Upside: Cash Back - Gas & Food 4+

Poor Customer Service

There were 2 offers at the same station. However, the LOWER offer (4 cents) was visible ONLY if I zoomed in on the map while the HIGHER offer (8 cents) was visible in a plain search. This is a deceptive practice. I only realized this because when I saw the payout it was much lower than the offer. So I went back to the app to make sure and the 8 cent offer was still there. However, there was also a hidden offer at the same station only visible if you zoomed in as far as possible on the map. If that’s not clear then imagine if I put up a large sign that says “8 cents back on every gallon!” Then you fill your tank only to realize the next day that you only received 4 cents back. You come back to check the sign and indeed it says 8 cents. However, when you closely inspect it you see a tiny little sign that says 4 cents back—two offers at the same station, one plainly visible and another hidden from view. This is EXACTLY what happened with the app and it’s deceptive. However, I wasn’t even paid 4 cents, it was 3 cents. This is extremely deceptive. When I contacted customer service about it they blew me off and told me that the payment (of 3 cents) was made and if I had additional questions go to the FAQ page. Nice.

Developer Response ,

Hi, Thank you for letting us know. We're sorry for the trouble here. We'd like to take a look into this one more time, can you send us another email with ATTN as the subject line, so we can take a look at this personally? Thanks for your patience! 💌

Saves You Money, But Very Frustrating App

It does what it says it does. I’ve saved $40 on gas so far, and this app is free. So that’s very nice. But it’s a very frustrating app to use. The app works fine until it’s time to actually prove to it that you filled up at the gas station with the offer you “claimed”. The app instructs you to tap a button that doesn’t exist on the screen in order to “arrive” at the gas station. So I looked it up online and people say you have to log out and log back in. Then it prompts you with the option to “upload receipt” which is what I do. But now the scanning technology which scans your receipt on the app doesn’t work anymore! So I have to upload a pic instead.
Logging out and logging back in after you’ve claimed your offer is what makes it eventually work, but not every time. Sometimes I have to wait a few hours after I’ve completed the transaction before logging out and logging back in will prompt the option to “upload receipt”, which appears to be the only way I can prove to Upside I completed the transaction.
It always works eventually, and I’ve saved $40 so far so that really is nice, but the app is buggy and has these issues. I really hope they fix it, it would be a dream to have this app finally just be smooth throughout the whole experience. But as of now it is a chore, they do make you work a bit for the savings.

Potential problems using Apple ID

First of all, I really like the Upside app. I recommend it to others. I’ve maybe earned about $20 so far using it, but have also lost out on about $10 because I can’t get back into the app using my Apple ID to log in. It’s not really the apps fault, but only rated 4 stars because of this circumstance. Here is what happened…

I initially created a login with my email address and a strong password and everything was fine for 9 months maybe. Then I started to have to enter my password every time I accessed the app. Apple’s password manager wouldn’t work. I became frustrated finding where I had recorded the password and entering it manually every time I wanted to use the app so I logged out of the app and created. New account using my Apple ID to log in. After three uses and accumulating about $10 in rebates, I would get an error when trying to log in using the Apple ID. Upside support isn’t able to help because they don’t get passed the actual email address Apple uses and passes to the app (I know I’m probably not explaining it right). I tried deleting an reinstalling the app, changing my Apple ID password, but I still get the same error. As far as i know, the account using the Apple ID is gone for good and I no longer can use Apple ID to login to the app at all. Now I’m using Google to log in. Hopefully I don’t encounter something similar with that ID.