Hernán

EDIT: My account was restored after this review. To be clear, support told me twice that this was a final decision before I posted my review.
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As others are mentioning, they started banning accounts accusing them of "fraud". I can tell I am not involved in any fraud, I was not even earning any money (less than 10 cents a week) and I do have almost no traffic nowadays (less than 100 visitors a week). But nevertheless, I was banned without notice or warning for "fraud". So, in a nutshell, I lost nothing, but you could be easily banned with a lot of money in your account. I totally agree in fighting any type of fraud or scam, but they are playing with fire if this is the quality of their screening. I am also behind Cloudflare, which I understand should filter out a lot of bad traffic.

Before that, everything looked more or less fine. Payments are regular, with good options to get paid. In the landscape of alternative ad networks, it seemed the least shady for me. All these alternative networks usually have very malware-ish advertisers, Monetag seemed to not be one of those.

I can see an answer coming "your account did not comply with our ToS". But they will not say why. The official reason they gave me was "fraud", which is very specific and definitely different than not complying with ToS. By the way, it's nothing new that providers (all big and small players) use their ToS in a discretionary way to shut down accounts.

EDIT JUNE 2025
It's been now almost 5 years, and I can tell for sure that I lost at least 23% of the initial investment. 3 wines remain unsold.
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I've been an investor for almost 4 years now, so it's a good moment to make a review. I have always been a "managed" investor.

Vinovest concept is good. If you are willing to invest in wine, you must know it's an alternative asset, with it pros and cons. That's fine. You manage your wealth, but as a general rule, don't invest all your savings in one alternative asset. However, my issues are not related to investing in wine, which I think is cool. My concerns with this platform are about trust. Investing in the long term with a company that fails on building trust is a big bet, especially considering that you need to pay the maintainance bill (fees) for a long time before you see any profit. And fees are high for unlikely returns. For those wondering, my average wine has been for three years in my portfolio. 63% have a negative result. Overall, the portfolio market value is in slightly positive numbers, but I spent way more in comissions than won in market value.

Now, the story. At the beginning, I thought they were just starting, so I gave them some credit. Product was still basic, but I was hoping it would become stronger. However, I started loosing trust slowly. Lately, I ask myself if it's a scam or communications/management are really bad. Key information is kept in secret. Wines are stored in "world-class wine storage facilities" (no details on real facilities and, in case you are wondering "clients are not permitted to pick up their wine from our storage facilities."). Wines are sold to "a network of trusted partners and buyers". Key features are buggy (recent "price sync" for listings is a good idea with poor execution, as listing will show that such an important feature is enabled or disabled randomly), "pending sales" taking ages (while market price increases). Selling wines at market prices is impossible (so is it really a market?). Withdrawal is still an email process, but I get that, that's not the biggest issue here.

Eleven months ago I decided to give a try to selling wines, just to test the feature and have a taste of how I could exit this investment, eventually. I was hoping that the launch of the trading option will at some point converge or help in the liquidity of "managed portfolios". That is not the case. In eleven months I only sold three wines out of 14 in listing. Last sale was 6 months ago. I still don't understand how wines priced at the market level or below won't have any buyers. I get the liquidity thing, but you are supposed to be onboarding people wanting to buy, you have the trading platform, but wines won't sell. From time to time you receive extremely low offers. You could try to ship them all to your house, but this is expensive and "The process of preparing these wines for shipment is quite extensive" (more empty answers), "There is also a warehouse consolidation fee of $XXX. " (literal). At least this will open the possibility of drinking / selling on ebay. Usually, you'll receive very slow bids on your wines. I've only sell wines at net loss. Additionaly, everything pays a fee. When you sell in advance, you not only pay a fee, but are not allowed to withdraw all your funds. They discretionaly keep some for future fees.

Overall, I would say that I don't know if my wines exist for real, nothing proves that. In the meantime, you pay a monthly fee (2.85% standard, lower if you invest more). They tell the investment horizon is around 10 years. 10 years paying fees is leap of faith that will start costing 28.5% of your capital. In the meantime, I'll keep all my listings open, just in case a miracle happens. I will have a hard time recovering my investment, and at this point I know for sure the net result will be negative.

Sin problemas, rápido.

Absolutely not trustable app. Said the place was 400m from a spot but it's only when you pay that you get the real address 2km away from the given spot. This was the case for Sorrento where they say it's in the Centro Storico and it's not even close to that. Total scam and useless for planning.

I have been a happy customer of Digital Ocean for the last 5 years and never had an issue with them. I moved in from a typical shared hosting because they used to have many restrictions, and, in the end, the entry price was similar. Being a VPS, the setup wasn't easy at that time, but I managed to create a solid server that never let me down, and I have done customizations that I would never have been able to do in a shared hosting. I find that Digital Ocean is somewhere between a typical hosting and AWS: not as hard to use as AWS, but with many tools that make management easier and a good price for the value.

This company couldn't solve an issue with my debit card for three weeks (the same debit card that I used in the past to fund my account). I decided then to go with ACH to fund my account, even if it was slower. But the day my last transfer was finally deposited they announced a new "cooldown period": you cannot withdraw to crypto for 65 days. Totally crazy amount of time. In sum, I deposited a lot of money and bought crypto which I cannot withdraw to another wallet or exchange.
I complained that they changed the rules (this "cool down" wan announced after I made my ACH deposits) and the only answer I get is "there is a new cooldown period to protect your funds". If I knew they would do that, I would have used a different wallet to buy crypto. They made me lose a lot of time and money and won't give a proper answer.

I've rent a car at Florence, Italy. Even if they advise themselves as a 'low-cost company', there's nothing low about them. The service was good, the car, excellent (new car with only 18000 km, efficient, small). I had no problems at all and did the check-in and check-out reasonably fast. There was no ugly surprises and no extra charges, just everything as promised.

I would absolutely recommend them.