Unless I missed something I think you misunderstood what they meant in regards to topping up. It costs Monzo roughly £24 per customer per year, not that they are going to charge us that. They are just encouraging us to use it as a current account as that was their intention, and how we get the most benefit from their current account.
The stability thing is fair, but that was on the pre-pay system. Moving to CA brought that processing in house and they promise that it will be far more stable.
That was on the pre-paid card system, which was using an external processor. The current account uses their own purpose-built processor and has so far (touch wood) been much more reliable.
Why would you have lost anything? The point of paying by card is to protect you from losses, as you’ve already experienced.
If you don’t trust Monzo to deal with fraud and issue the appropriate chargebacks, you probably shouldn’t use them. I’d suggest reading actual experiences of customers, I think they’re likely to handle this far better than most banks.
If you don’t trust Monzo not to go out of business, you don’t have to - you only have to trust the British government as they insure up to £85k.
P.S. To show an example of how I achieve that I usually carry: Monzo, Barclaycard Credit, Lloyds Debit, Halifax Credit, Metro Bank Debit, MBNA Credit, American Express Credit. These are mostly in my wallet but one is hidden in my bag separately. I also have access to them on my phone. All three criteria have at least three 
I know what they £24 is, didn’t mean they’re gonna charge that.
I consider this a way of forcing, not encouraging
I guess that’s a matter of perspective so there’s nothing to really discuss there.
I think Monzo unfortunately got picked and and were sold by various 3rd party’s as a pre-payment card, which isn’t correct. They always aimed to be a current account, and the pre-payment card was a stepping stone in getting there.
Monzo are a bank, offering a current account. I guess you just need to decide for yourself if that’s something you want or not.
If you’re worried about charges and want to regularly top up and use this as a secondary card, why don’t you just set up a standing order for a small amount from your main account?
There have been so many weekend I was asked to ‘carry another card with me’ because the processing system was down.
To be fair, this was due to using the older prepaid cards and outside of Monzo’s control. They’ve only had one short outage on the new system.
Or just a way to force people to move their salaries to monzo.
I think it is genuinely that they don’t want to encourage behaviour which makes them lose money, but yes also they do want people to use them as a bank, not as a backup card or exclusively a holiday card. In order to focus on running their own system and provide reliable service, they need to shut down the old cards.
If you really just want a prepaid card to put small amounts of money on, you may find your interests diverging from Monzo since they have always been really up front about aspiring to be a bank running current accounts and are not likely to focus on prepaid cards in future. If you want a current account but don’t trust them yet, perhaps just try the method above?
My experience of legacy banks detecting fraudulent transactions is (a) they’re utterly abysmal at it, blocking legitimate transactions and completely missing obvious fraudulent transactions, and (b) because they have no rapid feedback it can be weeks before you find out.
Monzo may or may not be better at (a) (although in my short experience they have been so far) but you can see a fraudulent transaction and block it instantly. Ultimately this will mean it isn’t worth fraudsters stealing monzo cards, as they will know they’ll only get one chance and it’ll be useless. I hope other banks start doing the same thing… but they’re not showing any signs of it yet.
As I said I use Monzo as my main card for everything and everywhere, and as such I don’t top up all time, I top up once (or a few times a month). As a user and a customer though, I will always be against charges for services which used to be free or restrictions being introduced.
It is chicken and egg though. I want to use them as a bank but they have to provide banking services such as statements, joint accounts and CASS. All of which are some way off. Meanwhile they are a good way of spending day to day without using cash.
Wait, you can’t get statements? Ouch. That’s a big deal for anyone trying to e.g. apply for a mortgage.
You can get statements, but at the moment you have to request them through in-app support and have them posted to you. Proper support for statements where you can download them at will from the app is coming 
(by some definition of ‘soon’!).
Keep it simple.
Let’s pay the actual cost of a top up by Debit Card.
We pay the actual cost of using an ATM abroad
We get the exchange rate at the time with no hidden costs for purchases
If they were to do all that it would be simplest. But I guess simplest may not always be right for businesses.
Let’s keep clear of rehashing the ATM discussion here though.
In short over the next year they are adding in facilities through the monzo api to manage your savings and do other things with your money via partners, as Tom put it, youll be able to start a savings account or switch to a better enegry plan with a few apps.
To keep things simple they want to get the banking aspects right and leave things like loans and other financial products to those that know it best.
At the moment I get its all hands on deck launching current accounts and the switching service will probably be on the roadmap. However theyre making leaps in whats available and its not a question of what we get more a question of when as the only factor here is time imho.
An allowance plus a flat fee therafter seems to be the simplest solution say a single top up of up to £200 monthly allowance then 50p per top up. The flat fee just seems simpler like the overdraft flat fee.
What is the % fee charge that Monzo have to pay? What is the current average cost of a top up?
£24 per customer, per year.
That’s the total amount that top-ups are costing. I think @Rob3 was asking what is the average cost per individual top-up, not the average cost of all top-ups in a year.
I was surprised by this figure. I wonder which customers it refers to.
If it is across all customers, as most are still on pre paid, then the amount will likely come down anyway, wouldn’t it? As customers transition to the CA there will be fewer who use debit card top ups, and those who do will use them less, I’d have thought.