AwardWallet price increase and how to lock-in current pricing
If you are into points and miles, you probably have many different travel loyalty accounts across various airlines, hotels chains, rental car companies, and credit card flexible currencies. That is a lot of balances to track. You can certainly do this manually in a spreadsheet, checking each account's website, but that is a lot of work. AwardWallet is an online tool for tracking all your reward programs. I have been using it for a couple of years and highly recommend it for one-stop updates on your points and miles balances. Unfortunately, the company will soon increase the price for its AwardWallet Plus membership.
Since a basic membership is free, should I pay for the Plus version?
The AwardWallet basic account offers many features and may be sufficient for your needs. These include tracking accounts for family members, travel plans, notification of balance expiration and mobile access. A Plus membership adds the following features:
- Display extra reward account properties
- Display historical account balance changes chart
- Display historical transactions for some of your loyalty accounts
- Allow exporting award balances into Excel or PDF formats
- Update accounts in parallel (up to 5X faster)
I had a Plus account in the past but let it lapse. While I like the fast updates, I did not find that to be a necessity. However, when I received an email in late December announcing a pretty steep price hike as well as an option to lock-in current pricing, I decided to upgrade.
Avoid Plus price increase by acting now
Just before Christmas, I received the following email from AwardWallet.
“Dear Derek,
On February 1, 2017, the price of an AwardWallet Plus membership is increasing from $5 for six months to $30 for one year. For many years we’ve avoided any price increase, but it has become necessary to maintain the high quality of AwardWallet website and mobile apps for our increasing member base. AwardWallet has been around for 12 years and in the past five years alone we’ve:
Added support for 250+ loyalty programs (supporting over 680 total today)
Created dedicated teams for our iOS & Android apps
Continued to offer a feature-rich product at no cost
The good news is that we are grandfathering anyone who has ever paid for AwardWallet Plus before February 1, 2017, and who maintains an AwardWallet Plus account going forward. According to our records, you have previously paid to upgrade your account to AwardWallet Plus; however, you’re currently at the AwardWallet Free tier.
If you subscribe to AwardWallet Plus before February 1, 2017, and keep your subscription active, you’ll lock in the rate for AwardWallet Plus at $10 per year. If you wish to take advantage of this opportunity, please subscribe via the payment page. If you are on a mobile device, please subscribe via the “My Profile” page.
AwardWallet has always had a Free tier, and that is not going to change. Compare AwardWallet Free and AwardWallet Plus in our FAQs.
Finally, another way to support AwardWallet is to use the credit card links that we have on our blog. We have some great offers that will keep your travel bank full of points and miles.
Thank you,
The AwardWallet Team”
A 200% price increase is a lot so I think locking-in the existing rate is a no-brainer if the Plus membership has value for you. I have already upgraded my subscription to continue paying a very cheap $10 per year.