Porte Referral Bonus ($100) – Step By Step Directions

Porte is an online-only bank that is offering a $100 signup bonus to new customers. To earn your Porte referral bonus, you have to do the following: 

1. Open a Porte account using a referral link (here’s my referral link).
2. Receive a direct deposit of $500 or more.
3. Your $100 Porte referral bonus should post about a day after a qualifying direct deposit. 

What makes Porte interesting is that, in addition to a good signup bonus, they also offer an FDIC-insured savings account that gives 3% interest on up to $15,000. That makes Porte a good bank that you can use for your emergency fund or any other short-term goals you have. If combined with other 3% and 5% interest savings accounts, you can put away a lot of money earning rates well above any other bank.

In this post, I give you step-by-step directions you can follow to earn your Porte referral bonus.

What Is Porte? 

Porte is an online bank that offers both a checking and savings account with no fees or minimum balance requirements. It’s a mobile-only bank, which means that you can only access your account via their app. Porte partners with Metabank, an FDIC-insured bank that is most famous for partnering with the Netspend brand of cards (these are prepaid debit cards that offer a 5% interest savings account – for more info, be sure to check out my guide on how to get 5% interest with Netspend).

The checking account is fine, but ultimately not one I would recommend using as a primary checking account because I think there are better banks out there (SoFi Money, N26, and Ally come to mind). 

What Porte does have that is useful is their savings account. Porte is one of the few banks that offer a mega high-yield savings account – i.e. savings accounts that offer 3% or more interest. In this case, Porte has a savings account that gives you 3% interest on up to $15,000.

Even without the referral bonus, I’d recommend opening an account with Porte just to gain access to another mega high-yield savings account. The fact that you can also earn a signup bonus for using a referral link is icing on the cake.

Step-By-Step Directions To Earn Your Porte Referral Bonus  

Earning your Porte referral bonus is straightforward. Here are the step-by-step directions to earn your bonus. 

1. Open Your Porte Account With a Referral Link. Here’s my Porte referral link. You have to open your Porte account on your phone. If you’re opening this link on your computer, you’ll be asked to enter your email address so that Porte can send you a download link. If you’re opening the link on your phone, then it should bring you to the app store and should automatically track it. 

Here’s the weird thing. It appears that every Porte referral link will give you an error message when you enter your email on the referral link page. It’ll then tell you to manually type in the referral link on your phone. What I think is happening here is that their email system doesn’t work. If you click the referral link on your computer and see the $100 offer, then I believe the referral link is valid. So once you confirm that the link is valid, you can then open the link again using your phone and it should track the referral offer. That said, document everything you do in case you have issues getting your bonus. 

One thing to know (and this is really important) is that Porte limits you to $500 worth of referrals. I think if you hit $500, you’re no longer able to refer other people. My recommendation is to first check the referral link on your computer to make sure it shows the bonus offer. Then you should take a screenshot of that page in case your bonus doesn’t post for some reason.

If you receive a message saying my link is not valid, get in touch with me and I’ll try to update the link to a valid one. You can either email me or just leave a comment down below. 

To recap: 

1. First, open the referral link on your computer to confirm you see the bonus offer.
2. Then, open the referral link using your phone. This should bring you to the app store to download the app.
3. Finally, follow all of the steps to get your bonus.

2. Do a Direct Deposit of $500 or More. After you open your account, you’ll need to then do a direct deposit of $500 or more to trigger the bonus.

If you can easily do a real direct deposit from your employer, then I’d recommend doing that. If you can’t, then there are a lot of banks that will trigger the direct deposit requirement. This will be a trial and error process and you might need to try multiple banks to see what works. The good thing is that the bonus posts within a day of meeting the direct deposit requirement, so if the bonus doesn’t post within a day or two, try again with another bank. 

I also recommend doing a direct deposit of $1,000 or more to activate the savings account. So, instead of direct depositing $500, it’s best to simply direct deposit $1000. If you have no interest in the savings account, then you don’t need to do that, but I think you should consider having this savings account even if you aren’t sure that you’ll use it. 

3. Your $100 Bonus Should Post Within a Day. If you’ve met the above two requirements, then your bonus should post within a day. After that, you can withdraw the money to your primary bank account. You can either use Porte to transfer the money out, or the better bet is probably to withdraw the money out of Porte using your primary bank account.  

Porte’s 3% Interest Savings Account 

As previously noted, the best thing about Porte (and really the only reason I use it) is for the 3% interest savings account. The savings account pays 3% interest on up to $15,000.

The terms state that to activate the savings account, you need to have a recurring direct deposit of $1,000 or more. In practice, funding the account with basically any amount seems to activate the savings account. And once activated, you don’t have to do any more direct deposits to keep the savings account active. 

In other words, if you open your account and move $1,000 into your account from an outside bank, it should activate the savings account and will stay active forever.

There are a lot of ways to earn 3-5% on your savings account. Be sure to check out this post if you’re interested in all of the ways you can do this: Where To Get 5% Interest Savings Accounts Now That Insight Is Gone.

Some Issues I Had With The Porte Referral Bonus

I signed up for this bonus about a year ago and while I did earn my bonus, I had a few weird issues that you may encounter. The first is that my Porte account kept getting locked when I first opened it. Customer service answered my calls quickly and unlocked my account each time, but it kept getting locked again. The issue was eventually resolved, but it took a couple of phone calls and wasted a bunch of my time.

*Update: I recently had my Porte account locked again for a security issue. The customer service rep indicated that if you have the Netspend app on your phone and check both the Porte app and Netspend app on the same day, their security algorithm sees it as someone trying to hack your account and will lock it. This is a bit annoying, but essentially, it means if you have Netspend and Porte, you need to check Netspend on your computer and avoid checking the app on your phone, otherwise you’ll have to deal with getting your account unlocked.

The other issue was that I referred my brother to Porte, but he never received his bonus. I don’t know why he didn’t get his bonus, but I suspect that I might have maxed out my referrals and the link I sent him was no longer valid. This is why I recommend checking the referral link on a computer to confirm that it’s valid. 

The final issue is how many referrals you can do with Porte. The terms state that you can earn $500 worth of referrals. In practice, though, I’ve found I can only earn $450 worth of referrals. I don’t know why this is the case, but it’s what I’ve noticed. 

All of these issues initially made me hesitant to use the 3% savings account, and admittedly I haven’t been using the Porte savings account because of the issues I had. That said, I’ve seen enough positive data points over the past year to make me comfortable with putting my money into Porte, so I’ll be using it for at least part of my emergency fund.

Final Thoughts 

Porte is a relatively simple bank bonus that you can earn. After you open your account, you’ll also get a referral link that you can use to refer family and friends. If you have a spouse or partner, you can easily open your own Porte account, then refer your partner. You’ll earn $100, then your partner will earn $100, and you’ll earn another $100 for referring them. That’s good for $300 in bonuses without much work. 

What makes Porte particularly interesting is the 3% savings account. I recommend taking advantage of the 5% interest savings accounts first, but once you max those out, it makes sense to move money to Porte to gain another $15,000 of mega high-yield interest. 

There are a lot more bank account bonuses out there and a lot more you can learn about bank account bonuses. If this is a topic that interests you, be sure to check out my post, The Ultimate Guide to Bank Account Bonuses. That post goes into great detail about bank account bonuses and how you can take advantage of them. 

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a message.