A Thank-You Letter in Numbers: Transfer Bonus Week Recap
Eight days. Five airline partners. 2,995 transfers and ~1.93 lakh bonus miles credited on top of the regular ratio. A field report from our first Transfer Bonus Week, with a thank-you note woven in.
Some weeks at Magnify are quiet. This one was not.
Between 21 and 28 April, we ran our first Transfer Bonus Week. Eight days, five airline partners, stacked bonuses on every flow. By the time the deadline closed on Tuesday night, the cohort had moved 2,995 transfers through the app and we had credited ~1.93 lakh bonus miles on top of the regular 1:1 ratio.
This is the recap. Equal parts thank-you note and field report. The thank-you part is for everyone who showed up. The field report is for everyone else, because the data turned out to be worth writing down.
Ishan and I run Magnify as a small bootstrapped team, with a few good people who help us ship. We had no idea how this campaign would land. The cohort answered for us.
The opening shot, the closing shot
The window opened at midnight on 21 April. The first transfer of the campaign hit the app at 00:00:55 IST. Fifty-five seconds in. Someone had clearly been waiting for the clock to flip.
The last transfer of the week landed at 23:59:34 IST on 28 April, a clean Maharaja Club move with twenty-six seconds left on the deadline. Two strangers, eight days apart, both refusing to leave anything on the table.
The 10-hour SLA we wear (and rarely use)
Maharaja Club is the only partner where there is a queue on the credit side. We tell people transfers can take up to ten hours. That number is a conservative SLA we wear because of operational guidelines we follow.
The reality during Bonus Week was less dramatic. The median Maharaja transfer was credited well under two hours. The fastest of the week clocked in at 1 minute 36 seconds. Nothing crossed the SLA.
Every other partner runs effectively instant. SAS EuroBonus, AirAsia, Lotusmiles, ShebaMiles. Sub-second is the norm. Most users probably do not realise this, which means we should talk about it more.
The shape of the week was a U
The conventional wisdom on a one-week campaign is that everyone delays until the last day and rushes. The cohort did the opposite. The opening day was the busiest of the entire campaign, the middle of the week dipped, and the deadline drew a fresh wave back in.
One nuance worth flagging. The launch day was deeper (more transfers per head) and the deadline day was wider (more new faces, smaller average transfer). Both crowds mattered, but they did not look the same.
When transfers happened
After dinner. During the workday. Almost never at four in the morning.
Four transfers worth writing down
Most transfers are unremarkable in isolation. A few during this week were not.
The 4:13 AM Maharaja move. Someone sent 31,500 Mag Miles into Air India Maharaja Club at 4:13 in the morning on 27 April. With the +50% bonus, it landed as 47,250 Maharaja points. We hope they got some sleep after.
The 18,938 SAS transfer. A single move at 6:53 PM on 22 April turned into 33,141 EuroBonus points. Whoever did it almost certainly has a specific premium-cabin redemption in mind. We can guess.
The 22-transfer power user. One person did 22 separate transfers across the eight days. An absolute legend.
The 10-second double-tap. Two consecutive transfers, ten seconds apart, by one person. Decisive.
The infra stayed boring (in the best way)
One technical note worth writing down. Across eight days of stacked bonuses, sub-second transfers on four partners, and a Maharaja flow that has to wait on Air India's queue, the platform was quietly rock-solid. The only incident of the week was a fifteen-minute window of downtime on 27 April at around 6:30 PM, and that one had nothing to do with Bonus Week or with the app itself. Just an upstream blip. Outside of those fifteen minutes, every transfer was processed cleanly through the entire campaign. Kudos to Ishan, who runs the infra side and made sure Bonus Week was completely uneventful on the engineering side of the house.
The fun stuff (skip if you came here for takeaways)
Optional section. Our favourite though.
Aesthetic minutes. A surprising number of transfers landed at exactly 11:11, 12:34, 12:12, 13:13, and the stroke of midnight. Make-a-wish minutes are real, apparently.
Round numbers and palindromes. The most-loved transfer amount was a clean 100 Mag Miles. After that, 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 150. Roughly one in ten transfers used a round multiple of 100. A handful used amounts that read like a date (2104, 2804) or a palindrome (111, 121, 222, 242). We see what they did there. The rest just transferred whatever they happened to have, which is honestly the right answer.
The doppelganger problem. Two people with the same first name independently transferring to the same partner inside a ten-minute window happened repeatedly through the week. The most-repeated combo was a pair of Siddharths. Then Sourabhs. Then Priyanks. The most common first names across the cohort were Siddharth, Rahul, Aditya, Rohit, Abhishek, Krishna, and Ankit. If your name is on that list, statistically a stranger who shares it probably moved miles minutes after you did.
Where in India the cohort showed up from
Over twenty-five Indian states were represented. The top five did roughly two-thirds of the work.
Bengaluru was the single most active city, narrowly ahead of Mumbai. Tier-2 cities showed up in numbers we did not entirely expect, which is the most encouraging signal in the whole dataset.
Why Maharaja led the partner list
Maharaja Club took more transfers than any other partner. Which made sense. It is the most familiar program for Indian travellers, the +50% bonus stacked nicely on Air India's existing domestic redemption sweet spots, and most participants already had a Maharaja balance to top up.
One more thing: an Air India bonus is coming in May
We were happy enough with how this one went that we are doing it again, sooner than we had planned.
The next round is an Air India Maharaja Club bonus in the last 5 days of May 2026. Tighter window (five days instead of eight) and a single partner this time. Maharaja was the program most people transferred to during this campaign, and we want to keep that flywheel going. The dedicated post for the May bonus has the exact rate and the partner-page link.
The simplest way to be ready is to keep stacking Mag Miles between now and then. Every gift card on the Magnify app earns Mag Miles. UPI works, no premium card needed, and a balance built up before the May window opens is the easiest way to make the next bonus actually count.
Thank you, again
To everyone who showed up this week. To the 4 AM Maharaja sender. To the 22-transfer power user. To the 23:59:34 deadline-hugger. To every transfer that landed at 11:11. To all the Siddharths and Rahuls who unknowingly transferred together. To the SAS move that turned into 33,141 EuroBonus points. To the Maharaja transfer that landed in 1 minute and 36 seconds.
Ishan and I are very happy building Magnify as a small bootstrapped company. We don't have a war chest. We have an app that mostly does what it should, a slow but real growth in trust, and weeks like this one. Thank you for showing up.
Onwards and upwards. See you in May.
