The Gift Card Market Is $1 Trillion – and Nobody's Playing It Smart

01 /The Concept

On Me is a platform for buying and sending digital gift cards.

Recipients can add them to their Apple or Google digital wallet and redeem them in-store by tapping their phone at the terminal, or online via wallet checkout or card number entry.

The cards never expire. There are no fees when you buy them – what you pay is exactly the card value you receive. They're delivered instantly by email, text, link, or through the On Me app. Conveniently, within the app you can schedule card sends up to a year in advance – so you can knock out your entire gifting calendar in one sitting.

The no-fee model works because the brands behind the cards pay On Me when a recipient redeems one in their store. For brands, this counts as customer acquisition spend – and the recipient may spend more than the card's face value while they're there, and might return later as a repeat customer.

On Me's key differentiator is that its cards aren't tied to a single brand. Instead, they're tied to a category – beauty, coffee, wellness, yoga, travel, boxing, climbing, and 69 others. Seventy-two categories in total.

This means the recipient can redeem their card at any of the many partner merchants in that category. The beauty category alone has 74 chains where the card can be used.

The giver just has to choose a category that seems right for the recipient – and the recipient redeems it wherever is most convenient for them. This removes the friction on both sides: the giver doesn't have to guess a specific store, and the recipient isn't stuck with one they don't use. It also makes the gift actually useful.

Another nice detail: the sender can attach a video, photo, or personal message to the card, turning it into something closer to a personalized greeting card – but with obvious added value.

The sender can also track the gift's journey – when it was purchased, when it was sent, and when the recipient finally opened it.

If the recipient opens the gift in the On Me app, they can respond right there – sending back a thank-you note with their own video or photo.

On Me is also making a push into corporate gifting, enabling companies to send up to 500 gifts at once through the platform.

The platform launched in November of last year. Since then, it has delivered over $2.5M in gifts to 26,000 recipients, with monthly gift volume growing at roughly 50% per month.

On Me raised $1.7M at launch and has just closed a new $6M round.

02 /Why It Matters

Gift cards might seem like a small-ticket category. That would be a very expensive mistake.

The global gift card market was already approaching $1 trillion in 2023 and is projected to hit $2.3 trillion by 2030.

Here's how lead investor NFX explains why it committed to this round.

The market's scale already validates demand. But the growth potential is even bigger – driven by deeper penetration into mobile commerce.

Most gift cards today are still physical plastic, handed person to person, or digital cards delivered by email. Meanwhile, 65% of shoppers in the US already use digital wallets on their phones, and 20% no longer carry physical cards or wallets at all.

NFX is betting that embedding into digital wallets could allow On Me to pull off something like what Uber and Lyft did to the taxi industry – by giving both riders and drivers a mobile-native experience that blew up the traditional market.

On Me's model also has a genuine network effect – and it's two-sided.

On one side, sending gifts through On Me becomes a medium for personal communication: you attach a message, video, or photo, and the recipient can respond in kind. On Me is quietly building something like a social layer – not from scratch, but layered on top of existing real-world relationships. The more people use it, the more their contacts get pulled in. And so on.

On the other side, the category card model is especially valuable for lesser-known or newer brands. The recipient isn't locked into a specific merchant chosen by the giver. They open a mini-marketplace and choose whichever brand appeals to them.

More brands in a category make the cards more appealing to give. More people giving the cards increases merchant appetite to be listed. Another compounding loop.

The idea that gift cards could become the skeleton of a social network – an unusual one, but a social network nonetheless – is genuinely interesting. There's already a precedent: Claim ([related review](/review/novaja-mehanika-kotoraja-tolko-nachala-rabotat)), which has raised $18M.

Restaurants, shops, and cafes drop a batch of perks into the Claim app each week – free dishes, discounts, essentially gift vouchers. Users pick one perk per week, and Claim even rewards them with extra credit for actually redeeming it, sharing in the economics of engagement.

Users can see which perks their friends redeemed and what they thought of them – nudging them toward trying the same place the following week. But that place might not drop new perks soon, so users can trade perks with friends who have something more interesting.

Claim thus becomes a discovery engine – helping users find new places and stay plugged into what their friends are enjoying. The mechanics, again, are built around gift-card-style instruments, even if Claim doesn't call them that.

03 /Opportunities

The main takeaway: gift cards are an unexpectedly enormous market, and investors believe the upside is even larger than the current numbers suggest. That combination – big and growing – is worth paying attention to.

And the entry mechanic doesn't have to be conventional. As we've seen, interesting mechanics can blend the gift card model with social dynamics. Which leads to a perhaps obvious but genuinely underexplored observation: today's social networks lack material incentives for engagement. Likes, shares, and comments are fine. But real, redeemable rewards would be considerably more powerful.

So what mechanic – using gift cards under any name – could you layer on top of social communication dynamics in a way that creates value for everyone involved and triggers a network effect? The market size suggests the reward for a good answer is substantial.