Sinemia Goes Cardless, Customers Must Prepay For Movies
In yet another negative move Sinemia goes cardless for all accounts. Even people who currently have a card and pay at the movie theater will have to go the prepay route. This may sound like a positive, and it would have been until Sinemia added a $1.80 fee for all prepaid bookings.
Details
Starting October 30, 2018 Sinemia debit cards will no longer work. You will need to make all movie ticket purchases in advance through the app. These type of bookings incur a recently added $1.80 fee per transaction. This fee is above and beyond the monthly or yearly plan cost. This is on top of the $1.50-$2.00 fee you pay to Fandango directly unless you use the Facebook trick I covered in the past.
Sinemia Sign-Up
Sinemia says this fee is to offset their transaction fees imposed by the payment processors. This sounds like complete horse bleep to me. This is nothing more than a money grab on Sinemia’s part to increase their bottom line. If they still covered the Fandango fee like they used to then I could understand.
They are giving anyone who currently has the card 90 days of fee free advanced movie bookings, or until your plan is up. That really isn’t enough in my opinion. You can roll it out for new subscribers or during the renewal but not in the middle of someone’s term.
Conclusion
I will be downgrading my Sinemia review score because of all of these Mickey Mouse changes they have been doing lately. This seems very much like Moviepass over the last few months.
For month to month users you have the option to quit with these changes. For the yearly plan users this is really in poor taste. They shouldn’t be changing the terms mid term year. You can always try to file a charge back with your credit card provider if they will not cancel and refund your account.
You may wanna do yourself a favor and look into the AMC plan or do what I do and take advantage of the Tuesday movie deals.
Hat Tip PDX Deals Guy
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It has gone up for some US annual 30 per month subscribers to a $3.60 processing fee. That is an extra $100 a month if you see a movie every day.
That is crazy
Wow, I just started Sinemia last month and JUST got rid of it because the app denied my login. I had to dispute the annual fee charge with my credit card company because down the line, I wouldn’t be able to do so because the charge would be to old.
Moviepass was great while it worked and then it started screwing up. Now Sinemia is going the same route. I MAY go the AMC route but I would have to see 2 movie per month justify it and I sometimes don’t go that often.
I might just ditch the theater altogether besides the few blockbusters per year. The sad thing is, Moviepass got me into the theater more which was a win for theaters. I have no idea why theaters didn’t hop on board with giving a percentage. It seemed like a win-win since people were going to the theater less prior.
Pretty much the same boat as you. If you do have an AMC near you and can make it to the theater on a Tuesday the movies are only $5 at any AMC. They also have a $5 drink and popcorn deal too. May be a good option if you can make it work.
You would think theaters would give a discount to these movie plans but I don’t know how it is set up with movie tickets…how much they have to give to the studios. I am assuming it is a large percentage of the ticket fee but I am not sure.
I think that’s why Moviepass wanted a cut of concessions, which is where movie theaters make their bread umm, popcorn and butter.
I have 3 AMCs really close to me. I live near MGM National Harbor in MD and there’s a theater near there, right on the other of the bridge in VA, and another in Charles County, MD. If I do AMC A-List, I’ll wait till I’m close to actually seeing the first film. The $5 always looked fantastic since, at 2 movies per month, I’m paying half of an A-LIst membership.
One thing that’s cool about is that it includes alllll types of formats (IMAX, Real 3D, etc). It’s still rather steep though at $240 per year and ONLY AMC theaters.
In fact, I’m glad I’m talking about this. $5 Tuesday it is.
Perfect 🙂
OOH OOH can I say it? Horse shit! Seriously, your piece here is spot on. I’m glad I’m not currently enrolled in any movie subscription service. The moviepass annual subscription debacle was enough for me. Fortunately my charge back on that worked. At any rate, too much bait and switch for my taste, at least at this point in it’s subscription-based infancy. I’ll continue to buy the pack of 4 movie passes for two people from Costco and go with the no BS route.
That is where I am at as well. I would give AMC a try since I think they can take the swings since it is their movie tickets as well but at that price I don’t see enough movies to make it valuable to me.
Yep. I posted about this last week. It’s a classic bait and switch. This will go the way of Movie Pass with them failing. It’s proven that this business model simply isn’t sustainable over the long term. My advice is to enjoy it as long as you can until they go out of business like Movie Pass is. Good riddance.
That is how it is looking