I was fully expecting that the usual suspects like MEAB and myself would be the only people seated in the peanut gallery for yesterday’s big Bilt launch, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were plenty of prominent voices calling out that the new program was unnecessarily complicated (outside of the absurd headlines in the Daily Mail, lmao).

There’s still an angle if you are like my good friend Andrew that I forgot to h/t in yesterday’s article (sorry dude!) and both have an existing Bilt card that was product changed sans hard pull and are an advanced MSer that can squeeze strong value out of uncapped 2%. 

However, I also noted in yesterday’s article that one of my major reasons for avoiding this whole launch was the anti-MS slant from both Cardless and Richard Kerr. This was reinforced with the whole banana shtick that was prevalent throughout the press release.

Honestly, the more I thought about it, the banana thing was almost funny in a wink-wink nudge-nudge way because it called back to the fact that Bilt was built (ba-dum-tss) by people who cut their teeth in the MS world. 

Significantly less funny was something else shared by the Bilt team, insinuating (in a non-fitting meme format, of course) that all of Bilt’s customers are “basement dwelling redditors trying to cheat their rent system”. This spread like wildfire, even among the Bilt subreddit full of non-gamers that are just trying to get a leg up on rent and mortgage payments. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought of openly insulting my customer base on launch day as the greatest way to aid in new customer acquisition.

But hey, I’m just some idiot in the peanut gallery, so maybe I’m wrong. If nothing else, it certainly distracted from the whole “bro please bro just earn Bilt cash to use it to “unlock” earning points on rent even though the whole point of this card is paying rent please bro”

Anywho, that’s all for today. You have choices about where to bring your spend (and corresponding extreme volume of interchange fees for banks), so choose wisely. 

Живели!