> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money". The self delusion of these people is incredible. There’s already an enormou

> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money". The self delusion of these people is incredible. There’s already an enormous number of fees. Check out midway through [1] where it lists out the various fees JP Morgan got in their 2014 EBT management contract with New York State (it was the first example I came across, there may be a newer contract publicly available). The federal portion alone (there’s a state-level component as well) of the cost to administer EBT services in 2017 were $4.2 billion [2], so there’s plenty of fees between recipients and food stamp money already. That said, iirc it’s illegal for a third party to insert a fee related to EBT services. In fact, most of the fees that are charged aren’t directly visible to the recipient, but are rather charged on the backend as part of the administration costs. Looking at the screenshots for the FreshEBT app, there’s a coupon section and the ability to find stores that accept SNAP benefits. It’s more likely that they’ll monetize via retailers and manufacturer promotions rather than via recipients themselves. Plus the marketing analytics components of being able to track EBT spending habits and tie it into all the other type of data you can collect by having an app installed on people’s phones. Not that there isn’t potential qualms about that monetization strategy, but that type of data is already available to the largest retailers and isn’t a new level of monitoring. And it shows the company’s incentive isn’t actively detrimental or predatory to the users like inserting fees, as you suggested. [1] http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-stamps http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-s... [2] https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsu...