There are times when you just have to roll up your sleeves and get to work. We asked some NerdWallet writers to try out a few apps that let you take surveys online to make money to find out if it was worth the time.
The results were not very good, and it took a lot of time for not much pay. Even though this happened in 2017, a recent survey of app store user reviews shows that not much has changed. No one is getting rich, but strangely, not many people are upset about that.
It’s possible that the point of taking surveys isn’t to make money. People may just want to say what they think while killing time, and the small rewards are just a bonus.
When we looked for the most popular iOS apps for getting paid to take surveys, these were the ones that stood out:
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Make Money
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Eureka
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Zap
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InboxDollars Surveys
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Google Opinion Rewards
At the time this article was written, all of them had more than 100,000 reviews and ratings of 4 stars or higher.
Most reviews of these apps say that the payouts aren’t very big, but many users seem to enjoy taking surveys and making a little extra cash.
Here’s what NerdWallet writers discovered when they were paid to take surveys.
The Lowdown on Paid Online Surveys
In 2017, three of us took paid surveys for more than 50 hours, but we didn’t make more than $90 total. So, no, taking online surveys was not a good way for us to make money. ( You can skip to the list or keep reading to find out more about what we did.
Fair enough, getting paid to take surveys was easy and could be done at home if you had an internet connection. The sites we tried were free and didn’t need us to have any skills or education. Depending on the website, surveys can be a simple but boring way to make a few bucks or a frustrating chore that doesn’t pay much.
Not all sites paid the same amount. We liked sites that told us how much money each survey was worth and put us in touch with relevant ones. We hated sites that paid us with a confusing system of points and sent us surveys that we rarely qualified for.
Keep in mind that your age, gender, and other characteristics determine a lot of whether or not you can take a survey. We were all single women in our 20s who lived in cities and took surveys in 2017. Depending on the survey, we might not have been the best people to take part. Your profile could lead to different results than ours.
Survey Sites That Pay Cash
Here are what we found when we tried to spend an hour on each site every day for five days. Some days, there weren’t enough surveys on a few sites to fill an hour. (We didn’t add that time to the total number of hours we spent studying.)
We put these U.S. sites in order of how much we earned per hour on average in 2017, from the most to the least.
1. OneOpinion
Average earnings: $2.03 per hour
This site collects surveys and has a good way to screen them. Its dashboard tells you a lot of useful information and shows you things like your activity and a customer support form. The site did a better-than-average job of matching us with surveys we could do.
As for the number of points you get for each survey, 500 or 1,000 points may seem like a lot at first, but when you turn them into cash, you’ll get 50 cents or a dollar. Also, you can’t get your money until you have 25,000 points, which is $25.
2. Survey Junkie
Average earnings: $1.57 per hour
This is a smaller site that collects surveys, but it stands out. The site has a clean, easy-to-use dashboard, and each survey you finish gives you a lot of points.
The point system is clear, and the dashboard shows you exactly how much your points are worth in dollars. But you need 500 points before you can get your money.
3. Opinion Outpost
Average earnings: $1.50 per hour
Some survey sites send a lot of information and opportunities to their users, but Opinion Outpost doesn’t do that. Its website was easy to use and simple, so we could fill out survey after survey without much thought.
As new users, we also liked that the site’s points system was easy to understand and that each point was worth 10 cents. The most important thing is that we actually made money. We made an average of $1.50 per hour on Opinion Outpost, which we could spend on Amazon.
4. InboxDollars
Average earnings: $0.41 per hour
After confirming their email address with InboxDollars, new users get a $5 bonus. But that didn’t make up for the fact that we only made 41 cents in an hour by taking surveys, which was the least of the 12 sites we tried.
Sometimes, instead of sending us surveys, the site sent us to ads that asked for our address, phone number, and date of birth.
5. Swagbucks
Average earnings: $0.89 per hour
This site has a lot of survey opportunities, but people often get kicked out. We were sometimes kicked out just because we clicked on a link to a survey. Since Swagbucks collects surveys from other sites, some of the sites it sends you to are better than others.
It takes a long time to earn points, but the site’s huge rewards marketplace has a lot of choices, like gift cards, PayPal payments, and sweepstakes.
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