It appears the recent Freetrade investment round has slowed the CrowdCube website to a crawl. For anyone wanting to invest you may find it easier to use the Crowdcube app.
It crashed the website
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The app seems buggered as well. Whether I try it on wifi or mobile data, it keeps telling me I seem to be offline 
Weird! it seemed OK for me.
I got through all ok on the app.
ÂŁ1,788,000 of the ÂŁ1,000,000 target with ÂŁ2,000,000 EIS available now!
Force closed it and it seemed to work. Got as far as submitting an investment when it told me I was offline once more. Force closed again and checked my portfolio and appears my pledge has gone through. Phew.
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Managed to invest but missed out on the EIS 🤷
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Lots of people accidentally invested more than once, and someone managed to pledge 10k more than the maximum allowed. So once those have all been fixed/removed, there will be people who find they are actually in under the EIS limit. Suspect you probably won’t find out if you’ve managed to get under the line until money actually starts being taken, though.
It now looks like the investment page has been taken down entirely.
This whole thing just goes to show what a farce Crowdcube is… 1.5% fee and they cant even scale the infrastructure to support the demand of a high profile crowdfunding like this… bet Monzo are even more pleased they brought the infrastructure in house… its been a terrible experience for investors and will be a PR disaster for CC and potentially impact Freetrade too!
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Closed by crowdcube for now as it was crashing their website. Crowdcube really are the terrible at this, the demand is entirely predictable, but they still try to serve full dynamic pages and unsurprisingly their website crashes every time there is a big raise.
I agree about the fee - it is particularly galling that they now charge investors a fee yet can’t provide the service they charge for.
I imagine next time Freetrade will take this in-house and do it in the app, as Monzo did in their latest round. That has other benefits too anyway.
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I did question why I was paying a fee when the website was barely working 
I’ve also in the past accidentally managed to invest multiple times by accident (but that’s easily fixable).
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I think Freetrade should be pushing for a refund of the fee or at least a % of it back to investors… with just £2m of EIS available most of this will have been swallowed up with people who got triple charged and so this is going to be a logistical nightmare to sort out and there is no way of ensuring the right people get access to the EIS
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I almost double invested but luckily reviewed my portfolio and cancelled it. The app was poor, the website even worse. Typical when they charge a fee for the “privilege” as well.
No one has been charged yet, the money has just been pledged. People will be able to cancel duplicate pledges before money is taken. This would mean that the EIS should be able to be reallocated to later investments, one would hope.
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you would hope but then there is the logistics of correctly allocating the EIS to the right people and the fact that people may not have invested because they didnt think they would qualify for EIS any longer… therefore not making it fair or clear to everyone investing…
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I wasn’t going to invest this time, but the pitch deck (which wasn’t available on crowdcube) was emailed to existing investors so they could look through it (I received the email at 12:24, so it was a bit of an afterthought)…
Also said not to share the documents - Although difficult to police…
Fair point about people who have chosen not to invest. Unfortunately there really is no way around that, is there?
Of those who’ve actually invested, that should be more straightforward. Only ask EIS qualifiers to complete payment first, and then see how much is cancelled. Reallocate down the queue and ask next set to pay, and see how much is cancelled. Repeat until no more EIS left to reallocate.
Obviously this does depend on a certain level of competence from Crowdcube, which currently isn’t a given 
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Reports now that Crowdcube have been proactively cancelling duplicated investments and the total invested is now down to ÂŁ1.8m (so everyone should have EIS so far now, I understand).
However, there are reports that they’ve also cancelled duplicates where the customer has been in touch with them to say “I intentionally pledged more than once” 
I’d be surprised if they reopen the campaign before next Monday, as they’ve clearly still got a lot to sort out.
that’ll be me then… lol