Where we stand, before anything else. We build Step and Earn, which is a walking app that competes with this one. We are not paid a referral fee by Sweatcoin or by anybody else, and there is no affiliate link on this page — but read this knowing who wrote it, and check the sources at the foot of the page, all of which are Sweatcoin's own.
Sweatcoin is legitimate. It is a real product from a real company, it counts your steps, and the things in its marketplace genuinely arrive. Almost every negative review of it is really a complaint about one specific thing nobody read first, so here it is first: a sweatcoin has never been withdrawable as cash, and it is not meant to be.
The short answer
It does what it says. What it says is not what most people assume. You earn a currency you spend inside a catalogue, not a balance you cash out — Sweatcoin's own help centre puts it plainly: there is no option to cash your sweatcoin balance out to PayPal or a bank transfer. Judged as a free step counter with rewards attached, it is fine and it is popular. Judged as a way to make money, it is close to nothing, and the crypto side has made that worse rather than better.
What a sweatcoin is actually worth
The earn rate is published and it is simple. 1,000 verified steps convert to 1 sweatcoin, less a 5% commission Sweatcoin takes, so a 10,000-step day earns 9.5 sweatcoins. The app also discards movement its algorithm reads as shaking rather than walking, and says so, which is why nobody's real conversion rate hits the headline number.
What those sweatcoins are worth is the part with no published answer, because they buy from a rotating marketplace rather than converting at a rate. Some of it is discount codes, some is digital subscriptions, some is physical goods, some is charitable donation. The value of your balance is whatever happens to be in the catalogue when you look, which is a real answer and not an evasion — but it does mean nobody, including Sweatcoin, can tell you what a month of walking is worth in dollars.
The part that causes every argument
You cannot withdraw it. Not at a high threshold, not with a fee, not eventually — there is no cash-out path for a sweatcoin balance at all, by design, and there never has been. Sweatcoin is clear about this in its help centre. It is considerably less clear about it in the parts of the app where you watch a number labelled in coins going up.
That gap is where the “is Sweatcoin a scam” searches come from. Our view is that it is not a scam and it is a genuine design problem: a currency called a coin, displayed as a growing balance, that cannot become money is going to be misread by a large number of people no matter what the help centre says.
The crypto route, honestly
Since 2022 there has been a second currency, $SWEAT, minted from your steps and held in a separate Sweat Wallet app. That one is a real token on a real exchange, so it can be sold for money. Two things about it matter more than anything else written about it:
- Sweatcoins and $SWEAT are separate currencies, and Sweatcoin does not convert one into the other. Earning one does not give you the other, and a sweatcoin balance built up over years cannot be turned into tokens.
- The mint is deliberately getting harder. Each token is designed to cost more steps than the last, and since a July 2024 community vote the free plan only mints from the steps between 3,000 and 10,000 a day — the first 3,000 steps of your day now mint nothing at all.
Then there is the price. $SWEAT traded at about $0.00034 on 15 August 2026, which is roughly 2,900 tokens to the dollar. We are not going to quote you a steps-per-dollar figure, because the current mint rate is not published and every number circulating for it is somebody's estimate dressed up as a fact. What can be said without guessing is that both variables — steps per token, and dollars per token — have moved in the same unhelpful direction for several years.
What Sweatcoin does better than we do
This section is here on every review we write, and this one is easy to fill.
- It is on Android. Ours is not. If you are not on an iPhone, this comparison is over before it starts — Step and Earn is iPhone and iPad only, and Android is the single most common request we get.
- The catalogue is enormously bigger. Sweatcoin has sixteen years of brand partnerships behind it. We have a PayPal payment. If variety of rewards is what you want, there is no contest.
- It is a better fitness app. The streaks, the challenges, the community and the charity donations are the reason plenty of people keep it installed, and none of that has anything to do with earning.
- It has scale, and scale is a safety feature. A large company with a long history is less likely to vanish overnight than a small one. That matters more than it sounds — we wrote a whole article about a sixteen-year-old app in this category closing without notice and taking every unredeemed balance with it.
Side by side with our walking app
Mechanics only, because that is the part that is checkable. Both figures below come from the publisher's own documentation.
| Sweatcoin | Step and Earn | |
|---|---|---|
| What you earn | Sweatcoins, and optionally $SWEAT tokens | Coins |
| Earn rate | 1 per 1,000 verified steps, less 5% | Awarded at daily goals and milestones, not per step |
| Paid out as | Marketplace goods and services. No cash withdrawal | PayPal cash |
| Threshold | Varies by marketplace item | 2,000 coins, which is $2.00 |
| Platforms | iPhone and Android | iPhone and iPad only |
| Paid tier | Premium plan, monthly, raises the earning window | None |
Neither column is the winner. They pay for different things: one gives you access to a large catalogue and no cash, the other gives you two dollars and no catalogue. Our threshold is low on purpose, which is a real difference and a small one — $2.00 is $2.00.
Who should install it
Install Sweatcoin if you want a free step counter that occasionally hands you something, if you are on Android, or if the streaks and challenges are the kind of thing that actually gets you walking. Those are good reasons and it is good at them.
Do not install it expecting money, and do not accumulate a large balance in it on the theory that it will be worth something later. That is true of our apps too, and we say so on the page about what ours pay: the realistic figure in this whole category is pocket money, because you are being paid a share of an advertiser's budget for a few minutes of attention. Anything promising more is either not paying out or selling something it has not mentioned.
What we checked, and when
Every number on this page came from one of the sources below on 15 August 2026. Payout terms in this category change without announcement, so if you are reading this much later, check them again — and tell us if something has moved.