How Does Grow Credit Make Money?

We often receive questions asking how we make money when we offer a free, 0% interest virtual MasterCard. It’s understandable that potential customers would be skeptical—after all, nothing in life is really free, right?

Yes, Grow Credit’s Build membership is 100% free for qualifying customers. (By “qualifying customers,” we mean those who meet our underwriting criteria.) Grow Credit monetizes our services in other ways:

Premium-tier memberships and secured cards

Although Grow Credit’s Build membership is completely free, we also offer premium-tier memberships with higher monthly limits, as well as secured cards for those who do not yet qualify for the Build plan. (Higher spending limits and cards that require a security deposit are considered to be higher risk, so we have to charge fees to absorb the costs associated with defaulted loans.) To learn more about our membership tiers, check out our Help Center article here.

According to a platform study conducted in January 2022, approximately 49% of Grow’s active customers have either opted to join at a paid tier, or they have decided to upgrade after opening a free account. We are confident that many of our customers will see the value in upgrading after they have built their credit with our free product and learned about the added benefits of a higher monthly limit, which can have a greater positive impact on their credit score.

Interchange fees

Merchants pay processing fees to credit and debit card companies. The current average fee is between 1.3% and 3.5% of the transaction. A small percentage of that fee is passed back to Grow Credit every time you use your card. 

Here at Grow, we strongly believe in transparency and welcome questions from our users. Please feel free to reach out to customer service at behappy@growcredit.com if you have any questions.