1.6p a minute 
20 days and you would have enough for a non fat skinny latte, but with no choc chips on the top
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Completely agree with that. Other competitors’ equivalents (ie: N26 back in the day, or Revolut), would tie you in for a minimum of 12 months I believe
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Conclusion
Monzo appears to be trying to go down the Banking-as-a-Service or the ‘freemium’ route, rather than making money in a more traditional way for a bank, by lending money.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing either, but I’m just not sure how long I (or anyone else) will pay for a service and features that other digital banks already offer me, and often for free.
There are whisperings that all Monzo’s new features might be Monzo Plus-exclusives, or at least exclusive for a while, so maybe (hopefully) it’ll get a little better?
This has occurred to me. What would non Plus customers think if 90% of development effort went into Plus?
I imagine they’d leave
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Most customers will have very little awareness of how much development time goes into the basic product vs the Plus tier and, might not even care if they were aware. (I own a Focus. Should I care how much time and resource Ford spent developing the Focus vs the Fiesta or the Mondeo?)
As with any product, Monzo need to make sure that their investment in Plus delivers returns. If it does, then the product will stand on its own two feet, and that’s all that matters.
(You could, perhaps, picture the opposite scenario, in which Plus subscriptions are so successful that they then end up subsidising and propping up the free/basic tier. In this example, you might wonder how sustainable the free tier was.)
What customers will judge, however, is whether Plus is worth the £5 price tag over the basic account, and whether Monzo (whether basic or Plus) offers more than other banks’ current accounts.
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So I’ve never been a fan of paywalling features. But if we get a trickle-down effect - where Plus features become free as others catch up - then I can see it as worthwhile.
The logic is that Monzo will at have a (profit) motive in making advances and providing good and innovative features - and moving older ones to the free tier to compete with others and to keep non fee-paying customers on board.
That’s the theory at least. Keen to see how it pans out.
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I like the way Plex do it. Most new features, and ones that cost money to run/maintain are exclusive for a certain length of time (and sometimes indefinitely). These often then fall into the free tier. I think it provides a great way of providing cash to develop cool new features but also helps out in maintaining and reiterating the base, free features.
Prevents things from being developed solely because they’ll generate immediate profit.
I definitely see the Credit Tracker falling into the basic account. Perhaps a single virtual card, too, as a tease. Connect a couple of external accounts? But things like the extra fee-free ATM withdrawals and 1 free PayPoint deposit will likely stay Plus.
Budgeting will definitely be interesting. I imagine basic insights will be free and a solid budgeting experience that gets regular updates as part of Plus.
Obviously I’d expect the foundations of the app to receive regular love and development (think Payee Management, International Transfers etc) but I’ll have bigger expectations of regularity and polish for new things from Plus.
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As a non-plus customer, I don’t think I’d mind as long as “core” app features are improved.
I have a feeling that most completely new features will be for Plus, especially in the near future. However, I see the following future changes being available for non-Plus customers:
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“basic” banking features — international transfers, cheque imaging (if it ever happens) etc…
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Improvements to current features — improvements to payee management, ability to edit scheduled pot transfers etc…
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Basic versions of Plus features to try and tempt people into upgrading to Plus — I can even see some of the current Plus features being introduced to non-Plus with limits as the Plus offering improves (eg: non-Plus gets up to two custom categories).
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Features that make money — stuff like bill switching, loans, credit cards, remortgaging.
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UI improvements (eg: Dark Mode).
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Features which cause network effects (ie: encourage your friends to get Monzo to use them with you) — shared pots, improvements to shared tabs etc…
I’m not so sure what will happen to future features which are built to encourage people to make Monzo their main account. For example, would Bills Pots or Get Paid Early be Plus only features if they were built now?
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I’m not so sure about this one. It might tempt Plus customers to downgrade 
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I have it on even though I don’t gamble and am strongly against gambling as if my card was lost it would be one less way fraud could be committed.
I must not be the only one.
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I used to have it on but leave it off now but that’s only as I play the lottery online so top up that when I need to buy tickets, usually every 4 weeks as that’s longest set for life allows, Euro Millions is DD
You are not, my friend. Same reason here
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That’s the only thing I use my Revolut card for…
Did teach me how, rightly, painful it is to deactivate the gambling block on 
Honestly, this is why I will never go Full monzo. It seems like it takes a story in the press to resolve these issues and I’ve read so many articles where monzo unitially said no to a reimbursement for fraud and it took the press getting involved to resolve it: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jul/23/monzo-refund-cold-callers-bank-fraud
Which may be true. Or this could be true.
“We were already in the process of reviewing both cases,” [Monzo] says. “Initially, we had declined, but senior colleagues looked at it again and decided to reverse this as they had been defrauded through no fault of their own.”
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No bank is immune to this sort of story, and many, many high street banks have been far worse than Monzo in refusing to reimburse until the press have got involved.
You don’t even have to take my word for it, just take this paragraph from the linked story:
£317m was lost by personal banking customers last year in similar scams, known as “authorised-push payment fraud”. Only 41% were refunded and, last week, the Lending Standards Board announced a review of the code amid complaints that signatory banks are failing to honour their commitment.
That’s 41% across the board.
In the Monzo case from the linked article, I suspect the reason that the claim was initially rejected is here: “[she] told me to forward to a Monzo email address, an email she would send me.”
It seems likely that the email was a magic link email, and while I can’t check right now (I delete all magic link emails once used), I’m reasonably sure that these emails come complete with a warning to not forward them anywhere. This would be the reason that Monzo could’ve pointed to the customer not taking due care (in the same way that if you give your PIN to someone who has access to your card a fraud refund would be refused for not taking due care). Is this fair or not? It’s really hard to say.
I have a great deal of sympathy for people who have been scammed, but I also have sympathy for the banks, because these scams are very hard for them to guard against and they could potentially lose a great deal of money through no fault of their own if they refund every single time. Indeed, short of building clearing delays back in to system, it’s pretty much impossible for banks to do more.
What I’d like to see is more education across the board on what people should (and shouldn’t) do in situations like this. Namely that it should be automatic that if you get an unsolicited call, you should hang up and not even entertain it as being legitimate or not. Contact the bank by another means if you want to check, but don’t entertain the call at all. I drive my family members mad by constantly drilling this at them. In return they drive me mad by saying “I got a call from X saying they wanted to discuss my account, but I knew it was fake becase I don’t have an account with X.” (to be clear, drives me mad because the implication is that if they did have an account with X then they would’ve put themselves at risk at falling for the scam, having forgotten the “It doesn’t matter” part of the advice).
Here’s another story from the Guardian with different banks involved, to further support my earlier statement that Monzo are far from the worst at dealing with such fraud events:
tl;dr, scams are awful
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Why are people still falling for these scams? They’ve been around for ages and there’s constant reminders and advice about them.
Not only did they have to forward the magic link they also had to give the scammer their pin number as well which they neglected to mention. The magic link only lets them view the account, the pin is needed to transfer.
I know number spoofing makes it harder to tell but at what point are people responsible for their own actions especially with the HUGE amount of info and warnings about scams everywhere.
Then you get people moaning because “my bank didnt instantly transfer my money to a different bank when I created the payee for the first time so they could do extra checks”
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