Compare / Chime vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Chime
BUSINESS MODEL
Chime
Chime makes money almost entirely from interchange fees. Every time a Chime member uses their debit card, the merchant pays a swipe fee (typically 1-2% of the transaction).
Chime keeps a portion of that interchange. The model only works at scale — Chime needs millions of members making thousands of transactions to generate meaningful revenue.
But with 22 million members, the math works. Chime also earns interest on member deposits and fees from optional instant transfer services.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Chime
Chris Britt spent years working in financial services — at Visa, Green Dot, and other companies — and kept seeing the same thing: banks made a disproportionate amount of their revenue from fees charged to their least wealthy customers. Overdraft fees alone generated $35 billion annually for US banks.
The average overdraft was $36 for a $24 transaction — that's a 150% fee. Poor people were subsidizing free checking for rich people.
In 2012, Britt co-founded Chime with Ryan King (CTO) to build a bank account designed for people living paycheck to paycheck. The core promise was radical: no monthly fees, no minimum balance, no overdraft fees, ever.
You'd get your direct deposit up to two days early (because Chime could release funds as soon as they were notified of a pending deposit, while banks sat on the money for two extra days), and you could overdraft up to $200 without any penalty through a feature called SpotMe.
The product launched in 2014 and grew slowly at first. But the target market — working-class Americans frustrated with bank fees — was enormous.
Once people tried Chime and realized they'd never see another $35 overdraft fee, they told everyone they knew.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Chime
Chime grew through massive direct-to-consumer advertising. TV commercials, YouTube ads, podcast sponsorships, Instagram campaigns — all hammering the same message: no fees, get paid early, no overdraft penalties.
The message resonated with a demographic that traditional banks ignored or exploited: working-class Americans earning $30,000-$75,000 per year.
The "get paid early" feature was the killer hook. Chime releases direct deposits up to two days before payday.
For someone living paycheck to paycheck, getting paid on Wednesday instead of Friday is life-changing. It reduced the need for payday loans and covered emergency expenses.
The feature spread through word of mouth faster than any ad campaign.
Simplicity was a deliberate choice. Chime doesn't offer investing, crypto, or dozens of products.
They do one thing — be a great bank account for everyday Americans — and do it well. While competitors like Cash App and Revolut chased feature bloat, Chime stayed focused on the core banking experience.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Chime
Chime is not actually a bank. They're a fintech company that partners with Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank to hold deposits and issue cards.
This distinction matters because Chime doesn't have the regulatory protections and permissions that come with a bank charter. In 2021, the state of California ordered Chime to stop calling itself a bank in advertising.
The regulatory status limits what products Chime can offer and adds counterparty risk.
Unit economics have been questioned. Chime spends heavily on customer acquisition — hundreds of dollars per member through advertising.
If members don't use their Chime card frequently enough, the interchange revenue doesn't cover the acquisition cost. Chime needs high engagement to make the model work, and some members treat Chime as a secondary account rather than their primary bank.
The path to IPO has been repeatedly delayed. Chime was expected to IPO in 2022 but the fintech market crash made that impossible.
The company listed on Nasdaq in June 2025 at $11.6 billion, well below its 2021 peak of $25 billion. Public markets now price it in the open, which is a harsher judge than a private round.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Chime
Chime Spending Account is the core — a fee-free checking account with a Visa debit card. Chime Savings Account offers automatic round-ups and a competitive APY.
SpotMe lets members overdraft up to $200 with no fees — Chime covers the difference and deducts it from the next deposit. MyPay gives members access to earned wages before payday.
The Chime Credit Builder card helps members build credit by reporting on-time payments to all three bureaus — no credit check required, no interest, secured by your own money. Instant Transfers move money between Chime members instantly.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Chime
DST Global, General Atlantic, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Coatue Management, Dragoneer
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.