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Cushion
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Your bank & credit card fees, refunded
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Paul Kesserwani

Cushion — Your bank & credit card fees, refunded

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Get back money wasted on bank fees & credit card interest.

Cushion is currently in Private Beta. Our bot (Fee Fighter) is successfully waiving all kinds of costly bank fees for our users: ATM fees, late fees, wire fees, overdraft fees, credit card interest charges, and more đź’°

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Lyle McKeany
I've been on the beta for Cushion for awhile now. At first it didn't do much since I didn't have many fees at all. But when my wife and I wrapped up our kitchen project and had to carry a balance for awhile on our Chase card and we got hit with interest charges. Miraculously, Cushion got our $100+ interest charge back after pestering the bank on our behalf. It worked amazingly well and we didn't have to do anything to make it happen. Now it's fighting a Wells Fargo charge. Hoping to get some cash back from them since they've charged me plenty over the 20+ years I've banked with them. :)
✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
@lylemckeany Thanks for joining our beta! Glad to hear you got some money back through Chase and we're stoked to see what we can get you from WF!
Sheel Mohnot
Congrats on the launch! What's the most anyone has saved after signing up with Cushion? and how do you save the money?
Paul Kesserwani
Maker
@sheel_mohnot Great question! We've been in Beta for a few months now, and the most one user has gotten back to date is $730! What's important to note is that Fee Fighter chips away at your fees in phases -- it does not go after them all at once. So our users typically sign up and get a handful of fees refunded, then over the next few weeks/months Fee Fighter chips away at the rest. Some of our early users are on their 7th refund!
Israel Vicars
My SO was invited to participate in the private beta, and I can confirm that the service just works. We've gotten fees back from Chase. We're looking forward to our bank being supported too. Thanks so much Cusion!
✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
@israelvicars You're welcome Isreal! Happy to hear your SO got some money back!
Paul Kesserwani
Maker
Hi PH! This is Paul, Founder & CEO at Cushion - short for “financial cushion” Saving money is hard. It’s even harder when your bank - who is supposed to safeguard your money - profits from your mistakes. Did you know that hard working Americans spend $140 Billion on credit card interest and another $60+ Billion in bank fees each year? That’s insane! Well guess what? These fees and interest charges are negotiable. However, banks make the process time consuming and emotionally draining. That’s why we built Cushion - the only service that automatically haggles with banks & credit card companies, on your behalf, to get back some of that wasted money. We’ve built sophisticated tech to make this possible and are currently in Private Beta: - Right now, we support two U.S. banks: Chase and American Express - with several others coming soon - New users typically get their first refund within hours of signing up - Our service is waiving all kinds of penalties: ATM fees, overdraft fees, monthly service charges, wire fees, late fees, interest charges, and many more - And we have several very exciting money-saving features in the pipeline Feel free to learn more and sign up on our website: https://cushion.ai 🔥We're granting Product Hunters who sign up and fill in our short survey immediate access (and skipping a waitlist of 15,000+ people) if we support your bank 🔥 Thanks for checking us out. I’d love to hear your feedback and happy to answer any questions!
Jon
@thepaulk I signed up on the site but saw no product hunt skip the line option? How does that work?
✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
@thepaulk @biggiephat Hi Jon, can you email me at lauralynn@cushion.ai so I can look into this for you? We are a bit behind in sending out invites from the onslaught that is product hunt awesomeness - you may be in a queue. I'd like to find out.
Melissa Monte
I've been a member for a few months and I've added 4 cards to my account. Cushion has only found one fee to negotiate (it's still pending). I totally don't think this product is worth it.
Logan Johnston
Right on Cushion team! Storytime: I was lucky enough to get access to the beta and it was so easy to set up. I chatted with the bot and got like 4 dollars back in back fees and then forgot about it... A few weeks later while I was traveling abroad, I got a message from the Cushion bot about some additional travel-related bank fees. I tapped the "Yes, fight my fees" button and later that day I had nearly $100 come back to my account! I didn't even know. It was so easy. This is the way that technology SHOULD work. Question: The branding is super sweet and lovable. What's the story behind the adorable robo-mascot?
✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
@mylo_does Hey Logan, I love this story! I'll let @thepaulk talk to the inspiration for the bot!
Paul Kesserwani
Maker
@mylo_does @lauralynnz At Cushion, we are all about comfort - as the company name implies. We want to help our users build their financial cushion, and we want them to rest easy knowing that our service has their back. From the get go it was important for us to use welcoming colors and a mascot that was so cute our users would look forward to hearing news about their finances. We found the perfect designer on 99designs.com... and after a few iterations we knew that our mascot (Fee Fighter) would be a hit. Plus, his outfits are hilarious! Thanks for liking our mascot as much as we do!
Faisal Al-Khalidi

Used Cushion a few months ago when it was still in early beta. The onboarding process was simple and easy. The bot interactions made it easy to respond with a few words and a quick login with my bank account gave them all I need. Within a few hours I got a message letting me know I got cash back.

Pros:

Low effort way to get cash back

Cons:

None

✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
That's awesome to hear Faisal! Thanks for joining our beta - you rock! đź‘Š
Vittorio Banfi
Pros: You will get back money from your bank, automatically! It's almost magical Cos: Could not find any
✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
@vittorio_banfi Ha ha ha! Thanks Vittorio! There's never a downside to extra cash in your pocket!
Melissa Monte
Had Cushion for a year and I connected a LOT of cards and accounts and it saved me $0 lol. What a waste of money.
Sheel Mohnot

You just connect your bank account info and Cushion fights any bank fees you've had in the past and protects you in the future. No-brainer.

Pros:

You connect your account and get money back on any fees you've paid

Cons:

can't think of any

Charlie Benkendorf

Product doesn't support my banks yet but can't wait until they do!

Pros:

Who doesn't love saving money?

Cons:

Tom Uebel

I've been on the beta for awhile and it's gotten me back ~$100 two separate times and hasn't needlessly nagged me when there weren't any fees to be refunded. I’ve gotten pretty good at credit card/travel hacking over the past few years and grown a strong distaste for the myriad ways banks try to trick people, so I love products like these.

Even with a decent understanding of how all these things work, I was under the impression that wire fees were just a fact of life and non-refundable, so it was an awesome surprise when Cushion got several $25 wire fees back for me. A lot of people in tech are prime customers that banks want to keep happy, so you'll probably be surprised how often your bank will cave to the Cushion bot's persuasive powers :)

Pros:

Big fan of Cushion - it just does its job and stays out of your way when there isn’t money to be reclaimed.

Cons:

None

Sebastian Heyneman
This is an excellent tool for driving down bank fees. I'm excited to see how the tool develops. I am curious how my data is used, particularly because it's free. Is there a plan to charge people for the service later on? Related - if you had no limit to engineering time, what are some of the related services you might like to add? It seems like there's a fragmentation of fintech apps (acorn, truebill, billy) that each do one piece of passive financial assistance. Is the goal with Cushion to be the one platform for all of those needs? (automatic saving, tracking subscriptions, fighting fees)
Paul Kesserwani
Maker
@sebastianhwells Great questions Sebastian! The service is currently free because throughout the Private Beta our early users have gone above and beyond helping us troubleshoot bugs, sharing their experiences, and suggesting new offerings. However, we will switch to a paid Public Beta in the coming months. The paid service will work as follows: - Cushion will be free for anyone to sign up and connect their banks - Fee Fighter will generate a fee summary and offer to fight any eligible fees - When it successfully recoups some of your money, Cushion will keep (at most) a 25% cut. If Fee Fighter does not succeed, then there is obviously no charge - We also plan to bake in sharing and referral incentives that will allow our users to drive that 25% cut down to 10% or even lower Per our Privacy Policy (https://cushion.ai/privacy.html), we do not sell or rent our users' data. And the only exchange of data happens between Fee Fighter and the bank to explain which fees need to be waived and why. In terms of related services, that is a great question. Right now, we are very focused on nailing the bank fees use case. That entails expanding to more banks and providing the most frictionless experience for our users. The consumer finance space is very fragmented as you mentioned. While we could expand Cushion to provide a lot of the services offered by other companies in the space (like subscription cancelling, price protection, etc), we would much rather focus our energy on fixing the underlying issues causing people to get hit with fees in the first place. And we plan on doing so using: - data science: to uncover optimizations and opportunities to help people waste less and save more - automation: to do the work for them - as an extension of the automagical experience we are building for bank fee fighting In terms of "what are the exact features in our pipeline?", we can save that discussion for another time ;) Thanks again for the great questions.
Marc Atiyeh

The best i've seen!

Pros:

Love the product!!!! Really well designed

Cons:

Nothing worth noting

max mackey

This team is hungry works super fast. Paul used my Chase account to debug a few issues with the legacy chase UI and was able to help me get $$ back.

Pros:

Free Money!

Cons:

None

Nawar Nory

I've seen the team of cushion working on this problem and building the complex technology behind it, leveraging every knowledge out there and diving deep into security, machine learning and data nuances just to make sure the solution as efficient as possible and work as expected. I'm glad it is paying off now and we get to see the chat bot magically fights off our bank fees.

Pros:

Concierge bot, innovative idea

Cons:

-----

Paige Sandhu

I'm incredibly cautious when it comes to apps/services connecting with my bank and credit cards (my father's owned an ATM hardware and SaaS company for 30+ years). However, when I saw the ads for Cushion on Facebook, I had to try it out. Student loans, multiple moves around the Bay Area, and a couple credit cards later, I knew I had some random interest charges hidden throughout my history.

I got access to their beta back in January and connected Cushion to my least used Chase card to test it out. Onboarding was a breeze, and before I knew it, Cushion was already fighting $37 in fees! I didn't even know about those fees!

So far, I've connected it with the rest of my Chase accounts, and looking forward to when I can connect Cushion to my actual bank account to fight overdraft charges (darn you, BofA)!

Pros:

fights hidden fees, constantly checks for hidden fees, all done through Facebook Messenger

Cons:

waiting on that bank account connection! :)

Michael Burkett

It's really amazing to watch money that banks took for fees fly back into your account.

Pros:

Super easy to use, just sit back and fee fighter does all the work

Cons:

Only available for a few banks, they dont support bank of america yet

Jake Gibson
Which banks do you guys work with?
Paul Kesserwani
Maker
@iamjakestream Thanks for the question Jake! Since we built brand new tech that enables our bot (Fee Fighter) to negotiate with banks, we've been rolling it out one bank at a time. The first two banks that we support are Chase and American Express. Next up is Wells Fargo - which will be available in the coming days. After that, we plan to support that top 10-15 U.S. banks.
Sebastian Heyneman
@thepaulk Is there somewhere we can subscribe if we want to get notified when our particular bank rolls out?
✨Lauralynn Stubler✨
Maker
@thepaulk @sebastianhwells Hey Sebastian! I recommend just joining the waitlist at www.cushion.ai and we're notifying everyone as we build out for more banks.
Logan Johnston

I've been on the beta and was astounded by how easy it was to save money.

Pros:

Easiest way to save more money.

Cons:

I guess you might prefer to visit the bank and whine at the teller.