Monzo Paid Accounts: 2 years+ Poll

[Peter_G]

Can you believe it’s over two years since Monzo Plus was launched? It landed on 15th July 2020 - where has the time gone?!

When Plus and Premium were released, we did some initial flash polls, then some bigger ones. So, two and a bit years and a financial/energy crisis later, it’s time to revisit!

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Are you currently subscribed to a paid Monzo account?

• Yes to Plus
• Yes to Premium
• Yes I’ve tried both
• No (I’m a Monzo UK customer)
• No (I’m a Monzo US customer)
• No (I’m not a Monzo customer)

If you are a customer, how satisfied are you? (5 is amazing, 1 is so so poor)

• 5 - Amazing
• 4 - It’s good
• 3 - It’s average
• 2 - It’s pretty poor
• 1 - So so poor

If you are a customer, are you planning to stick with it?

• Yes - it’s fine as it is
• Yes - if I get new features
• I’m going to downgrade / have already downgraded from Premium to Plus
• I’m going to upgrade / have already upgraded from Plus to Premium
• No - I plan to cancel (I’m on Premium)
• No - I plan to cancel (I’m on Plus)
• Unsure

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If you’re not a Plus/Premium customer, why not?

• Too expensive
• Features uncompetitive
• Interest rate not competitive
• Connected accounts don’t cover the providers I need
• No, or not enough, features of interest
• Disagree with paywalling features
• I haven’t yet but I plan to
• No joint account support
• I left because of the cost of living
• I left because of another reason (tell us below)
• I don’t have a Monzo account / Monzo’s not my main account
• I’m a Monzo US customer
• Something else (tell us below)

Top 3 Monzo Plus / Premium features?

• Other accounts, in Monzo
• Interest on balance and regular pots
• Custom categories
• Holographic card
• Metal card
• Virtual Cards
• Advanced Roundups
• Credit Tracker
• Offers
• Auto-export transactions
• Free cash deposit(s) per month
• Fee-free withdrawals abroad
• Phone insurance
• Travel insurance
• Discounted airport lounge access
• Cashback on loans

Which Plus/Premium features have you used?

• Other accounts, in Monzo
• Interest on balance and regular pots
• Custom categories
• Holographic card
• Metal card
• Virtual Cards
• Advanced Roundups
• Credit Tracker
• Offers
• Auto-export transactions
• Free cash deposit(s) per month
• Fee-free withdrawals abroad
• Travel insurance
• Phone insurance
• Discounted airport lounge access

What do you want next?

• Nothing, it’s fine as it is
• A more competitive interest rate
• Ways to help me save money
• Rename virtual cards
• An offset pot (money in a pot/s is used to offset overdraft fees)
• Get paid early automatic for Plus customers (it just lands in your account 4pm the day before)
• Freeze virtual cards
• Transfer money to a credit card pot when money’s been spent on that card
• An additional mega-feed, showing Monzo and all linked account transactions together
• Advanced roundups that actually roundup
• Categories, notes and the Monzo experience for connected accounts
• Budgeting across connected accounts
• Connect more current accounts
• Connect more credit cards
• Connect mortgages
• Connect investment accounts
• Manually add external account balances
• Search connected account transactions
• Export connected accounts to Google Sheets
• Use virtual cards to pay from Pots
• Add virtual card to Google/Apple Pay
• New app icon(s)
• More card colour options
• Priority support
• Change Monzo.Me username
• All 3 credit agency scores in app
• Change date of Monzo Plus subscription
• Pay Monzo Plus from pot
• Native IFTTT
• More IFTTT triggers / actions
• Nested categories
• Better budgeting
• Bring to joint accounts
• Google Sheets templates (for dashboards, data visualisation, interrogation etc)
• Delete / reorder custom categories
• Bulk change categories
• “A Year In Monzo” style analysis in the app (visualise / interrogate past spend / better in-app analytics of spending / categories / merchants etc)
• Create receipts in Monzo (through OCR or manual entry) - and assign a category per line
• A ‘secrets store’ - somewhere to keep sensitive banking info (like CVVs).
• More custom categories
• Nested custom categories (e.g. Energy Bills breaks down into electricity and gas)
• More colours for custom categories
• Delete / hide standard categories
• Future-proof the Google Sheets export - more information (e.g. payment method of Google Pay vs card) and columns for future use
• Net worth in the app
• Zero-based budgeting (like YNAB?)
• Something else (tell us what below!)

Happy polling!

[Revels]

This sort of thing makes me realise how little I utilise from Plus, but the two things (categories/export) I wouldn’t want to be without.

(Virtual card in ApplePay is a thing, but it’s in your wish list)

[N26throwaway (Sir Tom MacMonier)]

@Revels

This sort of thing makes me realise how little I utilise from Plus

Honestly this.

I was pretty content with Plus. Still kinda am, but this poll made me question that. Just how much value am I really getting from it?

The number of features are great, but I think it’s a bit of a problem if more people are like me and only really a handful get used. Perhaps it’s time for Monzo to revisit what’s packaged with the account, and maybe tilt towards quality over quantity, reducing it to fewer features, removing unused bloat, and really focus on making those few ones market leading. Or maybe there are some new ideas worth exploring?

@Revels

Virtual card in ApplePay is a thing, but it’s in your wish list)

So is the pots thing. Guessing it’s just copy pasted from last year’s poll when these things didn’t exist.

[Revels]

@N26throwaway

I was pretty content with Plus. Still kinda am, but this poll made me question that. Just how much value am I really getting from it?

For me, it’s only £5, and the export is worth that to me easily.

But the offers, credit tracker, card (#TeamYello) etc I’m not bothered about. I couldn’t tell you what the offers are, I only knew of the Patch one but when I tried to use it, I couldn’t anyway due to spend I think.

The thing most likely to make me downgrade is the annoyance of how it doesn’t work with my joint account.

[Peter_G]

@N26throwaway

Guessing it’s just copy pasted from last year’s poll when these things didn’t exist.

There are so many issues with these polls that I don’t know where to start But yes, that’s kinda the reason.

Remember kids, don’t poll in a hurry

[SebH]

@Revels

For me, it’s only £5, and the export is worth that to me easily.

I suppose it depends how much £5 cuts into individual personal budgets at the moment. Although we can probably all agree that £5 objectively isn’t a huge amount of money, there are a lot of people at the moment who are really without very much money at all. When you don’t have really any spare money, and are struggling to pay for essentials, as quite a few people are, it’s going to be too much. I do expect some people will cancel as a result.

That’s not to say that you don’t get significant value yourself though; obviously it’s a personal judgement for everyone and if you can both afford the fee and find the extra features useful it clearly makes sense for you.

I do think there’s a bit of a risk that Monzo’s profitability could be seriously hit by the current crisis, but I feel confident that they’ll be OK overall because more people now do use them as a main account than they used to.

[Revels]

Yes I agree. I didn’t mean to belittle the amount, and there would have certainly been times where every penny counted for me.

[SebH]

That’s fair, and I didn’t read your original comment that way at all.

Just as someone who isn’t currently subscribed to Plus, I suppose I wanted to make that point as I do think it’s a fairly valuable package and there are useful tools in there: however, at the moment, I can’t justify the cost myself. If I suddenly won the lottery, I probably would subscribe!

@Peter_G’s reasons for not subscribing are quite comprehensive. I chose disagree with paywalling features myself, because I don’t like it in principle, but it’s also a little bit that I don’t need the features enough (I suppose that is lack of features of interest) and can’t justify the cost personally (so too expensive). That value judgment for me doesn’t work, but I haven’t avoiding subscribing because there isn’t any value in the offering.

I personally think the current set of features works quite well and a good way of appealing to a broad set of people - probably rationalising the offering would be a mistake.

Monzo did eventually “get it right” with this version of Plus!

[Revels]

And I think the things I’d want to improve Plus, would/should be improvements to the general app that everyone would benefit from.

Pot to Pot transfers for an example

[JIMMWX (Village Idiot)]

Great poll @Peter_G

But, and I mean this with respect, this if anything reconfirmed I was right to canx plus and go elsewhere.

A lot of the “features” are not really features or are free elsewhere. Also, I suspect a lot of folk only have plus because essentially the app is low value otherwise.

If you look at plus, it has to be one of the poorest options for a paid account in my opinion, all you’re really doing is paying for a fully functional app.

But I do still like Monzo. What would bring me back? Better in house interest rates, premium which covered all phones in a household and offers you could actually use.

[SouthseaOne (Michael)]

@Peter_G

Use virtual cards to pay from Pots

So I thought this works already, though I crashed into a feature/issue recently

If there is not enough in your pot to pay a direct debit from a pot it takes as much as it can and then uses your main balance (and overdraft if necessary)

That does not seem to work for cards payments

I woke up to a few emails from Netflix telling me that they had tried several times unsuccessfully to take the payment

It would be nice if they were more consistent, but maybe there are legal and/or technical issues with that

[N26throwaway (Sir Tom MacMonier)]

I disagree.

I like that Bills pots do this. One of my direct debits is variable. I don’t account for the variable component or do any rounding for the pennies. So this is useful to me. I like my bills pot to be exactly £0.00 once all my bills are paid with no admin from me.

Virtual cards on the other hand are firmly for protecting and safeguarding my main account. The budgeting element is secondary, and I’ve since deduced it just doesn’t work for those edge cases I’d have liked it to without summary/trends being able to predict the weird subscriptions, else a lot of math is involved on my part.

I can see the use case for something like what you’re asking though, and maybe an option would nice. But I’m also thinking a technical limitation too, as that was the long used excuse for not being to pay card payments from pots with the main card, which virtual cards solved. So if they figured out how to make this sort of approach work with virtual cards now, then there’s zero reason they couldn’t do the same with the physical, and go further with it by being able to break it down into a merchant by merchant basis.

[Paulw (Paul)]

I’d like to see the Plus/Premium tab gone. There’s some discussion elsewhere on that.

[coffeemadman (Jonathon 🏳️‍🌈)]

There’s lots!

I’d like some really deep interactions with connected accounts. It’s already there for the most part (logos, merchant info, trends and categories) but I’d love it if it could have roundups (from my main account), moving funds into a pot automatically if I spend on a credit card, or even something super like Flex’ing connected account transactions (that would actually be game changer for me).

[JIMMWX (Village Idiot)]

Thinking about it in a little more detail….

Overall

Overall I think plus is great, if we see it as the plus version of the app. The £5 a month makes it so much more feature rich. But - that’s also my biggest criticism of plus.

Compared to other packaged accounts

This to me is the huge challenge plus definitely has, premium less so. Let’s look at Lloyd’s, Barclays, NatWest here.

In all of those, the “fee” is refunded, one way or another. Also, the benefit for having it (and I get that this is very subjective) outweighs the cost.

Free magazines, a better credit interest, cashback on direct debits. I made the cost of plus back in NatWest just by having DDs coming out that I would’ve had to pay anyway.

Premium I think is better placed and priced but here again is a lever for growth.

Compared to other fintechs

When Monzo launched it was cutting edge and there really wasn’t a lot out there similar. Of course starling and a few others (N26 etc).

Now though Monzo is a goose in a field of geese. And I’m not sure that what they offer for plus makes them enough of a differentiator to keep customers coming in/remain.

So what could Monzo do

Firstly connected accounts. Being able to budget across these would be epic.

Secondly, in house interest rates that are actually competitive. At this point the 1% is so unnoticeable it may as well not be there. Having an in house easy access rate could bring customers in.

Thirdly, and I think there is a huge gap here, family support. Apart from Nationwide (cheaper than premium) HSBC select and cover (More expensive) and Barclays (more expensive when you think it’s just the tech pack) nothing offers for a paid amount full family support for it all - Phones, Travel Insurance and others.

If they could bring in full family support for premium but retain at the existing cost my guess would be that would be a driver for growth eventually. In that yes it would lose them money, but eventually not.

Also, features that are innovative remain paid for (such as budgeting across accounts) but those that exist elsewhere become free.

I can guess why Monzo probably won’t do the latter, it probably relies on the “well £5 isn’t a lot for folks so they’ll just pay it to get a fully functioning app” but this is a bad assumption.

For me as I suspect others, every little can help. I’ve saved £60 just by cancelling plus, or if you are being pedantic, £36.

The main challenge for Monzo as I see it falls into retention of existing customers and attracting of new from other banks/divergence from other competitors in fintech.

To me the current plus offering doesn’t cut it, I would imagine I’m not the only one tempted elsewhere//unlikely to be tempted it for what you get right now.

[Carlo1460]

Plus does offer some good stuff.

Trends is probably the better bank based outlook across other accounts.

Virtual cards to pots I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere yet (Starling will nail this hopefully).

Custom categories should just be free. The work is there. Stop milking it when it’s fully functional and no longer required investment to work.

The not so good:

The offers are shite. Been the same forever and can get the same if not better deals just looking online.

The holo card is probably a winner for those who don’t enjoy the hot coral, maybe just offer people a choice at account opening instead.

Interest paid can be sourced better elsewhere so doesn’t really make it worthwhile.

Probably get away with reducing to £2/3 a month, with a lot more signups off the back of it. The price of a coffee won’t be missed.

Edit: maybe even make this free.

Premium is as above, but the metal card is nice, but the insurances again found cheaper elsewhere. Not worth £15.

Probably get away with dropping to £10 and have a lot more sign up, NatWest offer some insurances with their £10 sub.

Monzo is in a dire need to make a profit and hopes to achieve next year, though remains to be seen as they also need to keep staff happy with reward in these current times or people can/will just jump ship to the next best thing.

[Revels]

@Carlo1460

Probably get away with reducing to £2/3 a month

@Carlo1460

Monzo is in a dire need to make a profit

The road to profit is not making one of your best revenue feeds 40/60% cheaper. If anything, it needs to go up.

[Carlo1460]

Clearly no business man but would reducing cost and result in more signups? Otherwise people see less value and even more so if the price goes up for very little reward.

Granted some of these things cost the bank nothing to keep in place IE categories.

Pretty much every other bank offers open banking for free, not sure why people should pay for it here, people can go elsewhere for it.

Virtual cards are also free elsewhere to manage subscriptions.

Revolut does allow subscriptions from Pockets via virtual card, which is also free.

Their Plus offering for £2.99:

Premium £6.99:

Travel insurance alone is good here for pre existing conditions.

Metal £12.99:

Just wish it was 1% cashback, and a form of phone insurance was included.

Pretty much all the Plus stuff for Monzo is free here.

[Revels]

@Carlo1460

Clearly no business man but would reducing cost and result in more signups?

You have no idea what I do for a living

Reducing may increase sign ups, but it might not bridge the gap. Increasing the price may result in people leaving.

But if “cheaper = increase volume” then every single service would be 1p.

You price to the maximum you can. Plus can and should go higher.

For the sake of round numbers, if there’s 100,000 paying for Plus. That’s £500k a month. Make it £6 and it’s £600k. Unless you lose more than 17% of your original customers, you’re making more money.

Why do Netflix keep putting prices up? Why not make it £1 a month and try to get everyone to subscribe? Because there’s more money in it being a higher cost.

[Carlo1460]

I don’t see Plus as much value as it should be.

Netflix gives value for what you pay, unless I decide to pirate everything released I could save that £10 a month as I could get all the shows elsewhere.

But save time and effort, it’s all in one place.

Hats off to those who do see value in Plus.