koho Referral Code

"Up to $1,000" is a ceiling on fifty separate referrals, not cashback you can unlock in one go — the number that actually matters is twenty dollars.

KOHO's referral programme pays $20 to you and $20 to your friend, once they sign up with your code and make a first purchase of more than $20 within 30 days. The programme allows up to fifty referrals, which is where a $1,000 figure comes from — it is a cap, not a per-signup reward.

Fifty friends, each of whom must download an app, pass identity checks, load money onto a card and spend it inside a month, is a real ceiling for a small number of people and an irrelevance for everybody else. When a headline pairs a large number with a small one, the large one is almost always the limit — divide it by the small one and ask whether you know that many people.

The condition is also worth reading properly, because it is two conditions. Signing up is not enough: there must be a first purchase of more than $20, and it must happen within 30 days. A card that sits in a drawer for five weeks pays nobody, so if you send the link, send the deadline with it — that single sentence is worth more to your friend than the twenty dollars.

More important than the reward: KOHO is not a bank. It is a money app built around a reloadable prepaid Mastercard, and it works with regulated partner institutions rather than holding a banking licence of its own. Reported arrangements have customer funds held in trust at Peoples Trust Company, a member of the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, with coverage up to $100,000.

That is the same structure this site has described for similar apps in other countries, and the consequences transfer exactly. The protection attaches to the partner institution, not to the app, so the limit is per depositor per institution — if you hold two apps that both sit on the same partner, they share one limit rather than having one each. Deposit insurance covers the failure of the insured institution; it does not cover the app going dark, an account being frozen, a disputed transaction or a support queue that never answers, which are, realistically, the things far more likely to separate you from your money. The practical question to ask is: how would I get my money out if the app stopped working tomorrow? Knowing the name of the institution that actually holds it is the first half of that answer. And because this is a trust arrangement rather than a deposit in your own name, it is worth confirming with both firms how it is registered — a fair question, and one a well-run company will answer plainly.

A balanced closing note: a no-fee spending account with cash back and a credit-building feature is a genuinely useful product for people who are underserved by ordinary banks, which is much of who this is aimed at. Judge it on the monthly fee of whichever tier gives you the cash back rate advertised, on whether the credit-building feature actually reports to the credit bureaux — a facility that does not report builds nothing — and on the interest rate you really receive. Not on twenty dollars.