Stockpile: How Families Invest Reviews

So I had zero issues until I was on vacation with no cell reception. I got paid and put $20 in like I do every pay period. I got an email stating “your money has finished its journey from your bank to our clearing house.” I had couldn’t check my mobile banking to verify because we were in a remote location. I don’t know about you, but that verbiage tells me they have RECIEVED my funds. They credit my account $20 and I buy stock. So I’m using my card as normal for food and gas while I’m away confident that if I didn’t have funds in my account, my payments just wouldn’t go through. I then get an email as I’m returning home that I didn’t have funds for my stock and had gotten $30 an NSF fee. Then I hear from this app that they’re also charging me $30 for a returned check fee. If I had thought that the transaction hadn’t been completed I wouldn’t have even used the card in the first place. So I email their non existent customer service to tell them that I’d happily cover the $20 but absolutely not the $30 because my email clearly stated they had my money. The representative said my email said it was “pending” and “requested.” I took screenshots of the email to send them proving her wrong. I was told “Oh well, should have read your terms of service better.” Then they just stopped responding. So they locked my account. I can’t even cash out, give them what they say owe and be done with this ridiculous company.

I was interested in this to earn some extra money and not take too much risk as nowadays you have to be careful. I got a fraction of share of stock from Groupon a few days ago and finally downloaded the this app app and put in my Social Security Number as they requested due to regulations. Then I linked my checking account to my account. Then yesterday I tried to access my account but couldn’t gain access so I called (put on hold too long) and then emailed Customer Support. I received an email telling me I was locked out due to Equifax breach so to unlock I had to send a copy of my driver’s license to verify my identity. The email said it would take 2-3 days to unlock my account. In the meantime I received another email from this app saying that my weekly automatic deposit of $950 would be transferred to my account in 2-3 days and I became alarmed as I had not set up any auto deposit from my checking into my this app account. I could not access my account as it is still locked so I tried contacting customer service by phone and waited on hold for over 30 minutes so I emailed them to tell them they are mistaken and I did NOT authorize an automatic withdrawal out of my checking account. I called my bank and they said they cannot take action until this app attempts to take out funds from my checking it is all so disconcerting

I’ve had this app for a few years now as I wanted to start investing in my future when I was a minor, and because of my age I was given a custodial account. Upon reaching the age of 18, the age for my state where I no longer have to have a custodial account, I requested switching to an individual account. I started this process around 2 weeks ago and upon the start of the process they had my original account shutdown and made me make a new account, and then started to try and move everything from the custodial to this new individual account. During this timespan I am unable to check my portfolio, invest, sell, anything at all. They have no support phone number, forcing you to wait for email responses. This process has made me lose a decent amount of potential revenue as the market has changed in the two weeks while I’ve been unable to access this. While I understand that a process like this can take some time, the least they should do is communicate effectively and stick to their timelines given (they said “3-5 business days” and here we are). Apart from this this app is a great and simple tool for a person starting investing, but the glaring flaw of lack of accessible tech support is too big.

So far the only reason I’ve used Stockpile is they gave me a free $5 of stock. When you go to sell, you’re going to get the closing price of that day, or even possibly the day following, so heads up on that. They’ll of course cite that investing involves risk, investing doesn’t involve shooting in the dark though. A day long lag for price changes could be critical. Clearly Stockpile was designed to be for people who don’t know much about stocks, and it was designed to keep them that way, because it’s entirely brand-centric. It’s all about pushing fractions of huge companies, and not actually giving you many options. They don’t even allow you to trade in everything on the NASDAQ, so flip a coin for what you can and can’t invest in. There are no comparison tools either, which is proof it’s all name recognition and selling big brands. It doesn’t matter the performance just the name. It’s clearly designed to sell poor people on the idea of buying stock in big companies they recognize, not to actually help them invest. The trading fees are ridiculous for offering fractional shares also, the only way I can interpret charging $1 a transaction (yes that’s $2 total for a sale and a purchase) is trying to deincentivize trading. It seems they just want you to buy stocks on their app and hold. Do yourself a favor, get one of the big name brokers, don’t bother with this.

Let me start off by saying I love this app. I’ve been using them for a few years now, and I’ve only ever had one issue, which was quickly resolved. That being said, I’m starting to feel very ‘meh’ about them. It feels as though there’s very little effort on their part to make any kind of changes, or add features. I’m the approximately 3 years I’ve been with them I can say Stockpile hardly ever gets updated. It’s been forever since the last time I’ve seen an update. Stockpile has looked exactly the same for this time span. Most other apps are making changes all the time... updating things, making a better, richer user experience... I STILL after all this time have to press the “log in” button when I enter Stockpile for it to initiate face recognition... most apps these days automatically trigger face recognition and log you in. And they in all this time have added zero new features. Lots of these new apps that are popping up like this app, Webull, Robinhood, etc, are starting to adding things like after hours trading and such... but there has just been seemingly zero effort on their end to have any innovation, and its starting to make me want to move elsewhere with my money. Just the amount I have with them makes it a tough choice...

I am a parent using Stockpile as an educational tool for my 7 year old son. I started him with 20$, told him he could get 5$ worth of his favorite 4 companies and it has been amazing. For 2 weeks he studied the daily ups and downs. He loves the graphs and the short how to articles are to the point and easy to understand. He has internalized his new “ stock owner” title so well, that he asked the young girl in the drive through working at McDonalds (one of his picks) “ excuse me, how are your stocks doing today?” I was floored at his question, and the poor girl was confused. I had to explain to him that she probably didn’t know. I realize because of Stockpile, even a child can begin to understand the complexity of stocks and dabble in the buy sell process. I love it for the ease , simplicity, and quick response to questions!!!

When transactions are done they are not properly done in a timely manner as stated in your guidelines. So I have had a lot of loss when I could of had a lot of gain because the transaction was not done in a timely manner as stated in your agreement with customers. I am looking to move my investments or cash out. I know I don’t have a lot but I have been a valuable customer that has not been treated fairly and have lost a lot of money over time because of the transaction not being done like the contact says to do it. I know things happen but this has been an ongoing thing for a while. Even the simplest thing as when placing a buy on stock it does not go in when I made it way before 3 pm. Even when transferring money took up to 14 days that is unreal and not in agreement either. I have been dissatisfied for a while. I have referred a whole bunch of people to you and never even got recognition for that either. Long as you are acquiring customers why would it matter. Spoke with some other customers whom are disappointed wondering if we want to continue to be your customer and the sad part I bragged about your company and then it seemed like things went south. Thanks for your time. Darlene

This is a great platform for a child’s investment account. Stockpile has resources for kids to learn fundamentals of investing. The only reason I give 4 stars instead of 5 is because there are some opportunities for improvement. If this app integrated the ability to record notes for deposits/withdrawals and stock purchases/sales you could see when grandparents or other contributors gifted children money/stock and it would be fun to reflect on. You could even build on that and show how much an individual investment has grown over time or filter investments by the person who gifted the stock/money or add some social interaction aspect to it so that the child and child’s contributor can see when/what was given, similar to Venmo. I don’t think investment balances or account details should be shared, but it would be a lot more engaging if people could see the history of who gifted to them and who they’ve gifted to. The this app app is great as-is, but it would be more fun to use and encourage people to invest more frequently if you could see people’s gifts and they could see the gifts they gifted.

-Satisfied Parent

To start I have been a stock pile user pretty much since they took over from (loyal3 who went under). They were my first real investment firm and at a dollar a trade back then it was a great deal especially with the fractional shares ability. Fast forward to present day and there’s many many options such as Robin Hood or Fidelity then offer commission free trades with instant access to funds from your bank account. The biggest things that stock pile doesn’t bring to the table is That the trades are not instant because they are used in batches to save them money. This could mean that you lose out on a huge profit potential or even take a huge loss because you don’t really have that instant control. There’s also no ability to set a stop loss on any of the stocks which opens you up to increased risk. Couple that with the dollar per trade commission and I don’t know what I would be paying for with this app anymore as the value proposition just isn’t there. When I expressed these concerns to this app they pretty much blew them off as not being important and when I asked to transfer my account out because there’s no stop loss they said that I would be charged a fee. My advice is to do your research on other options to trade.

Had made a payment to fund my account which I then received notification that their clearing house had received the payment and had posted on the account. Then a few days later I get another email stating that they didn’t get a payment and will be charging me $30 for a reversal that never happened. I got in contact with the bank stating that the payment did go through. Which I then reached out to Kevin from this app Customer Support throughout several days he kept referring the only option I had was to pay the $30 and that i only had until May 5 to make the payment. But funding the account takes 3-5 business days to post which then he referred even if I made a payment they were authorized to sale my stocks and wouldn’t be worth it to make the payment since they would sell my stocks and close the account. At this point I had given up in Stockpile. I decided to pay the $30 in order to avoid any additional fees and to close out my account. If you are looking for an app to get stocks THIS is not the one! I’m sure you’d be better off with any other one just not this app! Horrible experience in customer service, and 0 assistance from the representatives or company which obviously don’t care about their customers.

Initially I thought this app was great especially after reading many reviews, plus it allows custodial accounts. I set up a custodial account for my daughter; however, could not add a bank account after multiple attempts. I then tried to set myself up an account, but it stated my email address was already used. Which it would be because it’s what I used to set up my daughters account. I changed her email address and tried to set mine up again and it still said the same thing. I’ve tried a total of 3 different emails and continue to get an error message.

I’ve emailed and left a message via Stockpile since they have no customer service number, but Stockpile shows that they’re only available Monday-Friday (go figure). I received an email back from Megah who only provided me with the link to an article on how to add a bank account. I’m pretty sure I said I’ve tried to add a bank account and was having issues so sending me a link was not what I needed, nor did she bother to address the issue of me not being able to set up my own account.

Customer service is extremely poor, very limited and not helpful. I like the concept of Stockpile but with the issues I’m having, I’ll find a better company with better customer service.

My children both attempted to redeem stock gift cards from this company and had nothing but problems. The credit did not show up on their accounts. It took me two emails that went unanswered and two phone calls for a total of 59 minutes on hold before I was able to contact anybody. Then the support person wasn’t able to help. She gave me excuses about it being their busy time of year, etc. Eventually she transferred me to her supervisor who gave me the same excuses and told me they are having trouble scaling their app, etc. This is a banking organization. They should be aware that they deal with real money and it isn’t acceptable to string people along.
Eventually they were able to get one of my children’s accounts working. It has been more than a week and the other child’s account still has not been fixed not had there been any contact from the company. I am dreading the reality that I may have to call them again. I’m certainly n I will be on hold and met with endless excuses.
There are many other ways to get your kids started with stock purchasing. Do not frustrate yourself with this company.

Stockpile is great for how easy it is to buy and sell stock. But, I want more options for viewing my total stock growth and returns. As it is right now, the only way to view my total ROI is through the graph presented at the top of the home page. I'd like to be able to zoom in on different portions of that graph and have it be more interactive. I'd like to see a version that normalizes out my investments so that I'm only seeing the growth or decline of my stock instead of artificial stepwise increases in the value simply due to the fact that I put money into a stock that day. It also isn't totally clear to me what the numbers in the red/green circle are. Is it total and percent return over the time period I selected on the graph? Or just overall total and percent rerun? Because when you look at an individual stock it's unclear what those numbers in the circle are because they're different than the total return reported in the detailed explanation below the chart. Also navigating to different portions of Stockpile is a little clunky.

I got Stockpile because I couldn’t get access to Robinhood or other stock trading apps. Had I known Stockpile uses delayed trading over live trading I would never have used it. It’s almost a guessing game when you buy and sell. The system is so screwed you’ll have money disappear or do something crazy without your authorization. I deposited $200 dollars to try my luck at some cheap stocks. I canceled an order I had placed and then my $200 had disappeared from my buying power and in its place I got a $200 “gift card” that I could only use on Stockpile. So yea instead of being able to take my money back I have to now hope a stock I bought at close Friday either gains value or stays the same by close on Monday for me to get my money back. All while charging me fees for transactions that most other apps and services don’t for way better service. COMPLETE TRASH!!! I would never suggest Stockpile to anyone who wants to trade seriously or even children or just new investors trying to learn the craft. Never using this again and will be deleting this as soon as I get my funds back. At least whatever might be left.

I transferred 40$ from my bank. After 3 days it said it was successful and said i had 40$ available cash. Spent the 40$ on two different stocks . I noticed nothing came out of my bank. Where I had 250$ balance . Then I went on and it said i had negative 70$ cash. So i called to find out what’s up and the lady tried telling me my account had insufficient funds so they lended me the 40$ and charged me 30$ fee because of my lack of funds where there was not . All of this was done without a notification of a problem or anything so I was unaware . On my timeline it was two maintenance fees of 40 and 30 that were charged . Then she proceeded to lock my account Because i was questioning her and trying to figure out what happened . So i got her to unlock my account and had to pay the 30$ and the original 40$ after being thrown through a huge sketchy loop . I actually had to apologize to the lady to get her to unlock my own account which was locked for a sketchy reason to begin with . I hope this isn’t too hard to follow for people . But please WATCH OUT . Maybe mine was a rare case but this seems very sketchy . Good luck !

This application seemed like an easy way to teach my son how to invest his allowance.
1st: it takes 3-4days to receive money from a bank this seems like the dial up modem for getting online. Or you can transfer it faster for a fee.
2nd I tried gifting stocks this feature didn’t work at all and tried 4-5 x used several different forms of payment, and called the company to which they told me they can’t do anything it’s the banks...hmmm. If my bank isn’t allowing it, sounds sketch.
3rd finally was able to deposit money and then applied additional funds to which my account was locked for not having funds and charged a $30fee...I checked my accounts to which that wasn’t the case and am done with Stockpile. It’s slow, half the features don’t work and they mis-charged me and locked my account.
Anyone looking to use Stockpile...DONT! There are way better options out there and I recommend you check out Stash app. That one actually is easy to use quick easy and painless. Stockpile is a joke. Seems more like common crooks than legitimate business. Take your money elsewhere and save the headache.

Gonna be honest with you. Stockpile is really only good for a few things. You can basically just buy stocks and watch them grow and have some dividends come in along with it. If you want to actually be involved with your trading this is NOT Stockpile for you. You can’t really day trade because of how orders are executed. You can’t venture into options, you can’t do forex, you can’t do crypto at all. So if you are a beginner and want to invest in the stock market and then venture into other types of trading you would be better off using Robin Hood or even etrade. They STILL have all the account types you may need including custodial accounts. They offer securities AND there is no trading commission fees. All around better than what stock pile offers other than the fractional shares part. Overall i think you should avoid this app. It feels very under equipped especially when you can get an app that offers the same stuff stock pile does with more. I do have some regrets after signing up here.

I gotta say it’s a good starter app for buying stocks. Some down falls is it would be nice if it had a market graph on what’s going on. Also the way the back arrow goes back into previous personal page is messed up. Some of the options are just not correct. Like I do go to my stock page/ go into a certain company I have / then want to return it goes all the way back to home. There is no simple go back button to previous page. I think this is the big problem and I hope they’re fixing some of these things. Stop having the page go back to the home page!!! It’s so annoying. Selling a stock takes forever to get funds back couple days it seems. Then when you get the cash back it’s pending in your account and still can’t access for another day. Buying stocks is slow as well. Look it’s a decent starter app but it has much more potential and I hope they’re working on these things. Please do

One of the more irritating trading apps I’ve used. It’s really for long term holding - if you plan on getting serious about trading you will VERY quickly grow out of Stockpile’s Playskool interface and severely limited data displays. Don’t plan on doing any time sensitive selling either - your orders don’t get executed until the market close regardless of the price at the time of your order... this means if you try to sell during a plummet, you’ll get the lowest sale price at the end of the day - I’m admittedly not too familiar with how this is normally supposed to work but I’m on 3 other exchanges which honor your sell price at the time of the order, so I know it can be done (it should go without saying that there is also no option for stop or limit orders, another serious handicap.) Add to this the fact that your sales profit isn’t available to reinvest until the next day, and you will find Stockpile simply provides no agility. The prince of thieves app has this one beat hands down. ALL OF THAT SAID, this is a decent app for investing beginners ;-)

Stockpile was initially a positive experience for me. It was simple and easy to use. Then, about a month ago, it started locking me out, saying my password was wrong. I tried to use the “forgot password” option, but it said it didn’t recognize my email. I contacted tech support, got the typical form-letter email, and used the password reset link. I got into my account temporarily. Same issue occurred again within days. Contacted tech support. Same advice, but this time they reset my password. I logged in with their password choice no problem, but when I changed the password to my choice, the issue began again. I emailed tech support again. Same advice, but now the password reset link doesn’t work in Safari; the site gets stuck on loading. I have just now emailed tech support AGAIN. If I ever get access to my account again, I’m selling and never using them again. Bottom line: zero useful support.

I received a gift card for this company and decided to give it a try! I enjoy the low cost commission (.99 cents a trade) and like the simplicity of Stockpile . I read the reviews after I invested and can’t believe the amount of bad things happening to people who have Stockpile. I’ve had no issues, all the pending transactions go through, and it’s very up to date! I haven’t sold yet but should be interesting to experience this because I’ve seen lots of negative comments when it comes to selling on this site. If you are new to the stock market, I would definitely try it because I never had a negative experience so far!! Keep an open mind when it comes down to picking an investment app! It’s great for beginners and small investors.

I’ve had Stockpile for 3 weeks and I still can’t get my bank linked. The first excuse was that the account was frozen due to an Equifax breach. So I sent them a pic of my id and they unlocked it. Then I went to link my bank account with the stupid micro deposits and it still said I was unable. The customer service rep said she saw that my bank account was already linked. Funny because every time I tried to transfer money, it said I didn’t have an account linked. So I restarted the process and two more times later I’m still waiting for the right micro deposits. On top of that I can’t find any of the options like dividend reinvestment or even the option to transfer cash. Their app and their website is flawed. And the icing on the cake, I go to call their customer support and I get an automated message saying, “We are experiencing unusually heavy call volume right now. Email us and we will get back to you.” Then it hangs up. This hasn’t happened once but every time I call. Avoid this company they need to change a lot!

I like the ease of using this app including setup and transactions. It’s also great how they were inspired by kids to have custodial accounts encouraging early investing habits. However there are a few issues. The magnifying glass for the search function only works for the initial search. You must then use the back button to return back to the search field for further searches. The dividend information for stocks is frequently incorrect. For ETFs it is non-existent. Also it is not easy to identify company names on my list. There is just a stock symbol. There needs to be a better way to organize your stocks other than just one long rolling list. Lastly, I cannot delete items off my wishlist once they have been added. Some of them such as Snap I never put in my wishlist to begin with but I cannot permanently remove them.

What people need to understand first of all is that Stockpile is for INVESTORS - people who want to buy a stock and hold it long term, set it and forget it - THIS IS NOT Stockpile for people who want to stare at charts, day trade, and get technical!!!!!

I’ve had Stockpile for about 2 years now and I absolutely love it! Never have I ever had a problem sending and receiving money from my checking account!!! I hold all my stocks long term and will continue to do so for many more years! It’s very easy to see how your individual stocks are doing! I RECOMMEND LINKING A BANK ACCOUNT TO SAVE ON THE FEES BUT DO REMEMBER IT WILL TAKE A FEW DAYS TO PROCESS DONT FREAK OUT!

When it comes to emailing customer support I’ve had no problems with responses! They really helped me out especially when one of my stocks disappeared from my account but it was cause the company itself was having a stock split and within a day or two it showed up again with all my money!

Feedback: Yes, Stockpile itself could use a little facelift when it comes to its charts and how it displays how much your gaining or losing but other then that for a person holding long term it’s great!

So last Wednesday service on my phone was a tad wonky, I went to put some cash in and it took Four times that from my bank account. So I immediately went and hopped on the phone to try and get it stopped. But after a couple dozen phone calls through Tuesday I never once got to speak to a Rep. go ahead Y’all try and call in to speak to someone. I quickly realized that I my calls were not going through so I quickly penned an email and sent it off, that was the 7th of February I got an email response on the 14th February “Looks like all four went through, but you can withdraw what you want back to your bank.
Michael.” Yea as**ole that’s because you waited days to respond.

On a separate note when you go to invest your money here the transfer of cash into your account takes a few days. Once you have decided on a stock or whatever be aware that it will take a couple days to process the trade so don’t expect the price reflected.