In light of recent events in my own life and the world, I’ve been unemployed. Luckily, I recently moved back in with my parents so my living costs aren’t too high. While I’m looking for jobs and figuring out what I want to do next, I want to make a little pocket change that’ll allow me to enjoy some nice things here and there. I googled “side gigs” and found “taking surveys” as a potential form of side income. Here is my experience.
Swagbucks
I think this was a big thing back in middle school for kids to make a couple buck. After creating an account. the main page is a lot to take in and I start to figure it out. You can do different activities to get “swagbucks (SB)” which can be redeemed for cash rewards. I’m just going to focus on the surveys though. Each survey has screener questions to make sure you qualify before you can take the surveys. The longer the survey, the more SB you get. After about 90 minutes, I make 79 SB. In order to get a $5 PayPal gift card, it is 500 SB. Essentially, I’ve made $0.79 in 90 minutes.
Inbox Dollars
My initial impressions of the site was that the layout of the landing page is very similar to Swagbucks, and I was very excited because you get $5 for just signing up! However, you have to have $30 in your account before you can cash out. I mean I just made $5 though. How hard would it be to make another 5/6 of that? Well, it’s very hard just doing it though surveys. I figured I would be making any where between $0.10 and $1 for a survey. I didn’t want to spend another 90 minutes doing this.
Survey Junkie
This site has a different layout than the other two and seems to just be focused on surveys. Each survey tells you how many points you’ll get and how long each survey will take. One point is equivalent to $0.01 and you need 1,000 points ($10) for you to be sent a payment I was determined to make at least $10 and see if the payout actually works.
After 4 hours, I got my results. The good news is that they do pay out. The bad news is that it took 4 hours to make $10. I thought I would focus on the highest paying ones that take the least amount of time. However, there aren’t many surveys like that. The best I was able to get were 15 minute surveys where I’d make about $1. Additionally, surveys expire fast so when you see one that has high pay and a low time commitment, it might already be gone. You can wait and keep refreshing your screen those higher paying, low time surveys, but it’s a trade off and not guaranteed. In that time of refreshing your page, you could just be completing more surveys. In the end I made about $2.50/hour.
One Opinion
It’s too much like Survey Junkie. The process of getting surveys and general low amount of rewards per survey is about the same. I feel defeated and really don’t want to spend another 4 hours to make $10. I decided it was time to move onto the next one.
MyPoints
The rewards system is once again based off of points. Depending on what store/restaurant gift card you want and the amount on the gift card, determines the amount of point you have to pay. It seems like you’ll pay less points for a dollar the more money you want on the gift card (see Figure A). Their surveys initially seem to pay more than Survey Junkie and there are other activities you can do to earn points, but I decide it’s not worth it anymore. At best, I could take the 70 minute survey to earn 1326 pts and a 14 minute survey to earn 90 pts. The total would allow me to get the $10 amazon gift card, but that’ll take at least 80 minutes. Additionally, I had already spent at least 15 minutes understanding the site and signing up. Ultimately, it’s going to take at least two hours to get $10 and don’t really want or need a gift card to any of these places.
Vindale research
I was feeling burnt out from taking surveys and had no intention of actually trying to earn money here, but I wanted to check it out. The rewards seem to be relatively higher than the other sites during my initial use, but it seems like a lot of these survey sites always start you off with high paying surveys. Once again at best, similar to MyPoints, it’ll probably take me a little under 2 hours to make $10.
Conclusion
Too much time, too little money.
The only cash I collected was from Survey Junkie which was $10 in about 4 hours of work. All together, I would probably make anywhere between $0.25 to $5 an hour. Nerdwallet and the Simple Dollar reached similar results. For me it wasn’t worth it, but it seems some other people have a strategy and have reached better results than me. If you’re fine making minimal money as you learn these strategies in the hopes of eventually making more, than these survey sites are for you. For me though, I’ll pass.
