Bluedot used to be a liquidation play for fintech debits, but they eventually caught on and started to block a ton of debit cards. However, they were still useful if you have an EV since you got a free charging day if you made 1 purchase with their credit card. Plus the $.30c per kWh was cheaper than if you rolled up to an EVGO charging station w/o a subscription. Then about a month ago, they removed their credit card program. It wasn’t a big deal but it did make you wonder how they were going to pay for free charging days.
Then yesterday they made some pretty big changes:
- Now you need at least 5 charging transactions in the month to qualify for free charging day
- Raised the price from .30c to .43c per kWh
- You can only get 1 free session on free charging day
To be fair, I was only using them for their free charging day. However, I did use them on road trips because the $.30 was cheap. I think the .$.43 is still cheap because EVGO can go up to $.53 per kWh in WA state plus you’d have to pay a credit card charge as well if you don’t have a monthly subscription. The free charging day wasn’t useful the last 2 out of 3 months because vandals keep cutting the cords to the charging station closest to me. They were losing money on me, but it was only like $20 a month. I guess if you multiple that by thousands of folks, it’d burn through VC money real fast. I’ll still keep them around for road trips though.