Update 7/30/20: Final reminder that Swych goes the way of the dodo tomorrow.
Update 7/21/20: A quick reminder that Swych is closing down next week, so get copies of any unredeemed gift cards and redeem any Swych points you’ve earned on your account.
The Swych app used to be a great source for gift cards because they’d frequently run discounts for all kinds of brands, with deals on Lowe’s gift cards being most commonplace.
Not only did they offer discounts, but you could also earn 5x/5% on Chase Ink Plus/Ink Cash cards when paying with one of those cards via PayPal. That could make some borderline break even deals much more worthwhile from a reselling perspective.
I’d wondered in recent months how gift card-buying apps like Swych and Bitmo had been doing recently seeing as neither had run many deals and there are now several apps that reward you for every gift card purchase like Fluz, MPX, CrayPay and the Pay With Ibotta feature in the Ibotta app, whereas Swych and Bitmo don’t offer any great incentive to buy gift cards from them.
Well, I got my answer on the Swych front today because they’ve sent an email to users that says the following:
Dear Swych Member,
As a user of the Swych mobile app, we are reaching out to let you know that on July 31st, 2020, the Swych mobile app will be disabled and no longer supported. This means that you will no longer be able to access the cards you may have stored in the app.
Prior to July 31st, 2020, we recommend that you log into Swych to retrieve all of your card data and store it safely so that the data is available for redemption. You can securely store your gift cards in your Apple Wallet directly from the Swych app or take a screenshot of the card details for future redemption.
Thank you for supporting Swych. We have appreciated your business. Should you have any questions, please contact [email protected].
Best,
Swych Team
As you can see, they’ll not only stop selling gift cards, but they’ll also be closing the app entirely, so you’ll want to check to ensure you’ve obtained all your past gift cards purchases.
Something else that’s worth checking is if you have any kind of points balance with Swych. They ran some deals in the past (e.g. here and here) which offered Swych points, with every 100 points being worth $1. To view your balance, tap the menu button in the app and you should see how many points you have at the top of the menu bar.
Can’t cash out the points. I got 8.42 worth of points, but they blocked all payment systems so I can pay the remaining 1.58. Smallest denomination that I can buy is $10 as well.
Yeah, that’s frustrating. We have a similar situation on my wife’s account – she has $9.98 of points, so only needs to pay $0.02 to cash out for a $10 gift card, but there’s no way to pay.
I think the Archive features basically put used/resold cards under a different tab in the apps. That way you still have access to the card numbers and PINs if you need them, but it helps keep the still-to-be redeemed cards separate.
As for what to do with the cards, I guess screenshotting them will be the quickest and easiest thing, albeit a bit of a hassle to subsequently go through. I only tended to buy cards in Swych to resell, so I don’t think I had any unredeemed cards for personal use in there.
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