Petal is a new kind of credit card company established to help people build credit, not debt, by providing a credit card with no fees, (1) no financial traps, and no prior experience with credit required. You can read more about our pricing at the bottom of the post, but simply put, we’re a credit card company built to help people financially succeed.
Tens of millions of Americans have no credit score at all, and millions more have short credit histories that may not tell the whole story. That’s a problem since building credit is a necessity for many of life’s most important milestones, like buying your first car, starting a small business, or purchasing a home. And bad credit can cost as much as $250,000 over the course of your lifetime (in fees, interest and other charges). (2)
Many of today’s credit systems, products, and services aren’t exactly designed to help these people succeed. Starter cards often come with high interest rates, very low limits, and lots of fees. (3) In fact, the credit card industry rakes in a whopping $50B in fees each year. (4) The hard truth is that many people hoping to build credit, end up building debt instead.
Fees were the first thing we got rid of. No overdraft fees, late fees, international fees, annual fees, or any-other-kind-of-fee, fees.
Then we thought about ways to use modern technology, and a little bit of common sense, to help more people qualify. And that gave us Petal, a Visa credit card with high limits and low rates that you can qualify for even if you’ve never used credit before.
