Which of our apps pays you best?

Every “best apps that pay you” list eventually admits the same thing: the differences that matter are not the payout rates. They are how much of your day the app wants, and whether you will still be opening it in a month.

All four side by side

All four are free, pay through PayPal, and are on both the App Store and Google Play. On iOS they need 15.0 or later; all four run on iPhone and three run on iPad too, Step and Earn being iPhone-only by design because it counts walking. Each reaches a first payout at 2,000 coins ($2.00) and 5,000 ($5.00) after that. None has a subscription or an in-app purchase, and none charges a fee to withdraw. The Rated column gives the App Store rating; Google Play rates the same apps its own way and disagrees on three of the four, which is set out on each app’s own page.

The payout is the same, so pick on habit

2,000 coins for a first payout, in all four. That makes the interesting question not “which rate is highest” but “which of these am I going to keep doing”, because a payout you reach in five weeks beats one you abandon in two.

What none of them will do

Replace an income. We gave the arithmetic a page of its own instead of burying it: a first payout is $2.00, and reaching it takes weeks of consistent use, not days. That ceiling is structural — your share of an advertiser's budget for a few minutes of attention is small, and no amount of app design changes that. Any app in this category promising materially more is either not paying, or not telling you what it is really selling.

If that sounds like faint praise for our own apps, it is meant as the opposite. Knowing the ceiling is what lets you pick sensibly: choose the one that costs you no extra effort, and a few dollars arrives for something you were doing regardless.

And if none of ours is the right answer

This page compares four apps by the same developer, which is a narrow field and an obviously interested one. The bigger apps in this category pay more than ours do, and for some people they are simply the better choice — so we review them properly rather than pretending they are not there:

• Ibotta pays real cash on grocery shopping and out-earns anything here, if you can clear its $20 threshold.
• Fetch asks less of you than any app on this page — a photograph of a receipt — and pays in gift cards.
• Rakuten pays a share of the retailer's commission on online shopping, which is more money than any of these — on four payment dates a year.
• Upside pays cash on gas and groceries, and is the one here that pays best to people who have just joined.
• Swagbucks has more ways to earn than we do and pays cash to PayPal from about $3.
• Mistplay is the serious option for someone who already plays mobile games for hours a week.
• Sweatcoin is the walking app most people have heard of, and the one whose payout is most often misunderstood.
• Receipt Hog pays cash for the receipt rather than for the purchase, which makes it the slowest of these and the most honest about why.

Every one of those pages says where the other app beats ours, because a comparison that always lands on our own product is not worth reading. The full set of reviews explains the rules they follow. When one of these apps disappears, or stops being worth the effort, the same treatment goes into an alternatives page. Apps like Shopkick was written after Shopkick's owner filed for chapter 7. Apps like Sweatcoin covers the walking apps, and which of them will tell you what their currency is worth. Apps like Fetch asks which receipt apps still take any receipt and which want an offer claimed first. The newest, apps like Ibotta, is about how many of the recommended replacements are running Ibotta's own offers.

There is a third format for the third question people ask, which is what an app pays rather than whether it is honest. Those pages take the company's own published figures and do the arithmetic. Start with how much Mistplay pays, where the only number published about your earnings turns out to be the ceiling. Then how much Swagbucks pays, the opposite case: the whole price list is public, and reading it shows what cashing out small actually costs. The third, how much Sweatcoin pays, is the case in between — the earn rate is published to the step, and the app stops paying at 10,000 of them. How much Receipt Hog pays is the one where the arithmetic finishes: everything the app guarantees comes to fifty cents a week, and everything above that is a draw with no published odds. How much Fetch pays is the odd one out, because Fetch's terms say points have no value at all and its sweepstakes rules price them anyway. How much Ibotta pays is the one with no conversion to do at all: it pays dollars, so the arithmetic is about the $20 you cannot withdraw below and the $3.99 a month that starts when you stop shopping. How much Rakuten pays is the case none of the others prepared us for — a company that publishes a rate for every one of its stores, and publishes two different ones at the same time. And the newest, how much Upside pays, is the one where the rate arrives in cents per gallon and the number that decides the account is at the exit: a dollar off anything below ten.

How to choose in one line

Take the app that maps onto a thing you did yesterday without being asked. That is the one still on your phone at payout. If none of them fit, tell us what would — that form is how we decide what to build.