Suits Me caught my interest as I searched for a way to earn cashback on grocery shopping. Their debit card offers a competitive rate of 4% cashback at Sainsbury’s (although their marketing team can’t decide whether it’s actually 7%). The cashback comes in the form of real money rather than cryptocurrency, unlike their rival rewards card Plutus. I decided to test out Suits Me, with the hope of recommending them to my YouTube viewers.
Setting up the Suits Me card
Suits Me post your debit card, along with an activation code to enter in the app. The first red flag I noticed was Suits Me deducting £5 from my initial deposit. They claim this is an “admin fee” to activate your card. This obviously left a bad taste in my mouth, but I let it slide, believing that I would quickly recover this cost in cashback rewards.
Suits Me top up fees
Suits Me also hit me with a £1.25 charge just for topping up my account. Still, it’s not a deal breaker, I thought, as those cashback rewards would soon be rolling in. It’s worth mentioning that the customer can deposit a maximum of £5000 in one go, to minimise the frequency of top-up fees. Granted, this is not practical for most people including myself.
Suits Me transaction fees
The alarm bells really began to sound when I went to use the Suits Me card for the first time. Unexpected start-up fees had left me with less in my account than I realised. Consequently, my card was declined twice at the Sainsbury’s self-checkout. Can you guess what happened next? That’s right, more charges. Suits Me helped themselves to 2 x 50p fees from my account, as a penalty for me not being able to use my card.
I gave Suits Me a choice of keeping the £1 they stole, or keeping me as a customer. They saw sense, and refunded the fees.
A month later, I incurred another declined card charge of 50p, despite having enough money in my account to cover the transaction. Suits Me revealed that this was a MasterCard security feature, which blocks every 6th contactless payment, necessitating a chip-and-pin transaction. The irony of using theft prevention measures as an excuse to steal money was lost on Suits Me customer support. No warning of this is given to customers, including in the app. I decided to use chip and pin every time moving forwards, rather than having to keep count of contactless payments.
Suits Me declined to comment on the rationale behind card decline charges. Instead, they avoided the question, by directing me to their Terms & Conditions. Funnily enough, there is no mention of declined transaction fees in any of Suits Me’s promotional material, or even their pricing plan.
Waiting for cashback
Following a third fee for insufficient funds, I decided to suspend my usage of the Suits Me card, while they caught up on my cashback. Then, I could reassess the situation and see if I was actually in profit. You see, cashback arrives in the same account that you spend money from. It’s therefore difficult to assess your net result without keeping some kind of spreadsheet. To make matters worse, there’s a two month delay in cashback crediting for each transaction. This leaves you out of pocket, as Suits Me deduct fees instantly.
During my absence from Suits Me, they sent me several e-mails and even left a voicemail message trying to get me to resume use of the card. I then discovered the fatal flaw of the Suits Me cashback card, which negates any chance it had at being a viable option:
The cashback either arrives late, or doesn’t show up at all.
Chasing up missing cashback
My first cashback arrived in September 2022, for transactions I made in May 2022. It took until January 2023 for Suits Me to credit transactions from June and July 2022. I had to ask them on three separate occasions to investigate the missing cashback (August, November and January), with customer support claiming they would sort it out each time.
To Suits Me’s credit, they overpaid the outstanding cashback balance by £3.07 as a “goodwill” gesture. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.
At this point it was clear to me that I should avoid using Suits Me altogether. When attempting to withdraw my remaining balance however, the app claimed I had “insufficient funds”. Needless to say, this was because I had forgotten to factor in the £1.49 withdrawal fee, which I had to manually deduct from the account total that I typed in.
Final thoughts – Is Suits Me a scam?
Taking all the fees, refunds and goodwill payment into account, I left Suits Me with a profit of £7.36. I don’t believe this was worth the hassle of tracking my own cashback whilst avoiding their traps. I lost out on potential cashback because this would have incurred more top-up fees.
Evidently, Suits Me is set up to syphon money from customers’ accounts at every opportunity. Customers would likely be better off using a standard debit card, due to the risk of losing money to fake fees.
Thanks for checking out this Lazy Money UK review. For more rewards on grocery shopping, check out the receipt scanner apps.
