SaveUp

» see saveup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

SaveUp required a US bank account and read it, which put it out of reach for me on the first line of the signup form. It is worth writing about anyway, because the idea behind it is one of the better ones anybody has had about personal finance software and it did not survive contact with the business model.

The product launched in November 2011 out of San Francisco. You connected your bank and loan accounts and SaveUp watched the balances. Every time you put money into savings or knocked money off a debt, it gave you credits. The credits were not money. You spent them on games, mostly scratch-off cards, for a chance at prizes that ran from small cash amounts up to genuinely large ones. Nothing you played with was ever your own deposit.

PCMag put it on its top 100 websites list for 2011, in its first weeks. TechCrunch covered a $5 million round in July 2012 led by BlueRun Ventures with True Ventures, bringing the total raised to around $7 million. By then it could read accounts at roughly 18,000 US financial institutions.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

The behavioral argument was real and had academic backing. Prize-linked savings works: people who will not respond to an interest rate will respond to a chance at a jackpot, and the money stays theirs either way. Banks in other countries had run schemes like this for decades, most famously the UK's Premium Bonds. In most US states the legal status was murky, because a bank raffling prizes for deposits looked uncomfortably like running a lottery.

SaveUp positioned itself in that gap. It could not be the bank, so it sat on top of everyone's bank and awarded the prizes itself, and it made noise about the congressional effort that eventually became the American Savings Promotion Act in 2014. That framing gave the company a mission to talk about, but it also fixed the shape of the problem. The prizes were a standing expense against a product that users paid nothing for, and the revenue was supposed to arrive later from financial institutions who wanted those customers.

~ priya haji ~

Priya Haji was the co-founder and chief executive. Before SaveUp she had built World of Good, which got artisans in 55 countries into the US market, and before that, while still in high school in Bryan, Texas, she had started a free health clinic. Fast Company later called her the best social entrepreneur of her generation.

She died on 14 July 2014 in San Francisco, unexpectedly, at forty four. Early reporting pointed to a pulmonary embolism. She left two children under three. There is no clean line from that to what happened to the company afterward and it would be cheap to draw one. What is on the record is that the $5 million round in July 2012 was the last funding SaveUp publicly reported, and that press coverage of the product effectively stops in 2014.

~ what the filing says ~

The site kept working for two more years. The last capture of a functioning SaveUp homepage in the Internet Archive is 10 June 2016, complete with the marketing copy about saving money and winning rewards. After that there is nothing until February 2018, when the domain answers with a blank page whose title is just the word "saveup" in lowercase.

The paperwork lagged the product by eighteen months. SaveUp Inc. filed for bankruptcy on 29 November 2017. Today saveup.com is parked on a domain marketplace with a price on it, which is what happens to a name whose company has finished and whose word is still generically useful.

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