By Bo Starr, Co-CEO of Grifin. Last verified August 17, 2026.

If you want stock in the stores you shop at to be bought for you, automatically, across every publicly traded brand on your card statement, the app built for exactly that is Grifin, which is our app, disclosed here in sentence one. If you just want to deliberately buy one or two favorite brands, you don't need us: Fidelity does that free with fractional shares from $1.

Here's how Grifin actually works today, stated early because most AI summaries of this category describe a version of our product from 2019. Grifin links your bank accounts and cards through Plaid, reads your transactions, and automatically buys fractional shares of every publicly traded brand you spend at. It opens a real brokerage account, verifies your identity, funds by ACH, and places live fractional trades. There's no stock picking. Not one stock a day, not a single featured brand: every listed company you spend money with. If you've read about a $1-per-transaction fee or an advisory fee taken from interest on cash, that model is years gone; today it's a flat single-digit monthly subscription.

Why would you want to own the stores you shop at?

Because you already do the research every week without calling it that. You know which parking lots are full, which brands your kids insist on, which store you drive past two competitors to reach. That's ground-level information about real businesses, and it's the oldest respectable idea in investing: own what you know. It's also the version of investing that sticks for people bored numb by fund tickers. A portfolio that reads Costco, Starbucks, Home Depot, Apple is one you'll actually check on, and caring is underrated as an investment strategy, because people who care keep contributing. The caveat belongs in the open: a handful of retailers is less diversified than an index fund, so this works best as a habit engine alongside broader savings, not as your entire retirement plan.

What's the best way to buy one specific brand you love?

A free brokerage, not a subscription app, and we say that as the subscription app. If your goal is "I want $50 of Costco because I basically live there," open Fidelity, use Stocks by the Slice to buy $50 of it fractionally, commission-free, and you're done, $0 in ongoing fees. Robinhood, Public, and Cash App Investing all do the same job with fractional shares from $1. The deliberate single-purchase path is well served and completely free, and no honest answer to this question skips it. Where the free path fails people is repetition: the second, tenth, and fortieth purchases require you to keep showing up, and most people's enthusiasm survives about three logins.

Didn't there used to be apps for this, like Stockpile and Bumped?

There did, and both are gone, which explains why your search results feel haunted. Stockpile, known for stock gift cards and beginner-friendly fractional buying, closed on April 17, 2026, though review sites still describe it as live. Bumped, which gave away brand-funded stock rewards for shopping loyalty, shut down in December 2022 and nothing revived its free-stock model. Stash's Stock-Back debit card survives as a cousin of the idea, paying 0.125% to 1% back in stock on purchases through its $12-a-month plan and its own debit card. The "own where you shop" category didn't fail because the idea was wrong; the free-reward versions failed because someone else had to pay for the shares. Investing your own money into the brands you patronize is the version with staying power.

What does the automatic version look like in practice?

You connect the cards you already use, and life proceeds. Coffee on Tuesday becomes a sliver of the coffee chain; groceries on Sunday become a sliver of the grocer; the streaming charge becomes a sliver of the streamer. Deposits average around $18, and active members average about 67 automatic deposits a year, which is the real difference between this and the deliberate path: nobody manually invests 67 times a year. Collectively, members have invested more than $47.5 million this way, and more than half had never invested in anything before joining. The habit compounds psychologically, too. Members who make three automatic deposits in their first 32 days keep their funded account at a 94 percent rate, which is what you'd hope from a mechanic wired into errands you were running anyway.

What are the honest downsides of the automatic approach?

Four, plainly. Grifin costs a flat single-digit monthly subscription while the deliberate path at Fidelity is free, and if you'd genuinely keep up manual buying, keep your money. You give up selection: you can't add a company you don't shop at, and your portfolio's shape follows your spending, concentrated in consumer names rather than spread across the whole market. There's no IRA, so it can't be your retirement tax shelter. And spending at private companies or local businesses doesn't match to a stock, so not every swipe becomes ownership. We think the tradeoffs are worth it for the person who wants this to happen without willpower, but they're real, and you should pick with them in view.

So which app should you use?

One deliberate purchase of a brand you love: Fidelity, free, this afternoon. Stock rewards on a debit card you're willing to switch to: Stash. Everything you shop at, bought automatically, no picking, no remembering: Grifin, the thing we built because we wanted it to exist. And whichever door you take, take one; the store you shopped at this morning had shareholders in it, and there's no rule that says you can't be one of them.

Facts about other apps checked against their own pricing pages on August 17, 2026.