The Plastiq website redesign and a "known issue" with recurring payments

Plastiq occupies a strange space in the world of travel hacking, since almost everyone seems to have strong feelings about it, but for a wide range of different reasons. When Five Back Visa Gift Cards could be used to manufacture spend at eligible merchants, you’d often be left with a “rump” balance on the cards once the cash back posted, which was easy and cheap to liquidate with Plastiq. When certain prepaid debit cards could be liquidated for a 1% fee, it was a convenient way to scale up your volume from home, albeit at a relatively high cost.

But my favorite use of Plastiq has nothing to do with manufactured spend. Rather, it’s been to automate transactions made with bank-issued debit cards, like the 12 monthly charges required to trigger an elevated interest rate on the Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account, or to maximize deposits to “round-up savings” accounts which can only be funded by making debit card transactions (ideally transactions ending with $0.01, so the maximum amount of $0.99 is transferred to your savings account).

Plastiq broke their website

The beauty of using Plastiq for these transactions is they require minimal maintenance: you can schedule monthly or weekly transactions far into the future, requiring upkeep only when a payment schedule is about to expire or a debit card needs to have its expiration date or CVV code updated.

What I found when I went to restart another 6 months or so of daily round-up transactions was that my Plastiq account had been “upgraded” to their new interface. Most or all of the same features were still there, but they were all a little more annoying to access. Instead of selecting your payment card at the beginning of a payment, you select it at the end. There’s an ambiguous prompt to upload a billing statement or invoice from your payee. But worst of all, when I went to set up more recurring payments, the website returned a generic message: “Sorry, an unexpected error occurred. Please try again.”

There were two odds things about this: I was able to schedule one-time payments for the future, and all my existing recurring payments (for my Consumers Credit Union account) were still active. I just couldn’t configure new recurring payments.

Fortunately, Plastiq has a pretty good live chat feature, so I hopped on the horn with one of their representatives and was told that:

“This is a known issue we are working on fixing. At this time, we recommend making single payments scheduled for future dates. I have escalated your case and will reach out to let you know when this issue is resolved.”

Obviously, not ideal, but presumably the scheduled payment feature with either get fixed or permanently removed eventually.

A “charitable” alternative

A reader e-mailed a few months back saying that he’d set up a public website to help automate transactions like these. This seemed like a pretty good idea (an idea so good long-time subscribers may remember I actually attempted something similar many years ago), but with Plastiq on the fritz, I thought I’d finally cruise over and check it out.

The website is called Automate To Donate, and as the name suggests, it configures repeating payments which go, not to your student loan, mortgage, or HELOC, but instead to a charity called “Giving to the Givers.” Now, this charity does not appear to have any public presence whatsoever, so this is absolutely not an endorsement of any kind, but it does at least appear to actually exist as a “DOMESTIC NOT-FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION” in New York State, and is listed by the IRS as a “Public Charity,” so let your tax preparer know if you’re eligible to deduct charitable contributions.

Conclusion

Hopefully Plastiq will work out the kinks in their new website soon, but in the meantime, if you have trouble setting up recurring payments, you should still be able to schedule one-time payments for the future. I’ll probably just set mine up a week at a time until the problem is resolved, which isn’t the end of the world. Alternately, you might try out Automate to Donate in order to configure recurring transactions in variable amounts. Just be sure that your transactions are actually counting towards your requirements; in the past, I’ve seen PayPal transactions processed as “PIN-less debit” and not count towards my 12-transaction requirement.