Is there still an app that pays you for walking into a store?

Not one we can find operating in the US in August 2026. Shopkick's walk-in kick paid you for arriving, with no purchase involved, and that mechanic appears to have left the category with Shopkick. Every app on this page pays you for a transaction — a receipt, a linked card, a purchase through a link — except the walking apps, which pay for steps and know nothing about shops. If you find one that still pays for store entry alone, it is doing something nobody else is.

What is the closest app to Shopkick?

It depends which half of Shopkick you used. For collecting points toward gift cards from ordinary shopping, Fetch is the nearest thing: scan any receipt, and most rewards start at 3,000 points. For being paid while physically in a store without photographing anything, Rakuten's in-store and dining Cash Back on a linked card is the closest mechanic, though it pays quarterly. Nothing replicates scanning barcodes on a shelf for kicks.

Can I still redeem my Shopkick kicks?

No. Gift cards that had already been redeemed, where people kept the codes, generally still worked, because those had stopped being a balance and become a thing you owned. Unredeemed kicks had no redemption route from 27 March 2026 onward, and the chapter 7 filing in May did not create one. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice; the practical position is that there is no app to redeem in.

Which Shopkick alternative pays out fastest?

Upside, which sets no redemption minimum of its own, though a bank cash-out under $10 costs a $1 fee and gift-card brands usually impose a $10 floor. After that come Fetch at 3,000 points for most rewards and Receipt Hog at 1,000 coins, which is $5. Ibotta needs $20 plus a seven-day wait after your first redeemed offer, and Rakuten pays on four fixed dates a year, so those two are the slowest to a first payment.

Apps Like Shopkick in 2026: What Actually Replaces It

Q: What happened to Shopkick?

The app stopped working on 27 March 2026, with no email, no notice in the app and no wind-down period, and unredeemed kicks became unredeemable. On 29 May 2026 Shopkick, Inc. filed for relief under chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, case number 26-10877. That notice is the only thing shopkick.com serves today. Chapter 7 is liquidation rather than reorganization, so the app is not coming back and the kicks are not being converted into anything.

Where we stand, before the list. We build four small reward apps for the iPhone, so we compete with several of the apps below for the same twenty minutes of someone's day. We take no referral fee from any of them, which is the usual reason these lists are long: an affiliate is paid per install, so every app that pays a commission earns a paragraph. One of ours appears near the bottom of this page, in the only section where it is genuinely relevant, and it does not replace what you liked about Shopkick either.

Shopkick was unusual, and the searches for a replacement have not stopped because most of what gets recommended is not a replacement. It is worth being precise about what has gone, because that decides which of these apps is the right one for you — and for a lot of ex-Shopkick users the honest answer is none of them.

What happened to Shopkick

On 27 March 2026 the app stopped working, with no email, no notice inside it and no wind-down period. We wrote about that at the time, because it is the clearest illustration in this category of what a reward balance actually is: unredeemed kicks disappeared, while gift cards already redeemed — where people had saved the codes — kept working.

The formal ending arrived two months later. Shopkick, Inc. filed for relief under chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code on 29 May 2026, in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, case number 26-10877. A notice to that effect is the only thing shopkick.com serves today. Chapter 7 is liquidation rather than reorganization, so this is not a pause: there is no version of this where the app returns and the kicks are honored.

What Shopkick actually paid you for

Its own homepage, as it stood at the start of 2026, described four things: walk into stores, scan products, watch videos, and shop online, all of them earning the points it called kicks. Three of those four cost you nothing. You could collect kicks for entering a supermarket and photographing a barcode on a shelf, put nothing in the basket, and walk out with a fraction of a gift card.

That is why it kept people for sixteen years, and it is why every "best Shopkick alternatives" list you will read is misleading. The receipt and cash-back apps below are good at what they do. None of them pays you for showing up.

The part nothing on this page replaces

We looked for a still-operating US app that pays for store entry with no purchase, and did not find one. We would rather say that plainly than pad the list. If you were using Shopkick as a way to earn without spending, the closest thing left is not a shopping app at all — it is an app that pays for something else you already do, which is the last section here.

If you were using Shopkick alongside your normal shopping, though, the replacements are real, and they pay more per trip than kicks did. Every figure below was read on the company's own page on 19 August 2026 and is linked at the foot of this page.

If you collected points toward gift cards

Fetch is the nearest thing in feel: scan any receipt from anywhere, accumulate points, spend them on gift cards. Its FAQ puts the minimum at 3,000 points for most rewards. Points buy gift cards and only gift cards — Fetch's terms are explicit that they have no cash value — which is exactly the deal Shopkick offered. Our Fetch review goes through the rate and what the receipts are for.
Swagbucks is the closest thing to Shopkick's breadth: surveys, offers, videos, shopping, and a large catalogue to spend in. Its rewards store prices $25 of PayPal cash at 2,530 SB, and gift cards start well below that. It is the option for someone who liked having several ways to earn on a slow day. See our Swagbucks review for what an SB is worth.

If you would rather have cash than a gift card

Ibotta pays real money on grocery offers you claim before shopping. Its withdrawal terms are the strictest here: at least $20 in earnings, at least one redeemed offer, and a seven-day wait after your first one. Cash, but not soon — our Ibotta review covers the dormancy fee as well.
Upside pays cash back on gas, groceries and restaurants, and sets no minimum of its own. Its support site notes a $1 fee on bank cash-outs under $10, and no Upside fee on gift cards though brands usually set a $10 threshold. It also removed PayPal in August 2026, which matters if that was how you wanted the money.
Receipt Hog takes any receipt, like Fetch, but pays cash: 1,000 coins is the minimum and comes to $5. The catch is the ceiling rather than the threshold, which our Receipt Hog review sets out. It is also the most honest app in the category about being market research, which you may read either way.
Rakuten is the one that most resembles being paid for simply being in the shop: link a card, and its In-Store & Dining Cash Back pays automatically at participating locations with no receipt to photograph. The trade is the schedule — payments land on four fixed dates a year, and you need $5.01 in confirmed Cash Back before one of them. Our Rakuten review explains the calendar.

If what you liked was earning without spending

This is the group Shopkick actually belonged to, and neither of these is a shopping app. That is the honest framing: they replace the habit, not the errand.

Sweatcoin pays for walking — 1,000 verified steps to 1 sweatcoin, less a 5% commission — and spends in a marketplace rather than paying cash, which is the same shape of deal kicks were. Our Sweatcoin review is blunt about the cash question.
Ours, for completeness and because you would find out anyway: Step and Earn pays coins for walking and cashes out at 2,000 coins, which is $2.00 to PayPal. It is a smaller app than everything above it on this page, it is iPhone and iPad only, and it knows nothing about shops. If what you want is your grocery receipts turned into money, install Fetch or Receipt Hog instead of ours — they do a thing we do not do at all.

All of them side by side

Mechanics only, because that is the checkable part. Each figure is the publisher's own, read on 19 August 2026.

Shopkick alternatives compared on what they pay you for, what they pay in, and the minimum to cash out
App	Pays you for	Paid in	Minimum
Fetch	Any receipt	Gift cards only	3,000 points for most rewards
Swagbucks	Surveys, offers, shopping, videos	Gift cards or PayPal	2,530 SB for $25 of PayPal
Ibotta	Claimed grocery offers	Cash or gift cards	$20, one offer, and seven days
Upside	Gas, groceries, restaurants	Cash or gift cards	None, but $1 under $10 to a bank
Receipt Hog	Any receipt	Cash or gift cards	1,000 coins, which is $5
Rakuten	Online, in-store and dining spend	Cash, on four dates a year	$5.01 before a payment date
Sweatcoin	Verified steps	Marketplace goods. No cash	Varies by marketplace item
Step and Earn (ours)	Verified steps	PayPal cash	2,000 coins, which is $2.00

A low minimum is not the same as a high rate, and the table deliberately does not rank anything. Upside can pay more in one tank of gas than Receipt Hog pays in a month, and Receipt Hog will pay you on weeks you buy no gas at all.

What these apps do better than ours

All of them do the thing our four do not: they pay you in relation to money you were already spending. That is a fundamentally better deal than being paid for attention, because the money was leaving your account regardless. Fetch and Receipt Hog will take a receipt from any shop in the country; Rakuten covers thousands of retailers online and a card-linked network in person; Ibotta's offers are worth more per item than anything we could fund. They are also all available on Android, and two of ours are not.

Where our apps are different rather than better: the threshold is $2.00 and the rate is published, which is a small promise kept rather than a large one deferred. That is a matter of taste, and after Shopkick it is a taste more people have.

The habit worth keeping from how it ended

Shopkick users who cashed out at every threshold lost nothing in March. Users who were saving toward something large lost the lot. Nothing about that was specific to Shopkick — a points balance is a record in a company's database, not money held for you, and the money funding it arrives continuously from advertisers, so it stops when the business does.

Whichever app on this page you pick, redeem at the first moment you are allowed to. It is the one habit that makes the next shutdown someone else's problem, and it costs you nothing but a slightly less satisfying number on the screen.

Apps like Shopkick