I joined Sprive in June, won the £2,000 top prize in its weekly referral draw, and have now sent £2,250.37 to my mortgage. Here’s why I’d still use it without the prize.

What is Sprive?

For anyone new to it, Sprive is a free app for mortgage holders that lets you earn rewards on everyday spending and put them towards your mortgage.

Want to understand what your normal mortgage payment is actually doing first? I built a free mortgage payment breakdown calculator that shows how much of your payment goes to interest, how much reduces your balance, and how that changes over time.

Where it all started

I downloaded Sprive in June after hearing about it from a couple of friends.

I was fairly cynical. I love finding ways to save money, but I wasn’t convinced I needed another money app. More importantly, deliberately overpaying my mortgage had never really been a priority.

Spare money can do lots of jobs. I could save it, invest it, keep it accessible for whatever was coming next, or put it into my mortgage. For me, locking extra money into the mortgage hadn’t felt like the obvious first choice.

Sprive threw me a bit of a curveball.

This wasn’t extra money I was choosing to put into my mortgage. It was money I could generate from things I was already buying.

I started with a £100 Tesco shop.

Skip forward a couple of weeks and I’d gone from testing Sprive at Tesco to checking it before paying for Uber, Boots, Marks & Spencer and coffee. I was telling friends and family about it too, and some of them started using it. We’d even text each other about it.

Then, in July, something completely ridiculous happened.

I won the £2,000 top prize in Sprive’s weekly referral draw.

I’ve now sent £2,250.37 to my mortgage through Sprive, including that prize.

Sprive also estimated that paying the £2,000 into my mortgage could save another £1,365.62 in interest, taking its potential impact to £3,365.62.

Think about how much you’d normally have to earn before tax to end up with more than £3,000 of completely spare money to throw at your mortgage in one go.

That still slightly blows my mind.

Would I still use Sprive if I hadn’t won £2,000? Absolutely.

The prize is obviously the exciting bit.

It isn’t why I keep opening the app. The reason I keep using it is Tesco.

The £100 Tesco shop that changed my mind

My first proper test was a £100 Tesco shopping card. Buy a gift card before doing your food shop sounds considerably more annoying than it actually is.

The card lives in my Apple Wallet, so I don’t have to spend £100 at once. I can use £30 one week, another bit the next time, and Sprive keeps track of the remaining balance.

I’ll explain why those are two different numbers shortly. But after that first shop, something clicked.

I was already spending the £100.

I hadn’t changed my budget. I hadn’t taken £100 out of savings. I hadn’t decided not to buy something else so I could make a mortgage overpayment.

I’d simply paid for groceries I was going to buy anyway in a slightly smarter way and ended up with £3.50 I wouldn’t otherwise have had.
So I started checking Sprive much more often.

Then I started using it everywhere

Once I got into the habit of checking whether a brand was on Sprive, I started noticing how many places I could actually use it.

In the last couple of months I’ve used it at Tesco, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Airbnb, Just Eat, IKEA, Treatwell, Etsy, Costa, Deliveroo, Uber and Caffè Nero.

When my boyfriend had an operation, I spent about a week sitting around hospital waiting rooms. Costa became both my caffeine crutch and a surprisingly hefty expense.

So I used Sprive.

That’s probably the best description of where it fits into my life. It isn’t normally enormous, carefully planned financial decisions.
It’s coffee. Taxis. Food shops. Things from Boots. Money I was spending anyway.

I told friends and family about it because I genuinely liked it. Some started using it too, and we’d even text each other about it.
And then things got weird.

In July, out of nowhere, I won £2,000

I knew Sprive had a weekly referral prize draw and that my referrals were giving me entries.

Did I think I was genuinely going to win the £2,000 top prize?

Absolutely not. I’m optimistic, but I’m not that optimistic.

One night around the draw time I checked the app because I had this completely irrational feeling that I’d won. The app looked a bit strange and I couldn’t quite work out what was happening, but for some reason I was convinced something had changed.

The next morning I checked again.

There was £2,000 sitting in my Sprive account.

That is an insane amount of money.

I genuinely thought it might disappear or turn out to be an app glitch. I took screenshots immediately because I needed evidence that I wasn’t imagining it.

The referrals I’d been making to friends and family had generated entries into Sprive’s weekly prize draw. One of those entries had actually won the top prize.

The £2,000 prize saved me another £1,365 in interest

I immediately pressed the button to send it to my mortgage lender.

Then I took more screenshots.

Then I spent an unreasonable amount of the day checking my mortgage balance.

Eventually, there it was. A real £2,000 reduction.

Sprive estimated that making that overpayment could save me another £1,365.62 in mortgage interest.

So a £2,000 mortgage reduction + £1,365.62 projected interest saving = £3,365.62 potential impact. That figure is specific to my mortgage and based on Sprive’s estimate, so it isn’t what everyone would save.

Seeing what an overpayment could do also made me much more interested in what my normal mortgage payments were doing month to month. If you’re curious too, my mortgage payment breakdown calculator shows the interest-versus-repayment split using your own current mortgage numbers.

But it completely changed how I thought about the prize. Sprive hadn’t magically given me £3,365 in cash. By putting £2,000 into the mortgage now, I could potentially avoid paying another £1,365.62 later.

There was one thing I had not expected. Because I had made such a large overpayment, my lender automatically reduced my monthly mortgage payment.

That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to keep paying the same amount each month and use the overpayment to reduce the mortgage term instead, so I contacted them and had it changed.

I’d never made an overpayment anything like that size before, so I hadn’t even realised that could happen. Different lenders handle overpayments differently, so it is something I’d now check rather than assuming yours will behave like mine.

So how do Sprive rewards work?

There are two numbers worth understanding.

When you buy a digital shopping card, Sprive gives you an actual shopping reward.

It can then show a bigger Supercharged Reward, which combines that cashback with Sprive’s estimate of the mortgage interest you might save by making the overpayment. Sprive explains the Supercharged calculation here.

So, for my £100 Tesco shop, £3.50 was the actual cashback. Sprive then estimated that putting that £3.50 towards my mortgage could save another £2.18 in interest.

I like seeing it this way because the interest-saving part makes the small rewards feel more worthwhile. But it is worth knowing what you are looking at. A displayed 5.68% does not mean I’m receiving £5.68 in cash.

You can stack Sprive with other discounts

This is probably where I have the most fun with it.

I recently booked a girls’ weekend away in the Cotswolds through Airbnb for roughly £900.

Through Sprive I got £31.50 actual cashback, plus £21.21 of projected mortgage interest saving, giving a projected mortgage impact of £52.71.

But I was also able to use my 5% student discount and roughly £40 of Airbnb credit.

One unexpected benefit of doing a part-time master’s in my thirties is that I have a student card again, and I fully intend to extract some value from it.

I’ll probably write a separate post about that booking because I love this sort of thing.

The point isn’t to buy something because it has cashback. It is to look at something I’m already going to buy and think: can I pay for this in a smarter way?

Think bigger than groceries

Some of the displayed Sprive rewards can get pretty hefty. When I checked my app in August 2026, I could see Theatre Tokens at 18.8%, Pizza Express at 17.2%, Prezzo at 13.2% and Marks & Spencer at 6.4%.

Those are the displayed rates I could see at the time, so they can include projected mortgage-interest savings rather than being pure cashback, and the rates change.

For me, Tesco is still probably more useful. I buy considerably more groceries than theatre tickets.

Sadly.

What keeps me using Sprive

It works with spending I am already doing. I am not inventing a new purchase to earn cashback.

The cards are easier than they sound. For regular shops, having them in Apple Wallet makes a big difference.

I remember to use it. I have an impressive ability to remember Quidco approximately thirty seconds after buying something. Sprive works better for me when I am actually standing in a shop.

I can see the mortgage progress. Mortgages are enormous numbers and can feel as though they are moving at the speed of continental drift. Seeing small rewards turn into actual overpayments makes the progress visible.

Apparently that is enough to motivate me.

A couple of things I’d think about before using Sprive

The biggest one for me is refunds.

I haven’t personally had to refund one of my Sprive purchases. But because you’re often paying using shopping cards, I think carefully before using one for something expensive or cancellable.

My Airbnb booking is a good example. Airbnb says that if a gift-card-funded booking is cancelled and qualifies for a refund, the gift-card-funded amount returns to the Airbnb gift-card balance. That could be awkward when you have booked on behalf of a group.

Sprive’s own terms also say that once a shopping card has been purchased, the card purchase itself cannot simply be refunded through Sprive, while returns for what you bought are subject to the retailer’s rules. See Sprive terms.

So I wouldn’t blindly put every expensive purchase through a gift card just because there was a good reward attached.

The other thing I would understand is the Supercharged Reward figure. I like it, but if you do not realise that it includes projected future interest savings, you could understandably think you are getting more actual cashback than you are.

Would I recommend Sprive?

Yes. Very easily.

Obviously, winning £2,000 has made my experience slightly unusual.

But the £2,000 isn’t why I’d recommend the app.

It’s the £3.50 from Tesco. It’s the Uber I was already booking. It’s the Costa coffee I was already buying while sitting in a hospital waiting room.

I like feeling that some of the money leaving my account is quietly doing something useful on the way out.

I’ve explored ways to save money for years, and Sprive fits into what I’m already doing rather than asking me to completely change how I manage my money.

I hope this gives you a useful picture of why I’ve become such a fan of it, as well as the things I’d pause over before putting every purchase through a shopping card.

As with anything involving your mortgage, do your own research and make sure it makes sense for your circumstances.

If you do want to try Sprive, I have a referral link below. Sprive rewards me for qualifying referrals made through it.

Sprive FAQ

Is Sprive legit?

Based on my own experience, the shopping cards, rewards, mortgage transfers and £2,000 prize have all been real. Sprive’s current FAQ explains its regulatory arrangements and says its e-money provider is FCA-authorised. Read Sprive FAQ.

What is my Sprive promo/referral code?

My Sprive referral code is JM06ZHFZ. I also have a referral link above if you’d rather use that. Sprive rewards me for qualifying referrals made through it.

Is Sprive free?

Yes it is.

Has anyone actually one the £2,000 Sprive prize?

Yes. I did.

I won the £2,000 top prize through Sprive’s weekly referral draw in July 2026. The screenshots in this article are from my own account.

You can read the current referral prize-draw terms here.

Are Sprive’s displayed percentages all cashback?

No. Sprive’s Supercharged Reward can combine the actual shopping reward with its estimate of future mortgage-interest savings.

Can I use a Sprive shopping card more than once?

It depends on the retailer, but my Tesco card can be used over multiple shops. It sits in Apple Wallet and the remaining balance carries over.