $172.43, you can buy a gift card for that exact amount, rather than buying a $175 gift card and having $2.57 left over.

Pepper provides the opportunity to copy gift card numbers with one tap which is useful if you want to load the gift card to the retailer’s app without having to manually type it in.

How Much Are Pepper Rewards Points Worth?

A minor downside of Pepper is that it displays your cashback earnings as points rather than cashback. If those points were displayed in the same way as cashback (e.g. 100 points = $1), that would be easy enough. However, 1 point = $0.25, so if you have, say, 31 points it means you’ve earned $7.75 cashback. It’s not a huge issue, but it adds a little complexity when it doesn’t feel like they need to have set things up in that way.

Gifting Gift Cards From Pepper

In addition to buying gift cards for personal use, you can send gift cards from within the app. To do that, tap the person icon in the bottom right corner of the app, then tap ‘Send gift card’ and follow the intuitive process. Something to note with this option is that it looks like you have to buy gift cards in $5 increments rather than being able to send random amounts.

Which Company Is Behind Pepper Rewards?

Pepper Rewards has been created by a company called Moocho. They appear to have an app called Moocho too which works in a similar way to Pepper Rewards, so I don’t know if they’re planning on rebranding Moocho as Pepper, or if they’ll remain as two separate entities. It looks like Moocho was aimed at college students, so perhaps they’re aiming Pepper at all demographics. If they have the tech in place already, duplicating their existing app and giving it different branding is presumably easy enough to do.

The great news is that Crunchbase reports that Moocho raised just over $23 million on December 21, 2023. That means they have money to burn which is presumably why they’re offering a) a fairly generous referral program and b) 10% cashback on all purchases for your first 30 days.

Potentially Interesting Opportunities

I’ve had a quick play with the app tonight and made a couple of purchases to test some things out.

One thing I’m curious about is how the purchase will code. Will it code as some kind of miscellaneous purchase, or will the merchant category coding for whichever retailer you’re buying a gift card for be passed through? If the latter is true, it means that buying a Chipotle gift card with a card that earns more on dining purchases would become even more rewarding. If you buy a Meijer gift card with a card that earns more on grocery purchases, that could be awesome. It’ll likely be a few days before the transaction posts to my card rather than being pending, so the results of that test are TBC.

After making an initial purchase, I checked the card I made the purchase on. The transaction was displayed as ‘APP* MOOCHO-AMAZON’ which immediately made my eyes light up. That’s because of how things could work with Chase Offers. The Chase Offers backend doesn’t seem to be as sophisticated as Amex Offers are, so provided a retailer name appears within the description of a transaction, that seems to be sufficient to trigger the statement credit from a Chase Offer. Apropos of nothing, there’s a Walmart Chase Offer giving 5%-15% back right now.

I’ll keep you updated once I know how these tests turn out.

Thanks to Snailrock for the heads up about this awesomely named app.

Update 1/20/24: Apparently the Pepper app doesn’t like this Pepper. I opened the app today to find that my account had been shut down after being greeted with a message that says “This customer was deactivated for security reasons”.

For what it’s worth, I hadn’t been using the app in an unreasonable way. I initially bought a $25 Amazon gift card, then a $100 Walmart gift card, both purchased with my own money. Then last night I redeemed some of my referral earnings for a $250 Walmart gift card.

That’s all I’d done – bought two gift cards and redeemed for one – and I got shut down. I suspect that the reason I got shut down is because I earned quite a few referrals both by writing about the app here and from Nick including my referral link on the Frequent Miler post about it too.

Nick has been shut down as well, while I’ve seen reports of other people getting their accounts shut after not-unreasonable spending (e.g. buying two $500 Amazon gift cards). The app therefore seems very sensitive to pretty much any level of purchases outside of $25 here and $50 there. I’d therefore proceed with caution and be sure to write down or take screenshots of the gift card numbers and PINs for cards you buy because if your account gets closed you can’t access them.

If you used my referral link, it seems like you might not end up getting the $20 referral credit due to my account no longer being open.

I’ve sent an email to [email protected] to find out if it’s possible to get my account reopened seeing as all my purchases and earnings were legitimate. It might just be that they have some kind of algorithm that automatically closes accounts based on some preset limits and that manual intervention might result in my account being reopened. However, it might be that they decided to manually close my account – I guess we’ll have to wait and see if I get any kind of reply from them.

Further Update 1/20/24: I’ve heard back from Pepper and it’s good news – for me at least. The reason they’d deactivated my account is that:

Our Fraud Team paused your account access to review because other users who signed up with your promo code have broken our terms of service by creating multiple accounts and referring themselves.

They’ve now reopened my account which I appreciate. If you’ve been using your account legitimately but were subsequently closed down, it’s worth dropping an email to [email protected] and they’ll hopefully be willing to reopen your account too. If you’ve been doing a bunch of self-referrals and have been shut down, I doubt you’ll be as successful.

Update 1/28/24: There are some useful data points and other information in this follow up post.