With the latest quirky advertisement, cred app has become the talk of the town. While some may debate that advertisements are demeaning to some senior artists, but one must give credit to the creative team for successfully driving multiple conversations around it.

Founded by Kunal Shah (also the co-founder of freecharge), cred claims to reward people with a good credit history. Concept is particularly unique and has not been seen before in Indian fintech landscape. So, once you download the app from Google playstore or App Store, you need to enter your phone number linked to your credit cards. Cred evaluates your CIBIL score and if it is less than 750, you are not allowed to proceed. Hence the tagline: not everybody gets it.

I have been using cred app for over an year now and my experience has been decent so far. I believe that secret sauce for cred app is its UI and UX. The animations, transitions are so irresistible. It can be overwhelming in the beginning but you get a hang of it as you go. My digital wellbeing dashboard shows that I spend around 15 minutes on this app daily. For something that needs to be used once in a month, this is quite good. First things first, lets address your safety concerns.

Cred has been authorized by RBI as the data they fetch for your credit cards to enable payments won’t be possible otherwise. Also, they claim to use 256 bit encryption which is a standard in this industry.

Benifits of using cred? Features?

1. Cred coins

You get cred coins equivalent to the amount you have paid for the credit card which can be redeemed for the following:

1.1 Cashback:

For each payment of minimum 1000 Rs. you get an opportunity to unlock a mystery box which will have some cashback (real money credited to your CC). Earning potential of the mystery box varies from maximum of 1000 to maximum of 1,00,000 depending on the amount you have paid for in your credit card.

In my experience, this is the worst way to spend your cred coins as I have not got an average of Rs. 8 as a cashback in the multiple tries I have done. Some say that we should pay in the multiples of Rs. 1000 only to get maximum number mystery boxes. But, it will be a reconciliation nightmare, so I avoid that route.

1.2 Cred Store

Cred coins can be used to purchase merchandise and discounts from the store. There are loads of options available where you can use your cred coins to get good discounts.

About an year ago, this section had some amazing deals. I ordered multiple goodies for myself. But now, this section has a quoted price for a particular item and applying your creds will give you a discount of X amount. Prima facie, all these so called discounted prices are available on e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart as well. But you cannot challenge cred as they show the exact same prices that product websites quote.

Refer to the example below:

Below are the screenshots of a product Boltt Fire Echo 1000 Neckband compared on cred (post discount), Boltt Website and Amazon. As you can see, the product has no discount in reality and is available on Amazon at the same price cred is offering after spending 5000 cred coins.

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1.3.3 Slot Machine

Yet again a UX masterstroke. This addictive slot machine would give you hopes of winning some kind of discounts in case you get ‘777’. Else, you will be rewarded some creds.

2. Gems

The app has a very elaborate referral program as well. They have referral leaderboards which may win you an iPhone, Airpods etc.

Also referral will fetch you some gems. Gems, just like coins can be redeemed but for a much bigger prize. All the ways to spend your gems remain the same but the reward is significantly bigger.

Conclusion

Once you surpass that apprehensive mode regarding safety, data etc. it is a slippery downhill road for cred. With amazing features backed up by an intuitive UI/UX, application serves as a pathway to stardom for a normal corporate individual. For eg. I have seen some rewards offering discounts for a chartered plane, some unheard amazing brands which make you stand out. If you think about it, why should you get anything to clear your debts? That is a value addition for me. They have successfully delivered the proposition of “not everyone gets it”.