18 Best Rewards
Apps To Earn Free Money From Your Smartphone
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How much time would you say you spend
using your smartphone? Be honest. If you’re like most people, it’s
probably a lot – perhaps more than you’d care to admit.
In fact, the average American spends
around 86 hours a month on their smartphone, according to a recent report
by comScore. That’s right, 86 hours of
your life every single month.
What a waste of time, you might be
thinking. Why spend all that time browsing your phone when you could have been
working and getting paid instead? But wait – let’s imagine for a moment that
you could have been being paid for all that time…
Imagine you were to earn just $5 an hour
for the time you spend browsing your phone. If you did, you’d end each month
$430 richer. All of a sudden, it wouldn’t seem like such a waste of time after
all.
Now here comes the interesting part: what
if I told you that you could?
Alright, maybe not quite $5 an hour, but
it is possible to monetize your phone browsing habits and earn a little extra
for almost no effort on your part. You could literally be getting paid to
browse the internet, shop online, watch ads, play games, and do all sorts of other things using your smartphone.
There are dozens of reward apps that you
could download to your smartphone today and start earning money – but not all
of them are made equal. Some are good; others aren’t worth your time.
To help you to sort the good from the bad,
we’ve put together this list of the 20 best reward apps to earn money from your
smartphone.
Let’s get started!
1. Ibotta
Ibotta is one of the most popular reward apps on the market – and
for good reason. It’s simple, easy-to-use, and a great way to make savings on
everyday purchases.
Ibotta is primarily a cashback app, which
means you get real, genuine cash for simply making purchases from participating
retailers. You can also earn rewards instead, like gift cards and coupons, if
you prefer.
Participating retailers include big-names
like:
·
Walmart
·
Target
·
Hotels.com
·
Uber
·
eBay
·
7-11
Plus many more!
The way it works is simple: before you
make any purchase, you check Ibotta on your smartphone to see if the product
you’re interested in buying is listed in the current offers.
If it is, you can earn cash back on it.
You just need to complete a short task first, then you can purchase the product
and provide proof of purchase to redeem your cash back.
The tasks can be are short and sweet; you
usually just need to watch a video or complete a short poll.
2. Shopkick
Just like Ibotta, Shopkick rewards shoppers for making purchases, but that’s not all.
They actually offer eight different ways for shoppers to earn ‘kicks’ –
Shopkick’s version of points. You can earn kicks by:
·
Scanning barcodes of certain products
·
Making purchases with linked credit cards
·
Submitting your receipts
·
Walking into stores
·
Viewing online products
·
Watching videos
·
Visiting online stores
·
Making online purchases
The fact that you can earn points without
spending a dime makes Shopkick a personal favorite of mine. Earning points for
walking into partner stores is also a fun feature that you’ll enjoy if you’re
an avid shopper who loves getting out of the house and just browsing stores.
3. ShopTracker
ShopTracker is an app that asks you to share your Amazon purchase
history and fill out a quick survey once a month. ShopTracker pays you for your
time and then sells that data on to companies looking to do market research and
learn more about customer spending habits.
You’re not going to get rich using
ShopTracker (your earnings are capped at $36 per year) but it is one of
the easiest ways to get a few extra
dollars per month – and those dollars add
up eventually.
You don’t need to be worried about being
scammed either – ShopTracker is run by the Harris Poll Online Panel and is one
of the most legitimate survey apps on the market.
It works like this:
Step 1: Download
and install the ShopTracker App to your smartphone
Step 2: Login
and sync it to your Amazon account
Step 3: Fill
out a 5-minute survey on the app once a month.
Each time you complete step 3, you’ll
receive a $3 visa code.
To qualify to register for ShopTracker,
you’ll need an Amazon account which has at least one month’s purchase history.
4. Trunow
Trunow is a must-have app for any motorist out there. It doesn’t
just help you to earn money and rewards on purchases – it helps you to save money too by using the location data on your phone to inform you
where the lowest gas prices are near you.
The main reason to use Trunow is to get
cash back every time you buy gas. You’ll get either 1% or 2% cash back
depending on if the gas station is partnered with Trunow or not. This means
that the amount you can earn depends on how much you spend on gas.
If you spend $200 a month on gas, you’ll
earn between $2-4 per month in cash back, and probably much more in savings by
finding the best deal. Again, it might not make you rich, but why not save a
little extra where you can?
You can also get cash back and reward
points for other gas-station purchases too, such as confectionary.
5. Drop
Drop is a rewards app with a specific target demographic in mind –
millennials. They have created an app that understands where millennials tend
to spend their money and allows them to earn points for it.
It also understands what modern consumers
want out of their smartphone apps – convenience. Scanning receipts is all well and good, but wouldn’t it be better if the app
could just track your purchases and distribute points automatically? Well,
that’s exactly what Drop does.
Users can download the app, link up their
cards, select their favorite 5 retailers listed on Drop, then start making
purchases. Each time they do, they’ll earn points, which can be redeemed later
for gift cards.
Here are some of the retailers and brands
that Drop links up with:
·
McDonald’s
·
Starbucks
·
Uber
·
Chipotle
·
Cineplex
6. Acorns
Investing is one of the smartest money moves you can do. It protects
you from inflation, accounts for the time value of money, and helps you to grow
your savings passively.
The problem is that investment is
inaccessible for most people as they just don’t have the spare time or money to
invest.
That’s where Acorns comes in.
Acorns invest your spare change and handle
all the difficult investment decisions for you. All you need
to do is link up your credit cards (Acorns will automatically round-up your
purchases to the nearest dollar and invest the extra) and answer a few
questions to determine what kind of investment strategy you’d feel most
comfortable with, i.e aggressively or conservative.
Your little acorns will then (fingers
crossed) grow into huge money trees.
7. Ipsos
The Ipsos i-say app is first and foremost a survey app. Unlike many other
rewards apps on this list, they don’t encourage you to make purchases or give
cash back, they focus exclusively on getting users to fill in surveys and
distributing reward points.
Filling out the surveys doesn’t typically
take long, and it can be a great way to kill some time whilst you’re commuting
to work on a bus or train. Instead of playing games, why not fill out some
surveys and earn enough to pay for your lunch that day instead?
Once you’ve found a survey you’re interested
in filling out, you first need to check that you qualify by filling in some
basic information about yourself. If you don’t qualify, you walk away with 5
points anyway – just for trying.
Points can be redeemed against prizes
like:
·
A $5 Starbucks Card for 500 points
·
A $10 Amazon Gift Card for 1,000 points
·
$15 Paypal funds for 1,530 points
·
A $15 Target Gift Card for 1,500 points.
8. Zap Surveys
Zap Surveys is, as you’d expect given the name, another survey app. Like
Ipsos i-Say, you can use it to earn you a few extra dollars a day while you commute by answering some survey questions – but
wait, there’s more.
Zap Surveys also donate a certain amount
of money to charity for every survey you complete, which means that you’re not
just helping to fatten your wallet, you’re helping other, less-fortunate people
around the world too.
If you’re not the survey-type, it might be
worth downloading Zap Surveys just for their ‘location rewards’ anyway.
If you allow the app to access your
location, you’ll occasionally get a notification letting you know that you’re
near a store that’s running a promotion. If you open this notification, you’ll
be awarded anything up to $0.25.
As long as you don’t mind sharing your
location data, there’s nothing to lose from downloading it, even if you’d
prefer not to participate in surveys.
Pinecone Research is a survey app that pays considerably more than both Zap
Surveys and Ipsos. For each and every survey that you fill out, you’ll
earn around $3. Even better, these surveys only take around
15-30 minutes each, meaning, if you could line these up back to back, you
could potentially earn $6-12 per hour.
The only problem is that you almost certainly
won’t be able to line up surveys back to back. As you might have guessed
considering the high pay rate, Pinecone Research is very selective about survey
participants and you’ll have to wait for them to notify you that you’re
eligible. You can probably hope to be eligible for 1-4 surveys a month,
at best.
Once you’ve earned your rewards, you can
redeem them and cash out at any time via PayPal or, alternatively, by check to your postal address.
10. Makeena
Makeena is a shopping rewards app that will help to thin out your
waistline and fatten your wallet.
If you’re a healthy-eating enthusiast,
it’s the perfect smartphone rewards app to download. You earn cash back and
reward points on healthy and eco-friendly products by scanning barcodes and
submitting proof of purchase.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Download
the app and search for the kind of items you’re interested in (e.g organic) to
see what’s available
Step 2: Add
the items to your shopping list and go shopping for them.
Step 3: Scan
the barcode to register the offer on Makeena
Step 4: Submit
a photo of your receipt
Step 5: Wait
for verification and cash out your rewards using PayPal once you have at least
$20
11. TopCashBack
TopCashBack claims to be the UK’s highest paying cashback rewards app.
The reason they claim they’re able to pay out so much is that they pay 100% of
the commission they receive from retail purchases out as cash back, without
taking a cut.
This has earned them over 8 million users
and, last year alone, they paid out over £40 million in cash back.
It works the same way as many other
rewards apps: you browse the offers, choose your favorites, make your purchase,
then snap a photo of your receipt.
12. Ebates
Ebates is another cashback rewards app which rewards you points with a
cash value each time you make a purchase at any of their 1,600 affiliated
stores. These stores include:
·
Best Buy
·
Target
·
Macy’s
·
Drugstore.com
·
Priceline
The other great thing about Ebates is that
you get $5 just for signing up, and another $10 gift card once you’ve spent at
least $25 through the app.
You can read our complete review of
Ebates here.
13. Swagbucks
Swagbucks is a smartphone app which offers a huge number of ways to earn
points (called SB) which can be redeemed against gift cards. Most of the
activities you can do to earn are things that you’d probably be doing on your
smartphone anyway.
Their primary focus is on surveys, but you
can also earn points by:
·
Playing games on the app
·
Watching videos through Swagbucks Watch
(their version of YouTube)
·
Making purchases at selected retailers
·
Searching through the app’s search engine
14. BillsBoard
BillsBoard is one of the best smartphone rewards app as it allows you
to earn money totally
passively.
It’s what’s known as a ‘lock-screen app’;
an app which changes your lock screen so that you have to view an ad each time
you unlock your phone. Each time, you’ll earn a small number of points which,
over a lifetime of using your phone, will soon add up.
You can then redeem your points for cash
which you can withdraw via PayPal. While you won’t earn a lot of money, there’s
essentially no time commitment or effort required on your part, which makes
this one of the easiest ways to make money passively.
For more apps that pay you just to unlock
your phone, check out our blog post here.
15. MyPoints
MyPoints is another comprehensive smartphone rewards app which lets
you earn points for doing all sorts of easy, and sometimes fun, activities on
your phone.
You can get points for:
·
Shopping online
·
Reading your emails
·
Watching video playlists
·
Searching the web
·
Printing coupons and using them in stores
·
Playing games
·
Referring friends
·
Completing surveys
Once you’ve accumulated at least 700
points, you can choose to redeem them for travel miles, gift cards, or cash
deposits to your PayPal account.
16. MySurvey
No prizes for guessing what MySurvey rewards points for.
That’s right – completing surveys. They
actually claim to be the world’s number 1 paid survey website. But do they
deliver on that promise?
Well, they might not pay as much as
PineCone Research, but they are much less restrictive about which users can
take which surveys. You’ll usually be eligible for a lot of different surveys,
and disqualification rates are lower than some of the other apps out there.
Based on my own experience with MySurvey,
you can probably earn around $1-2 per hour if you complete several surveys back
to back. Most surveys don’t require a lot of thought or effort though, so if
you’re sat around listening to music on your phone or watching TV, you can earn
a little extra for minimal effort.
17. BeFrugal
BeFrugal is very similar – almost identical, in fact – to Ebates.
They pay you to shop at participating stores by giving you cash back on the
commission they receive. Like Ebates, they claim to give out 100% of this
commission to their users.
They’ve partnered with over 5,000 stores,
so you’ve got plenty of options, and the minimum withdrawal amount is $25. You
can choose to cash out your points via PayPal deposit, Check, or trade them in
for Amazon Gift Cards.
18. Dosh
Dosh is another cashback rewards app that allows you to earn cash
back on common purchases like gas, hotel bookings, and more.
Like the smartphone app ‘Drop’, they put
convenience first. You don’t need to dig around and find those receipts to
validate your purchases, you just link up your card and the whole process is
automatic.
If you’re a shopaholic, it’s definitely
worth downloading it and linking up your card. It won’t take you more than a few
minutes but it will allow you to save money on a lot of your purchases.
Which
is Your Favorite?
Have you tried any of these apps already?
If so, what did you make of them? Let us know in the comments!
If none of these are cutting it for you,
check out our make money section for more ideas on ways to earn money in your spare
time. Good luck and happy frugaling!
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Jillur Rahman
I'm Jillur Rahman. A full time web designer. I enjoy to make modern template. I love create blogger template and write about web design, blogger. Now I'm working with Themeforest. You can buy our templates from Themeforest.
Website: http://masala-jr.blogspot.com/
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