Upside- Cash Back for Gas (1 Viewer)

[supermike80]

I feel like I'm too old for all these apps. I know my wife is. She hates them with a passion.

 

[Alex P Keaton]

Weird. I’d love to understand the business model and how it makes sense (for the app company, not for you). Always skeptical of stuff like this.

I assume the selling point for the early adopters (among gas stations) is that it'll send them more business. Once some of them are participating, everyone else has to for fear of losing business to those who are.

From the point of view of the app company, i assume they're get some small affiliate fee of a fraction of a percent for every purchase made on it (from the participating gas stations where the sale took place).

So essentially it's a clever way for the app company to get a small cut of all gas sales, while the gas stations unwittingly get sucked into a price war.

I mean, think of it like Grubhub..... it costs the restaurants money but they do it because they gain business. Most gas stations the gas is a loss or breaking even and they make their money on the convenience store..... which some have offers as well.

Yeah, I just don’t believe gas stations will gain enough business to make this worthwhile. That’s ultimately my stance.

Well... I will ride the wave as long as long as there is a swell

Yeah, this is definitely a net negative for the gas stations. Once they're all (or mostly) doing it, there's no net increase in people buying gas, but there is a net decrease in how much of the purchases price goes to the station. Different from grubhub, where you might actually order food out because you can get it delivered, when you'd just cook at home if you couldn't get it delivered.

Exactly. But in the meantime, kudos to Chad and any others who benefit from this!

 

[Chadstroma]

I feel like I'm too old for all these apps. I know my wife is. She hates them with a passion.

I honestly really felt the same.... this one is super easy and user friendly though. I mean, if you can operate an app on a smart phone you can do this.

I did try out some other similar cash back apps and stuff for other things, they all sucked and I got rid of them.

 

[Chadstroma]

Further update on my experience with Upside.

Near the start of June until now, I have $41.19 in my Upside account. $20 of that was a bonus for having my wife sign up but $21.19 isn't bad for a months worth of usage on stuff we would have bought or bought something similar to anyways.

I have used it mostly for gas and a couple of convenience story stops for water or something. We did use it twice for food. The first was a nearby pizza place that I did not even knew existed let alone us try it before. My son raved about the pizza and it is his favorite pizza now. This is a Mom & Pop type place so when you claimed it, instead of the super easy "I paid" button, you did have to take the extra steps to take a picture of the receipt. I am still waiting for that to be processed 4 days later. The other was a quick stop at Taco Bell for my kids. I spent under $20 and got almost $4 back. Just like the gas, you just claimed it, put in what card you are paying with and then when complete hit the 'I paid' button. Super simple.

Yesterday, we had to go to a conference meet for my sons down further state in Bourbonnais which is about an hour drive from us. They apparently do not have any Speedway, BP's or Shell there but when I looked at the gas there were several gas station brands (that I am not familiar with) as options. They had restaurant options down there too. Since gas is significantly cheaper there than by us, we filled up our tanks down there. I used the same transaction for both of our cars on my wife's account as she still gets the bonus cents from signing up from my referral link.

The one thing that I would really like to see is that they should have a filter to do 'nearest' or 'cheapest' or 'most refund' etc. The listings they have in there are very random. There does not seem to be any order to them. I can only guess it is based on how much profit they get from it. As someone said, having a feature to show nearby options on your particular route would be great but as I was trying to figure out where to eat, you can use the map and do your own sort of 'what is on our route'.

I am a big fan of this. Super easy. Worthwhile.

I will say that is has changed my habits on getting gas though. Before, I pretty much exclusively used Speedway only using Shell or BP when I really needed gas and they were the nearest. Now, I can scan and see what is the best value and then what is near and make a decision based off that. I have used Shell a couple of times since and a BP convenance store once as well.