Questions
14 straight answers, including the awkward ones.
If something here is vague, that is a bug. Read anything you like before you sign up — none of it changes once you have.
Your banking data
Your bank connection runs through Wych, an accredited data recipient under the Consumer Data Right. You authorise it on your own bank's website, not ours — we never see your banking password or your login. The connection is read-only: it cannot move money, change your details or set up a payment.
Ninety days of transactions on the accounts you pick, which we read for one purpose: finding the regular credits that look like pay, so we can work out your annual income. We keep the salary credits we used as evidence, your assessed income and which bank it came from. We do not keep your account balance, your spending, or a copy of your statement.
Yes, at any time, from your account settings or directly with your bank. Revoking stops any further access immediately. Your verified income stays on your account until it expires or you replace it, so revoking does not knock you out of your tier mid-coffee.
Enter your income by hand. It goes to a person for review with whatever supporting note you want to add, instead of being approved automatically. It takes longer, but nobody is locked out for having irregular work, cash work or an unsupported bank.
At the counter
No. You scan the shop's QR code and pay on your own phone. The cashier sees a payment for the full ticket price land in their dashboard. There is no coupon to hand over, no code to read out, and nothing on the terminal that says anything about your income.
Your receipt shows every line: the ticket price, the discount, the percentage it came from and what you actually paid. Every receipt you have ever taken is in your savings history.
No. There is no card to carry, no app to open before you order and no membership to renew. Verify once, attach a card once, then just pay.
The money
Because it buys them a customer. A shop already spends money on discounting — happy hours, loyalty cards, half-price Tuesdays — and most of it goes to people who would have paid full price anyway. FairPinch aims the same money at people who genuinely could not otherwise afford to walk in, and only spends it when they actually buy something.
Entirely by the merchant. They set nothing and choose nothing at the counter — they accept the network rate, which currently tops out at 10% for the lowest income tier. FairPinch takes 0.5% of what the customer is charged as a platform fee. Nobody is subsidised by another customer, and there is no membership fee.
No. FairPinch never lends you money, never fronts you anything and never charges interest or a late fee. You pay a lower price out of your own account, in full, at the time of purchase. There is nothing to pay back because nothing was ever borrowed.
Nothing. There is no signup fee, no monthly fee and no cut taken from your discount.
Your tier
Re-verify whenever you like and your tier updates from your next purchase onward. If your income drops — lost shifts, a job ending, going part time — that is exactly when re-verifying is worth doing, because it moves you down into a bigger discount.
The table does. Tiers are fixed bands of annual income with a fixed discount attached, published on this site, the same for everyone. There is no score, no credit check and no discretion applied to individual people.
You see the assessed figure and the evidence behind it before anything is submitted, and you can correct it. Corrections go to a human reviewer. If it is still wrong after that, re-verify with a different source.
Nothing here is a catch waiting to be found.
Free to join, up to 10% off at every shop in the network, funded by merchants, with a 0.5% platform fee that comes out of their side and never out of yours.