Thank you @simonb for taking the time to write such a response.
I think people on here have got very stressed and emotional about a product and a company they want to succeed. This has been exacerbated but a lack of response direct from Monzo. Acknowledgement from someone in the team would help significantly - but we community members also need to remember that decisions take time. The update came out on Thursday, I’m writing this on Sunday, there’s only been a couple of working days since they update and much of this will need to discussed next week before the next update.
Everyone has different views - some small, some massive - but I think one common thread is that we don’t want to see software features as part of a premium packaged account.
Picking up on what you’ve written here, I don’t think it is unreasonable to included higher ATM limits etc as part of a premium packaged account. These are banking services you would expect to pay a bank for.
But paying for a software feature seems unreasonable to most people. Monzo is an app only bank. The app and its software features are a key reason people move their accounts to Monzo. Monzo makes profit on the money we put into our accounts. Software features are the core of Monzo and what gets us depositing our money with you.
Imagine if Nationwide (a traditional brick and mortar bank) turned round one day and said to its customers that they were only allowed to use one cash machine in the branch and anything else they were going to start charging people for coming into their branches. Or perhaps that you weren’t allowed in the branch unless you paid for a premium account and that the free accounts only provided basic online access. Suddenly the idea of keeping your money with a brick and mortar bank starts to lose its appeal.
Because of the frustrations with Monzo Plus I have considered moving to N26 - but one thing sticks out in their premium plans. They limit the number of pots you can set up until you pay for a premium account. This is exactly the kind of thing that terrifies this community. The number of pots you have costs practically nothing to Monzo. So the idea that you could put limits on this and make people pay for more pots is incredibly hard to swallow. This is the kind of paywalling behaviour we want to avoid but is exactly what some comments suggest…