Tally, a debt company that helped Americans pay off credit cards, abruptly shuts down
Tally, a San Francisco startup that created an app to help people pay off their credit card debt, has abruptly shut down - with some customers claiming the company stopped making promised payments to their cards without warning.
Co-founder and CEO Jason Brown wrote on LinkedIn that the decision to shutter Tally 'difficult and sad.'
Ultimately, the company, once valued at $855 million, folded because it was 'unable to secure the necessary funding,' Brown said.
The fall caps a nine-year run during which the company raised $172 million from the likes of prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz.
While investors were singing Tally's praises as recently as October 2022, according to a Bloomberg report, the consumer debt company has long been fielding angry complaints from customers to the Better Business Bureau.
Jason Brown, the founder and CEO of Tally, hasn't yet addressed the Better Business Bureau complaints
According to the company's website, Tally would immediately pay off the debt of those who qualified for a low-interest line of credit.
They would then be given a consolidated loan with anywhere from 7.9 to 29.9 percent APR that would need to be paid monthly.
The average APR on credit cards was 22.8 percent in 2023, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Customers received a letter sometime in December 2023 stating that the company would no longer be paying off their credit cards, according to numerous complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau.
Some wrote in their complaints that the company cited the loss of funding from investors as the reason for the stoppage of payments.
The Tally app helped users strategize on how to best to pay off their credit card debt, but it also offered lower interest consolidation loans until April 2024
Disgruntled customers claimed the move not only left them on hook for their debt, but that Tally still attempted to collect on the original loans it had given out to them while raising interest rates.
'Tally is a joke. Accepting new customers still even though I got a letter in 2023 stating they lost all funding and can no longer pay off my cards. Which resulted in my APR being higher then [sic] the cards they were paying for me,' one person wrote on July 15. 'It is not my fault funding was lost. I want my [APR] lowered as originally promised.'
Another said that after receiving the letter, Tally 'did nothing to lower my APRs or payments as advertised. They just stopped paying my cards.'
Yet another wrote on June 18 that Tally raised the interest rate on the person's loan higher than the credit card's.
'Now I'm paying an astronomical amount per month and they aren't even paying the credit card. I'll end up paying more in interest than what I would have directly to the credit card company,' the person wrote.
Several others called Tally 'a scam' and threatened the company with a class-action lawsuit.
A recent complaint submitted by a customer on the Apple App Store
This is the most recent complaint filed against Tally on the Better Business Bureau
Tally responded to all of these complaints on its Better Business Bureau profile with generic responses, stating: 'In this case, we have responded directly to the consumer.'
Many of the complainants wrote that Tally never actually reached out to them individually.
Tally tried appealing to Gen Z credit card users with accessible, low-budget TikTok ads that featured young actors.
In the videos, a narrator would explain how users could consolidate all of their credit accounts while allowing them to pay all of the cards off at once with a lower interest rate.
The Tally app is still available on Apple's App Store, where users have left one-star reviews with testimonials about how the app fails to load, how they're stuck paying a high interest rate and how the company is 'a scam.'
DailyMail.com reached out to Tally for comment.
