For those who don't know, Plutus is a debit card that gives you cashback in their cryptocurrency, Pluton (PLU). You pay a monthly subscription and depending on your subscription tier you get more cashback and more perks. Perks give you 100% cashback up to 10€ on certain sellers.
I started with the 10€ a month subscription plan back in February but later on upgraded to the 20€ one. It gives me 3% cashback on up to 1000€ in spending meaning I'm earning 30€ a month from that in Pluton and on top of that I also get 3 perks that earn me another 30€ per month.
So, in total, I'm paying 20€ per month and will get back 60€ in Pluton. It seemed like a great deal, even with the price steadily declining. You have to wait 45 days after receiving your rewards until they become available.
When I joined the in-app swap feature wasn't available yet but they claimed it would become available soon, it's been a long time since then, and a lot of broken promises. Only a few users outside of the EU and UK get access to this feature.
I can't trade in-app but no problem, the withdraw option is still available and the token is traded on coinbase so no worries.
I've accumulated quite a lot of PLU so far so I decided to investigate how could I withdraw my rewards and sell them. That's when I came across a couple of Reddit posts complaining about the withdrawal process and the new whitepaper. Apparently, it is against the terms of service to sell your coins in an external market.
So I can withdraw my tokens but I have to keep them in my Metamask, as soon as I move them my account will be flagged and restricted. This is a major red flag, they basically force you to keep your tokens and only sell them on the internal market once it becomes available.
Did a little more digging to read the opinion of the people who already have access to the internal market (Swap option). More red flags!
According to the posts I read, the internal market price is WAY LOWER than the external market (Coinbase). On top of that, there is a 50% fee which is absolutely insane.
Where do I go from here?
There are two options: either I ride this out and hope for the best, they promise to lower fees in the future and add a lot more utility to the token in the short future. To be fair they did just launch the gift card program but with preposterous fees (More about that in a future post).
Option two is withdrawing all my available funds if they approve the withdrawal and dumping it all on coinbase. So far I spent 171.87€ on this venture and selling everything on coinbase would yield me around 255€ minus paying for one ETH transaction. Doing the math I should walk away with 80€ after spending almost a full year using their cashback card. It would have been way more profitable to just buy Bitcoin and hold it.
For so little gain I'm going to just keep going until I find a better cashback option, or until this ship sinks. If you have any suggestions please drop them in the comments below.
Haven't posted in a while, trying to get back in the habit of visiting Leofinance and Hive more frequently instead of spending so much time on other social media apps. More to come!
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Just based on what you said, option two seems like the way to go. Clearly, they are treating their customers like crap anyway so I wouldn't want to do business with them even if they changed their ways...which seems highly unlikely.
I have the plutus free card, and stopped using it months ago. The amount of red flags is huge, no way I'm putting a cent in there. I basically assumed all plutus won is lost and moved on.