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The company promises 3% APY “Guaranteed” despite low industry interest rates. There are two issues with this. First, the company just walked that back to 2% APY. Second, the company never lets a user open a savings account. The path to open a user account is a sloppy attempt at gamifying the experience. A user must collect points to move up the wait list. These points are distributed by inviting friends, wiring money (before your account is even open) or collecting free “treasure chests” every 6 hours. Inviting friends is borderline a pyramid scheme without the financial reward. Wiring money without the savings rate is literally cart before the horse. And these treasure chests move a user up big numbers in the beginning but then never allows them to cross the finish line. For example, once a user gets down to around the 200th spot in line, each chest is worth 2-10 spots. But you automatically and I inexplicably bumps you back the same amount. So it’s literally spinning your wheels. Last alternative path to opening an account is to collect puzzle pieces and again, a user never gets the missing pieces. Meanwhile, the company can point to daily active users for a metric because they force you to open a chest every 6 hours. These aren’t active users these are frustrated people who don’t actually have an account yet. Long story short this is a total rigged scam. Poorly executed and not worth the time.

I’ve been using Tellus for about a year. The interest is higher than other products (like a money market account, etc) but they seem to constantly be coming up with creative ways to make roadblocks to accessing your funds. There’s a 60 day aging on ACH deposits which is far from the industry standard. I have a little over $20,000 in deposits held here & now there’s another bureaucratic delay from them claiming my ID needs extended verification…despite numerous deposits over the last year. Their customer service is next level abysmal. There’s no contact information available & any financial institution scoffs at mentioning deposits held here. It’s maybe okay for play money, but certainly don’t put more than a couple thousand here.

Normally I’d wait a bit to write a review, but with the world becoming what it is, there’s really no excuse. When setting up my account it asks for my legal name (which fair, as it’s connected to banks it makes sense) but they specify “legal name” insinuating that I might be able to put a preferred name on file so rather than my Deadname at the top of my app in giant black and white, I could have my preferred/nickname. It seems like a minnow in comparison to a whale, but for a trans person it is a whale. And when confronted about the minimum $125 transferring fee (and when told I don’t have the money to be throwing around a reoccurring amount every month) they said “just get this OTHER application!” Getting money into an account and saving money should not be this complicated.