Plastiq Review: Pluses and Minuses of Paying Bills via Credit Card

The landscape of paying bills with credit cards has changed, so it's worth overhauling our review of Plastiq — a service that allows you to pay nearly any bill with a credit card. While providing opportunities for increased spending is a positive, Plastiq charges fees for doing so.

Are those fees worth it? And how does Plastiq work? Should you keep using this service after its recent change in ownership and going through bankruptcy? Here's a look at the pros and cons of using Plastiq to pay your bills.

What Is Plastiq?

Plastiq used to be owned by Silicon Valley bank, but after its bankruptcy in early 2023, it was acquired by Priority Technology Holdings. Plastiq allows you to pay nearly any bill — including rent, mortgage, and tuition — with a credit card. The service will even allow you to pay a bill just by taking a photo of it with the app. Most importantly, Plastiq can send payments to any business, institution, or person who has provided a good or service in the U.S. or Canada. Recipients do not need to have a Plastiq account.

This essentially allows you to pay “you can't pay with a credit card” bills on your credit card. Thus, you can put nearly all of your spending on credit cards. This provides for increased rewards on daily spending and quicker completion of spending requirements for bonuses or new card welcome offers.

Related: How Does a Credit Card Sign-Up Bonus Work?

How Plastiq Works

Using Plastiq is easy:

1. Create an account with Plastiq, which you can do here.
2. Select a business that’s already in Plastiq's system or choose to add your own.
3. Pick a card (American Express, Visa, Discover, Mastercard, and Diners Club are accepted) and add it to your Plastiq account. You may save as many cards as you want in your Plastiq account profile. Additionally, you can add bank accounts as payment methods.
4. Create a payment with the account number on the bill, amount due, and payment date. You can even schedule payments for the future or make recurring payments of the same amount.
5. Your payment is guaranteed to arrive on time in the form of a check or bank transfer.

Plastiq payments can be made either by sending a check or processing a bank transfer. Bank transfers are sent electronically and typically arrive within three business days. Obviously, you will need to know the recipient's bank information to set this up. If you don't know it, use the option for a mailed check.

Checks are sent via standard postal service and should arrive within eight business days. Luckily, Plastiq's calendar asks you when the payment is due, and then Plastiq will figure out when to send the payment by planning backward from the due date. There are additional options for expedited payments with overnight and two-day express options available.

What if Plastiq misses your payment due date? If you submitted the payment on time and with the correct due date, Plastiq will cover 100% of any late fees incurred on that payment.

Limit on Card Types for Some Payment Categories With Plastiq

The concept of Plastiq is simple; however, not all payments can be made with all credit card types. This reduces the overall strength of Plastiq as a form of bill pay.

While you previously couldn't use Capital One personal credit cards or American Express cards, both are accepted now — for some payment types. There is a detailed chart available here to see which bills can be paid with which credit card types. It's long, so we will focus on some popular types of bills you might want to pay via credit card where the merchant itself doesn't accept credit cards.

• Labor contractors: Not American Express
• Mortgage: Not American Express, not Visa credit (only debit), some Mastercard debit cards are blocked
• Rent: All cards, but you might need to provide a copy of your lease
• Student loans: Not American Express, not Visa credit (only debit), some Mastercard debit cards are blocked
• Tax payments: All cards
• Timeshare: Not American Express
• Tuition: All cards
• Utilities: All cards (except American Express for telecom, internet, and phone services)

As you can see, paying contract laborers for work on your house, timeshares, and mortgage payments cannot be done with American Express cards. You also can't pay mortgage payments or student loans with Visa credit cards (only with Visa debit cards).

This limitation on types of cards for types of transactions is a downside. If you plan to put large payments like mortgages onto credit cards to meet spending requirements for a welcome offer or spending bonus, that only works for certain types of cards.

Service Fees

As should be expected, there is a service fee associated with payments sent via Plastiq. After all, this is a business.

Recipients pay nothing to receive payments with Plastiq. Senders pay the fees, which are outlined here.

• Credit and debit card payments: 2.9% fee
• Delivery fees:
  • EFT/ACH/billpay: 99 cents
  • Mailed check: $1.49
  • Domestic wire: $8.99
  • International wire: $39

For our purposes, we are looking at making payments with a credit card. That will incur a 2.9% fee. Is it worth it? We'll analyze that in a bit. For comparison, PayPal charges 2.9% + 30 cents to send money with your credit card as a source (not purchases, but bill pay / person-to-person payments). So, when it comes to fees, they’re about the same.

Additionally, Plastiq has previously run promotions that brought the service fee below 2%, such as via bulk or recurring payments. In some rare instances, Plastiq has even removed service fees altogether in the past for utility payments. Most of Plastiq's promotional service fees have required payments with a Mastercard. And we haven't seen any of these promotions since Plastiq underwent bankruptcy proceedings and a change of ownership. We don't know if or when these might return.

What Types of Payments Are Not Allowed?

Plastiq will not allow you to send a payment to yourself or your spouse. You also can't make any type of payment initiated for the sake of sending money. A legitimate good or service must be provided, and Plastiq may request proof of such good or service.

Review of Plastiq Fees: are  Are They Worth It?

We will consider the 2.9% fee on credit cards as the standard for our comparison. Here, we will look at fees, rewards that could be earned, and then analyze the net value.

Many Plastiq payments tend to categorize as “business services” or “miscellaneous” on your credit card statement. However, you may see some surprising classifications, such as “utilities” for a mortgage payment.

Recent Plastiq payment and how it coded on the CitiBusiness^® / AAdvantage^® Platinum Select^® Mastercard^®. Credit: Citi

Thus, Plastiq payments typically won't trigger any bonus category spending. Therefore, we won't factor category bonuses into this equation.

Since most cards earn just 1 point or mile per dollar spent on “other” purchases, even in the best situations you are probably paying more to get the points than what the points are worth. So when would using Plastiq make sense?

Meet minimum spending requirements

Using Plastiq can help you meet minimum spending requirements more easily. For many people, their largest expense each month is housing. Putting your rent or mortgage payment onto a credit card can shift considerable spending onto a credit card, easily meeting your welcome offer requirements.

In these situations, is it worth it? It depends on the person, but let's review those Plastiq fees when considering a lump of points. Here, we'll imagine putting $3,000 of spending onto a card via Plastiq and some potential points that could be earned this way. Paying $3,000 through Plastiq would cost $87 in fees, as well as assuming fees for two checks in the mail ($1.49 each). That's a total of $89.98 in fees, but here's what it can earn you:

If you assume that you would be paying that $3,000 anyway (you have to pay for your housing each month, whether you use Plastiq or not), the fee becomes the real differentiator. Is it worth it? For many, meeting several additional credit card sign-up bonuses each year by paying your mortgage on a credit card will make sense.

While using Plastiq for daily spend likely isn't worth it, a review of the fees for earning a welcome offer tells a different story. Consider a person who pays $2,000 a month in mortgage payments. If paid with Plastiq, that person would pay an additional $713.88 in fees over a year (the 2.9% fee + $1.49 mailed check each month). However, by doing so, they could meet the spending requirements for three or four new credit cards per year just from this one monthly payment.

However, the entrance of Bilt Rewards and The Bilt Mastercard^® into this arena, offering an ability to earn rewards on rent without convenience fees, skews this discussion. Are you interested in earning 1 point per $1 spent on rent without service fees in exchange for using a card without a welcome bonus? That's available so long as you use the at least five times each billing cycle. Or do you want the welcome bonuses offered on other cards, understanding that there will be fees for paying your rent on a credit card this way?

Profiting With Plastiq

One instance in which it can be of great value to send payments with Plastiq is when you can profit from the transaction. This would be the case, for example, if Plastiq was running a promotional service fee of 1.5% on Mastercard payments and you had a MasterCard that earns 3% cash back on all purchases.

In a situation like this one, if you send $5,000.00 in payments via Plastiq with a mailed check, you would be paying $146.49 in service fees to Plastiq. However, you would earn $154.39 in cash back from those payments (counting the $5,000 and the fees, since you will earn credit card rewards on the total spend). By using Plastiq you earned a profit of $7.90

Another example would be Bank of America's Preferred Rewards. Those with Platinum Honors status receive a 75% bonus on credit card earnings. The Bank of America^® Premium Rewards^® credit card earns 1.5 points on everyday purchases, plus your 75% bonus from Preferred Rewards. That's a total of 2.625 points per dollar, which you can cash out at 1 cent per point. Your earnings of 2.625% back is slightly less than the typical Plastiq fee. During a promotion, it could become profitable.

Credit: Ivan Samkov/Pexels

Comparing Plastiq and Bilt for Rent Payments

A recent arrival in the credit card world is Bilt Rewards. Considering that the whole concept of Bilt is to eliminate transaction fees on rent, it's worth a comparative review against Plastiq to see if Plastiq is no longer “worth it” now that a no-fee option exists.

A few key points are worth highlighting at the outset:

• Bilt is only for rent payments, so other categories of payments would still require Plastiq or another bill pay service.
• To avoid paying transaction fees with Bilt, your landlord must join the Bilt Rewards Alliance, and you must pay through the app.
• If you can't meet those requirements, you must pay using Bilt Mastercard (and there's a maximum of 100,000 points per year earned from rent).
• You'll earn a maximum of 250 points on rent payments if you don't make five transactions each billing cycle on the Bilt Mastercard; if you do, you'll earn 1 point per $1 spent on rent.

At this point, the comparison of paying rent via Bilt or Plastiq comes down to the following decision factors:

• Can you meet the minimum spending requirement on your new credit card without Plastiq? If so, paying your rent via Bilt saves money.
• Is this ongoing spend, where you aren't earning a large chunk of points (bonus offer, welcome offer)? If so, the fees on Plastiq wouldn't be worth it.
• Largely, the question is this: Is the cent-per-point acquisition cost higher than the cent-per-point value when redeeming?

Depending on the situation, the fees on Plastiq become “worth it” or “not worth it” depending on your situation. If you can save money by avoiding fees, great! If you can't earn a bonus without funneling some payments through Plastiq, then the fees will likely be justifiable to you.

Related: How Does Bilt Rewards Stack Up for Earning Rewards by Paying Rent?

Bottom Line

Plastiq is an excellent resource that makes credit card payments possible when a merchant does not accept credit card payments. By sending payments via Plastiq, you earn points, miles, and cash back for transactions that would otherwise not reward you in any way.

While the amount of points you can earn by sending payments through Plastiq is significant, no review can avoid discussing the fees. It's not free, after all. Consider whether the points and miles you are earning are worth more than the fees you're paying.

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