[Now only $100, previously $200] Easy checking account bonus with Chime

Chime is one of the many small finance / banking apps with a checking account bonus. They are out with a new referral bonus that will require reading this post for detail about how to get the best deal and pocket $500 in two-player mode or perhaps more than $800 if you’re able to stack to the max.

The Deal

• Chime is offering a limited-time bonus when you open a new account through a referral link whereby you can earn $100-$200 when you open a new account and receive a payroll direct deposit of $200 or more within the first 45 days (there are many ways to trigger the direct deposit requirement). Note that the offer you see when clicking through may depend on your browswer (read on in this post for more details if you don’t see a $200 offer after clicking through). Note that if you stack this in two-player mode and refer your significant other, this should make for a pretty easy $500 (or possibly more).
• Chime is offering a $100 bonus when you open a new checking account through a referral link and receive a direct deposit of $200 or more within 45 days of account opening
• Chime referral link

Quick Thoughts

Update 9/11/23: The rest of this post is remaining for historical information, but the new account holder bonus is now only $100 in all browsers. 

I opened an account for a bonus a while back and then I saw a Doctor of Credit post about the new referral bonus of $200 for new account holders. This is very low-hanging fruit because the new account bonus only requires $200 in direct deposits in the first 45 days There are a lot of things that have worked for people besides traditional direct deposits. For instance, when I opened my account a couple of years ago, I cashed out $201 from my Dosh account to Chime and it triggered the direct deposit requirement. Given the very low direct deposit requirement here, it should be very easy for most people to trigger the bonus. There are no ongoing account minimums to worry about to keep the account fee-free.

DoC reports that the referral bonus might stack with a $155 bonus from Swagbucks with some lucky clicking (see this comment for more). If you are able to successfully stack the Swagbucks bonus and the $200 bonus, that’s a nice $355 checking account bonus with low requirements. Note that MyPoints is offering an even higher bonus of about $182, but there were some failure reports on the stack with MyPoints in the comments at Doctor of Credit.

If you’re playing in two-player mode, at a base level, you can earn an easy $500:

• Player 1 signs up through a referral for the $200 offer outlined below
• Player 1 refers Player 2 and earns a $100 referral bonus
• Player 2 signs up through Player 1’s referral for the $200 offer outlined below

If you are also able to stack that with the Swagbucks, it would make for a total of more than $800. I want to be clear that the Swagbucks stack is a YMMV situation that I haven’t done. You’ll have to read the comment linked above for details on that stack.

But beyond the easy cash in the bank, I also wanted to write about this bonus to highlight something really weird about it: the $200 bonus you can receive for opening the account through a referral link depends on the browser you use to open the referral link.

When I saw the post on Doctor of Credit, I opened my Chime app and within the app it says that my friend and I can each earn a bonus of just $100 (not the $200 I had expected). When I scrolled the comments at Doctor of Credit, I found that the “trick” lies in which browser you use to open the referral link.

For instance, to get a screen shot for this post, I first opened my referral link in Firefox and I only saw a bonus of $100 for the friend opening an account.

I then made the rounds through some browsers installed on my computer. In Chrome, I saw a bonus of $150 for a friend who signs up.

In Microsoft Edge, the bonus was $175.

Then I tried the Vivaldi browser. Bingo! I saw the $200 bonus.

I also checked in the Opera and Cake browsers on my phone and both showed $150, but the DuckDuckGo browser showed the $200 bonus.

I repeated the same steps with my wife’s referral link and got the same results.

Note that all of these were opened in the normal browser modes (I didn’t try incognito or private browsing of any sort) and all from the same IP address (my laptop is currently connected to the Internet through my phone as a hotspot).

I wanted to bring all of this up because we sometimes see variance like this when it comes to credit card offers (so it is always worth trying a link in different browsers and/or on different devices, especially if you hear reports of higher targeted offers than whatever you are seeing). I have not seen this type of situation before for a bank bonus.

All of the above is to say that if you click through my link or you go to refer Player 2 and you do not see the $200 offer, try again with another browser. Knowing how easy it was to get the $200 offer to populate, I wouldn’t settle for a lesser offer on this account.

Overall, this account is easy money. Account bonuses like these can be great for some extra spending cash, but I like to look at small bonuses like these as cash reserves with which to buy points when a hotel or airline program sells points cheaply — I can kind of mentally account for the bonus in terms of points it will buy me.

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