Cardup? Time to Carddown for me.
- therichpoordad
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Before we start, what is Cardup?
CardUp is a payments platform that lets individuals and businesses pay expenses like rent, taxes, invoices, and insurance with a credit card, even when the recipient doesn’t normally accept cards. It helps users earn rewards, such as miles or cash back, while CardUp handles the transfer to the recipient via bank transfer or other supported methods. Of course - all at a small administrative fee.
What have I been using Cardup for? My car loan, my kids pre-school fees and income tax with a fee ranging from 1.75% to 1.85%.
Let me simplify it for you. For a $1000 payment, you pay $18 and receive 1400 miles. I prefer not to delve into the complexities of calculating the cost per mile or the value of a mile because it's too much trouble. Consider this - a one-way SQ business class Saver redemption ticket from Singapore to Japan requires 54.5k miles. If you acquired this amount of miles solely through Cardup, it would have cost you approximately $700. Is it worth it? That's for you to decide.
Here's the latest update. CardUp has announced a significant change in their fees, effective from 13 June 2026. The minimum rate available, regardless of any promo code, is now 2.25%. That's quite an increase! You can find the full announcement and updated pricing HERE
Even if you have created recurring payments previously, once 13 June 2026 comes, all rates will be revised to the new pricing.
I extracted some of the commonly used promo rates and their revised rates. Full details HERE.
What would have been a $700 price to pay in my earlier example now becomes $900. Is it still worth it..? Perhaps but why do it when there are other alternatives?
Personally, I have already canceled all my existing payments on CardUp today and transferred them to Ipaymy. Ipaymy functions just like CardUp and has similar fees (at least for now).
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