Few of us pay much attention to the price of something after we buy it, but now there might be a really good reason to do so. If you pay for your favorite stuff with a credit card, there’s a new app for your iPhone that alerts you when the price drops, and automatically allows you to cash in on the savings.
If you have a credit card, chances are good that it includes a benefit called “Purchase Protection,” or something along those lines. If the price drops on something you buy within 60 or 90 days of purchase, then you can actually get the difference paid back to you as a credit. While it takes a lot of manual effort to watch the prices of everything you buy and file a claim each time the price changes, Earny is an app that hopes to do all this for you. It’s a service that monitors your purchases, and helps you get back a credit each time the price changes wherever you bought it.
In reality, Earny isn’t doing anything you can already do yourself, but it’s making the whole process a lot easier and trouble-free. As you link credit cards and purchases to the Earny app, it will monitor retailers for any prices changes. If the price drops, the app will automatically file a claim for you, either through the store or your credit card provider, to get you a refund for the difference. Many stores have such policies for 14 days, and credit cards will let you file claims for anywhere from 60 to 90 days after purchase.
In return for the monitoring service, Earny takes a 25 percent commission off every claim you make through the app. For example, if you save $60 off the price of headphones with Earny, the app will take $15 as its fee. That’s a fair amount to lose for something you can do yourself for free, but it is worth every penny if you don’t have the time to do the leg work, especially since it costs nothing to use the app. The developers behind Earny believe more than $50 billion is lost to consumers each year in price drops, and they’re looking to stake a claim in that pot of money.
If you don’t have the time or patience to track your purchases, Earny makes the entire process a whole lot easier, and the app is yet another way to give yourself an edge at saving money whenever possible. Just make sure you check your credit card policies, as some have limits about how many claims you can make in a year.
