Is Receipt Hog legit?

Receipt Hog is legitimate, it pays cash rather than points, and it does something almost nothing else in this category does: it says out loud what it is for. Its own App Store listing says it is part of Numerator, a market research company, and that sharing receipts is how brands and retailers learn how people shop. That sentence does more for its credibility than any review can, and it also explains every other number on this page.

The short answer

Photograph a receipt, get coins, cash coins out to PayPal, an Amazon e-gift card or a Visa e-gift card. It works and the money arrives. The three things to know before you install it are that coins from receipts are capped at 100 a week, that the minimum cash-out is 1,000 coins, and that a US account can be eliminated after three consecutive months of inactivity. Those three facts sit in three different documents, and together they are the whole story.

You are the panel, and it says so

Most apps in this category describe themselves as a way to earn and leave the business model to a FAQ. Receipt Hog puts it in the store listing: it is part of Numerator, a market research company, and when you share receipts and take surveys your data helps brands and retailers understand how people shop. The privacy policy is equally direct — clients may purchase market research reports based on personal information provided in the app.

We think that is to its credit, and it is worth being clear why. This is not a cashback app. Cashback apps such as Ibotta and Upside are funded by brands who want you to buy a particular thing, so the money is attached to the purchase. Receipt Hog pays you for the record of the purchase, whatever it was. Nothing you buy is ever cheaper; you are being paid a small fee for your shopping history. Once that distinction is clear, the modest rate stops looking like a bad deal and starts looking like an accurate price.

The 100-coin week, which is the number that decides everything

Coin-receipts pay according to how much the shopping trip came to, and Receipt Hog does not publish the table that maps spend to coins — we have not seen one, so we are not going to invent it. What it does publish is the ceiling. Once you have earned 100 coins from receipts inside one of its weeks, every further receipt that week earns 5 coins and a sweepstakes entry no matter what the total was.

Put that next to the redemption minimum and the arithmetic finishes itself. 1,000 coins is $5. At 100 coins a week that is ten weeks to a first payout, and it is a floor on the time rather than an estimate — hitting the cap every single week requires enough qualifying shopping to do it. Fifty cents a week is the honest headline rate of the receipt half of this app.

A year holds fewer of those weeks than you would expect. Receipt Hog runs four per month — 1st–7th, 8th–14th, 15th–21st and 22nd to the end of the month — so a year is 48 of them, not 52, and the fourth week of each month is the longest. A perfectly maxed-out year is therefore 4,800 coins, which redeems as $25 with 500 coins left in the account. Surveys, Hog Slots spins, level bonuses and the monthly sweepstakes stack on top of the receipt cap, and Receipt Hog publishes no rate for any of them, so a good year is somewhat more than $25 and we cannot tell you how much more without guessing. What we can say is that the receipts — the part you control, the part the app is named after — are capped at about $24 a year.

Waiting is worth 23% more, which is unusual

The coin tiers are the same for PayPal, Amazon and Visa: 1,000 coins for $5, 2,900 for $15, 4,300 for $25 and 6,500 for $40. Those are not proportional, and the difference runs the friendly way for once. A coin is worth 0.50¢ at the bottom tier and 0.615¢ at the top — about 23% more for holding on.

Most apps in this category are the other way round, which is why our advice on Fetch is to redeem steadily. Here the incentive genuinely points at saving. The catch is the calendar: 6,500 coins at the weekly ceiling is 65 weeks, and at four weeks to the month that is sixteen months of uninterrupted uploading for the best rate in the app. That is a real choice rather than a trick, but it is a long time to leave $40 inside somebody else's balance sheet, and the next section is the reason to think about it carefully.

Three quiet months

Receipt Hog's terms say it may suspend or eliminate a US account after three consecutive months of inactivity, and define inactivity as not uploading receipts, not sharing data related to purchases and not making a redemption request. Canadian accounts get a year instead. Residents of Quebec are promised notice between 30 and 60 days before elimination.

That last detail is the one we would want pointed out to us. The terms extend the promise of notice to Quebec residents specifically, and to nobody else. Compare Fetch, whose window is the same three months but which sends every user 30 days of warning by email and text before points go. Same rule, different courtesy.

The trap this sets is structural rather than sneaky. The ceiling is 100 coins a week and the door opens at 1,000, so anybody who installs the app, uploads enthusiastically for a month and then loses interest is holding something like 400 coins — a real $2 of value with no way to take it, and a three-month clock running against it. Our own apps cash out at 2,000 coins, which is $2.00, and have no inactivity rule at all; that is a genuine design difference and it is the one place on this page where we think we have the better of it. Upload one receipt a quarter and none of this touches you.

The rules that quietly govern a receipt

Three more limits, all published in the help centre, all worth knowing before you save up a shoebox:

• Fourteen days, on two different clocks. A receipt must be uploaded within exactly fourteen days of the transaction date and time printed on it, which the help centre states in Eastern time — while the moment you upload is recorded in UTC. The gap between the two is small and it runs against you, so the help centre's own advice is not to cut it fine. A receipt found in a coat pocket in March is worth nothing either way.
• Three per store, per date. You can upload up to three receipts from the same store with the same transaction date, whenever you upload them and wherever the branch is. They count as they finish processing rather than as you submit them, which has a consequence worth knowing: send more than three at once and the first three to finish processing are the ones that qualify. Short receipts process faster than long ones, so the big shop can be the one that loses.
• Twenty coin-receipts a week. A second ceiling sits alongside the 100-coin one, on the same calendar — and the two are calibrated to meet. Twenty receipts under $10 earn 5 coins each, which is exactly 100. So the coin cap binds first on a big shop and the receipt count binds first on a stack of small ones, and either way the week ends in the same place.

Those weeks are Receipt Hog's own, not yours: 1st–7th, 8th–14th, 15th–21st and 22nd to the end of the month, in UTC. The fourth is longer than the others, the boundary is not your local midnight, and nothing resets on a rolling seven days.

What connecting your inbox actually hands over

The photograph is the small version of this app. The larger version is in the listing's own instructions: connect your email account so digital receipts upload themselves, and link your Amazon, Walmart, Target or Costco loyalty accounts to earn automatically. The privacy policy describes the same thing in legal terms — consent for Receipt Hog to access your email account to collect information related to your digital shopping history, consent to access linked retail accounts, and collection of your grocery, drugstore or other loyalty card numbers.

Both halves of that are optional and Receipt Hog says so repeatedly, which is the right way to build it. But they are different orders of disclosure. A photograph is one shopping trip you chose to share. Inbox access is a standing grant over a mailbox that also contains everything else, and a linked retailer account is your full order history at that retailer, backwards as well as forwards. If you are going to say yes to those, say yes deliberately, and know that the earn rate for doing so is still governed by the same 100-coin week.

We write about our own side of this trade in how reward apps make money and what these apps can see. Our apps take an advertising identifier and show you ads; Receipt Hog takes your shopping. Neither is free. The only question worth asking is which one you mind less.

What Receipt Hog does better than we do

This section is on every review we write, and this one fills it comfortably.

• It tells you what it is in its own store listing. Naming the parent research company and the data trade, in the marketing copy, where a shopper will actually read it rather than three clicks into a policy, is rarer than it should be. Most of this category leaves that sentence to a FAQ, or does not write it at all.
• It pays cash. PayPal, or Amazon and Visa e-gift cards if you prefer. Fetch, the other big receipt app, pays no cash at any threshold.
• The effort is close to zero and it is retrospective. You already did the shopping. Nothing we make pays you for something you finished before you opened the app.
• The reputation is enormous. 4.75 stars across roughly 265,000 App Store ratings is a sample nobody can manufacture, and it is the strongest evidence on this page that the money arrives.
• It is on Android. Ours are not.
• Its ceiling is higher than ours. Fifty cents a week from receipts beats the roughly thirty-five cents a week that Todo and Earn works out at over the forty days it takes to reach $2.00 — and that is before Receipt Hog's surveys and bonuses.

Side by side with our apps

Mechanics only, and these are different kinds of product: a shopper panel against four single-purpose reward apps. The payout terms still compare directly, and those are the part people ask about.

The row that surprises people is the threshold. Receipt Hog's minimum is two and a half times ours in dollars, and its weekly ceiling means you cannot rush it — but the money it pays out is money you did no extra work for, and ours is not.

Who should install it

Install Receipt Hog if you do a regular grocery shop, you are content to be on a research panel, and you want something that runs in the background of a life you were living anyway. Photograph the receipt on the way out of the shop, forget about it, and every ten weeks or so there is another $5 sitting there. Redeem at a higher tier if you have the patience, because the rate genuinely improves.

Skip it if you wanted cashback, because this is not that and no amount of uploading will make your shopping cheaper. Skip it if the three-month clause worries you and you know yourself to be the sort of person who installs things and forgets them — the ten-week climb to the minimum is exactly long enough to strand you. And if you are not comfortable with the panel model, the answer is simply no, which is a perfectly good answer and one Receipt Hog is honest enough to let you reach before you install it.

What we checked, and when

Every figure and quotation on this page came from one of the sources below on 18 August 2026, read from Receipt Hog's own terms, privacy policy, FAQ and help centre, with the rating, rating count, seller and device support taken from Apple's listing data the same day. The coin tiers and the weekly cap are the two figures most likely to move, so re-read them if you are here much later — and tell us if something has changed. Where this page reasons from a published rule rather than quoting a number, it says so in the sentence: the yearly totals are our arithmetic on Receipt Hog's cap, not a figure Receipt Hog publishes.