Dosh.nz Referral Code

Two unrelated companies are called Dosh — here is which one this page describes, and a 2026 change to its cashback that matters more than the referral.

Two completely separate companies are called Dosh.

• Dosh.nz is an Auckland company founded in 2021, offering a mobile wallet and a Visa debit card with instant payments and money-management tools. Its referral bonus is $5.
• Dosh (US) was a card-linked cashback app — you linked a card and earned automatic cashback at participating merchants. It was acquired by Cardlytics in 2021 for $275 million and has since been shut down as a consumer app; dosh.com now redirects to cardlytics.com, and the underlying technology survives only as a business-to-business service inside bank apps.

The American product's defining mechanic — card-linking for automatic cashback — belongs to Dosh (US), not the New Zealand wallet, and its referral figure was $20, not $5.

There is a recent change that matters more than the referral: from 1 February 2026, Dosh.nz replaced its 1% cashback with a "1% Phone Dollars" programme, described as uncapped and redeemable toward One NZ phone upgrades.

That is one of the sharpest instrument changes recorded in this catalogue. 1% cashback is money, spendable anywhere, on anything. 1% in Phone Dollars is a token redeemable with a single carrier, toward a single category of purchase. The percentage did not change and the value did — exactly the kind of substitution a headline percentage hides.

Whether it is worth anything to you now depends on one question: are you going to upgrade a phone with One NZ? If yes, uncapped 1% toward that is genuinely useful. If no — if you are on another network, or keep phones for years — the reward has effectively gone to zero while still being advertised as "1%".

That is the general lesson, and it is worth more than the $5: when a cashback programme changes its currency rather than its rate, the headline stays flattering while the offer changes completely. Always ask what the reward can be spent on, not just how large it is.

The practical checks on any wallet-and-card product: who actually holds your money and whether it is protected — a wallet is not automatically a bank; the FX and overseas-spending fees, which are where debit cards differ most; any monthly or inactivity fee; how disputes and chargebacks are handled, since a non-bank issuer's process can differ from a bank's; and whether rewards expire, which is the term most often omitted from marketing and most often present in the terms.