It is the single most useful thing that has happened in this category in years, because it answers a question most people never think to ask: what is a reward balance, legally and practically, if the company holding it decides to stop?

What actually happened to Shopkick

Shopkick had run for sixteen years. Its owner, Trax Retail, pulled it with employees reportedly told only hours ahead. The app came out of both app stores, the website went dark, and references to it were removed from Trax's own site. Unredeemed kicks became unredeemable, and there was no process to appeal to. Gift cards already redeemed, where people had saved the codes, still worked — those had already stopped being a balance and become a thing you owned.

That last detail is the whole lesson in miniature. A redeemed card was property. An unredeemed balance was a promise, and the promise ended with the company.

It does not have to go that way

Compare it with Dosh, which closed in February 2025. Dosh announced the closure ahead of time, published a page explaining it, set a final date to earn and a later one to withdraw, and — the part that mattered — dropped its minimum withdrawal to one cent so that any balance at all could be taken out. People who read a single email got their money.

Same outcome for the business, opposite outcome for the user. Nothing forced either choice. That is worth sitting with: whether you keep your balance is decided by how a company behaves on the way out, at a moment when it has the least to gain from behaving well.

Why a balance is fragile by design

Coins, points and kicks are not money held for you. There is no account holding your cash, no insurance behind it, and in most cases nothing in the terms obliging anyone to convert it after service ends. It is a record in a company's database saying what you would be owed if you asked today. As we set out in how free reward apps make money, the money funding it arrives from advertisers continuously — so when the business stops, the flow funding those balances stops with it.

This is not an argument against reward apps. It is an argument against hoarding inside one, which is a habit these apps quietly encourage: big round thresholds, streak bonuses, and tier systems all reward you for leaving a balance in place.

How to hold a balance so you never lose one

The honest version for our own apps

We are a small developer, and it would be worth nothing for us to tell you we will certainly be here in ten years. Nobody can promise that, and the companies that did were not being straight with you. What we can tell you is how ours are built and what we would do.

All four of our apps cash out at 2,000 coins, which is $2.00 — a deliberately low bar, reachable in about a month of ordinary use. It exists so you can take money out regularly instead of building a balance you are frightened to lose. Our advice for our own apps is the same as for anyone else's: redeem when you hit it. And if we ever did wind an app down, the right way to do it is the Dosh way — notice first, a window to withdraw, and the minimum dropped so nothing is stranded.

You can see what each app pays for and how the coins work on how rewards work, or side by side on which of our apps pays you best.

The basic exchange

Advertisers have money and want attention. You have attention and want money. A reward app sits in the middle, takes payment from the advertiser, and passes part of it to you.

That is genuinely it. Everything else is variation on who pays, how much, and what share reaches the user.

Rewarded ads versus regular ads

Two kinds of advertising show up in these apps, and they work differently.

• Rewarded ads are the ones you opt into. You tap a button, you watch a short video, you get something for it. Advertisers pay a premium for these because the viewer chose to watch, which makes them worth far more than an ad someone scrolled past.
• Regular ads are the banners and interstitials you see without asking. They pay less per view, but they run continuously.

Most reward apps run both. The rewarded ads fund the visible bonuses; the regular ads fund the baseline.

Why the app keeps a share

An app cannot pass on all of it. Building the app, running the servers, processing payouts, handling fraud, and answering support all cost money. A reward app that gave away every cent it earned would stop existing, and your balance with it.

A sustainable split is in your interest, not against it. The apps that promise implausibly large payouts are usually the ones that quietly make cashing out impossible.

What “free” actually costs you

You are paying with attention and, to a degree, with data. Ad networks use identifiers and general signals to decide which ads to show. That is a real trade. Better to look at it squarely than pretend the app is a gift.

What you should get in return is transparency: a privacy policy that says what is collected, and a way to opt out of personalised advertising. Ours is on the privacy policy page.

Warning signs

• Payout promises that are wildly out of line with the rest of the category.
• A withdrawal threshold that seems to move further away as you approach it.
• Any request for payment, a deposit, or card details before you can cash out.
• No privacy policy, or one that does not mention advertising at all.
• No support contact, or one that never replies.

How ours work

Our apps are funded by advertising, and the bonus ads are always optional — declining them slows your earning but never blocks it. The full mechanics are on how rewards work.

The short answer

Yes. Reputable step-reward apps do pay out, usually through PayPal or gift cards. What varies enormously is how much, how long it takes to reach a payout, and how much of your attention the app demands in exchange.

Where the money comes from

No app pays you for walking out of goodwill. The money comes from advertising. Advertisers pay to put their product in front of people, the app earns a share of that spend, and part of it is passed back to you as your reward.

That is the whole model, and it is worth understanding because it explains everything else about how these apps behave. It explains why they show ads, why payouts are modest, and why an app with no visible business model should make you suspicious rather than delighted.

What you can realistically expect

Think of it as a small return on activity you were doing anyway, not a wage. Someone walking a normal amount is looking at pocket money over a period of weeks, not a meaningful supplement to their income.

That framing matters, because it is the honest one. Apps that imply otherwise are usually the ones with the worst redemption terms buried further down.

The question underneath the question

“Do walking apps pay” usually turns out to mean “will this become money in my bank account”, and that is where the category splits in two. Some walking apps pay cash. Others pay a currency you spend inside their own catalogue, which is a real reward and is not cash, and the difference is almost never on the download page.

Sweatcoin is the clearest example, because it is the biggest and because it is completely upfront about it in its help centre and completely silent about it in the part of the app where a number labelled in coins goes up. 1,000 verified steps make 1 sweatcoin, less a 5% commission — and there is no option to withdraw that balance to PayPal or a bank account, by design. We wrote that one up in full: is Sweatcoin legit?

So the first thing to check about any walking app is not the rate. It is what the balance turns into, and whether the app will tell you before you have spent three months building one.

How to tell a good one from a bad one

The category has genuinely good apps and genuinely predatory ones. A few things separate them:

• You can see what your balance is worth. Good apps show you the value of your rewards and what it takes to cash out, before you have invested weeks into it.
• Ads are optional, not mandatory. Watching an ad for a bonus is a fair trade. Being unable to progress without watching one is not.
• You are never asked to pay first. Any app that wants money up front before you can withdraw is not a reward app.
• The permissions make sense. A step counter needs motion data. It does not need your contacts.
• There is a real way to reach a human. Redemptions occasionally go wrong. An app with no support channel is a problem waiting to happen.

How Step and Earn does it

Step and Earn counts your steps automatically in the background, so you do not have to start a workout or check in. Coins accumulate as you hit daily walking goals and activity milestones, and you redeem them for PayPal cash from inside the app.

We have written up the full mechanics on how rewards work, including what happens at redemption and why our bonus ads are always optional.

Start with the permissions

The useful question is not “is this app asking for a lot?” but “does each request match what the app actually does?”

• Motion and fitness data is necessary for a step-counting app. Without it there is no step count. On iPhone this data is handled by the system and you can revoke it at any time in Settings.
• Notifications are reasonable for daily streaks and reminders, and are always declinable.
• Tracking permission is the iOS prompt asking to track you across other apps and websites. Declining it is fine and should not break anything.
• Contacts, photos, precise location, or microphone have no obvious use in a step counter or a quiz app. Treat these as a question that needs answering.

What reward apps typically collect

Expect some combination of an advertising identifier, general device and app usage information, and whatever is needed for the reward itself — your step count, your progress, your coin balance. Payout requires a PayPal address.

None of that is unusual. What matters is whether the app tells you about it. A privacy policy that names the ad networks involved and explains your options is a good sign. A policy that is a page of generic text, or missing entirely, is not.

Advertising identifiers, briefly

Ad networks use a resettable identifier to decide which ads to show and to confirm that a rewarded ad was genuinely watched. On iPhone you can reset it, limit it, or decline tracking outright in Settings, and apps are required to ask before tracking you across other companies' apps and sites.

Red flags

• Permission requests with no relationship to what the app does.
• No privacy policy, or one that never mentions advertising.
• Any request for card details, a deposit, or a fee to withdraw.
• A developer with no website and no way to contact a person.
• Reviews describing redemptions that never arrive.

A reasonable checklist

Where we stand

Our privacy policy sets out what our apps and this site collect, including advertising and analytics, and how to request deletion. If anything in it is unclear, the contact page reaches a person.