{"id":2900,"date":"2021-10-26T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=2900"},"modified":"2023-04-18T12:11:53","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T18:11:53","slug":"post-mortem-bravo-2-liquidation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2021\/10\/26\/post-mortem-bravo-2-liquidation\/","title":{"rendered":"Post Mortem: Bravo 2% Liquidation"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>Background<\/h4>\n<p><a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/trybravo.com\/\">Bravo<\/a> is a great platform for sending person-to-person payments with both credit and debit cards. I first heard about Bravo in <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.middleagemiles.com\/2019\/01\/10\/one-year-of-experimenting-and-earning-with-the-citi-att-access-more-what-earns-3x-typs-as-online-retail-travel\/\">early 2019<\/a> from the now defunct <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/middleagemiles.com\/\">Middle Age Miles<\/a> blog. It\u2019s never been the lowest fee liquidation option, but if you are earning 5-15x when buying gift cards and you\u2019ve filled up other channels or run out of lower-fee liquidation, it can make sense. <\/p>\n<p>The problem with Bravo though is that the fees started out relatively high and they\u2019ve continued to creep higher, just like <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flyfrontier.com\/optional-services?mobile=true\">ancillaries on Frontier airlines<\/a>. The evolution:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The fees started out at a flat 2%<\/li>\n<li>They capped the flat 2% to payments of $499.99 or less<\/li>\n<li>Around September 2020 they <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.doctorofcredit.com\/bravo-app-review-pay-or-tip-people-standing-nearby-2-transaction-fee\/#comment-1056646\">raised the fees for payments above $10<\/a> to be 2.9% + $0.31 per payment (or more)<\/li>\n<li>Sometime in the last several weeks, they raised the fee to 3.6% + 0.31 per payment above $30.01<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At this point, it\u2019s really, really hard to justify the use of Bravo. That said, I suppose it could still make sense for some of you.<\/p>\n<h4>Forcing the Old Fee Structure<\/h4>\n<p>Here\u2019s the kicker with the fees though: Until the last couple of weeks you could still send payments under the old 2% flat fee structure. How? By using an old version of the app and jumping through a few other (small) hoops.<\/p>\n<p>Why did this happen? Well, I can tell you in general even though I don\u2019t have any special inside information: a golden rule in mobile app and web development is that the server should validate everything, and the server should be responsible for \u201cbusiness logic\u201d like the fees charged on a transaction. You can never trust a users device to be above board. Bravo\u2019s team clearly didn\u2019t follow this rule. The fees were hard coded into the application itself, so using an older application would give you an older fee structure. It took their team years to finally plug this hole.<\/p>\n<h4>Lessons Learned<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Older apps can unlock functionality that\u2019s been removed or changed, and that can even affect the way you\u2019re charged for a service<\/li>\n<li>Backing up your applications on iOS or having quick access to <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/apkmirror.com\/\">apkmirror<\/a> on Android will often be useful for future tinkering<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes you\u2019ll need multiple versions of an application to accomplish a task<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And of course the most important lesson for the software developers out there: Always validate on the server side. Always. (Unless you\u2019re trying to help us out, in which case, thanks.)<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-editorskit-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2901\" height=\"312\" loading=\"lazy\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 443px) 100vw, 443px\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/bravo.png\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/bravo.png 443w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/bravo-300x211.png 300w\" width=\"443\"\/><figcaption>Pictured: Bravo\u2019s fix for the \u201c2% in perpetuity\u201d hole.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Background Bravo is a great platform for sending person-to-person payments with both credit and debit cards. I first heard about Bravo in early 2019 from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":2,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[53,12,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gift-cards","category-ms-hints","category-shenanigans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2900"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7177,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2900\/revisions\/7177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}