Do you know that you can earn hundreds of dollars of extra income every month from home? I know because I’ve done it. I make at least $250 a month in extra income by performing microtasks, taking surveys, and watching videos right from my couch. I’ve used that money to pay down debt, grow my savings, and enjoy my life more, and you can too.
The twenty apps and websites below don’t require you to invest any money or acquire any special skills to use them. You can get started today and build a sizable side income that will help you make real progress toward your financial goals.
If you want to learn more about these money-making apps and websites, then just keep reading!
Rewards Sites
Rewards sites (also known as Get Paid To sites) allow you to earn money by shopping online, playing games, downloading apps, scanning grocery receipts, taking surveys, and more. Because there are so many ways to earn points, it’s fairly easy to make a lot of money from these sites. Here are a few of my favorites.
Swagbucks
With over 20 million active users, Swagbucks is arguably the most popular rewards site. They’ve been able to gain a large user base because they offer lots of fun ways to earn points, which are called SBs. Here are a few of the ways you can make money on the site:
- Taking surveys
- Searching the web
- Scanning grocery receipts
- Printing and using coupons
- Playing games
- Watching videos
- Completing offers like signing up for Hulu
- Shopping at major online retailers and getting cash back
If you take advantage of all these opportunities to earn, you can rake in a lot of cash. Many users make between $50 and $100 on Swagbucks every month, and some earn even more. If you’re dedicated, Swagbucks can make a great side hustle.
Monthly earnings potential: $50 to $100+
PrizeRebel
PrizeRebel is a rewards site that has more than 8 million users and offers lots of fun ways to make money, including contests and raffles. They have a weekly contest called Lucky Numbers that’s similar to the lottery. You can participate by purchasing a ticket and choosing a few numbers between 1 and 17. If you match the winning numbers, you’ll take home the jackpot, which is usually a couple thousand points.
If contests aren’t your thing, here are a few other ways to earn on PrizeRebel:
- Taking surveys
- Testing out mobile apps
- Watching videos
- Playing games
- Referring new members
I make around $50 a month on PrizeRebel, but it’s definitely possible to earn more, especially if you focus on surveys. I heard from one user that they were able to cash out $108 after their first week on the site. Not bad for something you can do from your couch!
Monthly earnings: $50 or more
RewardXP
RewardXP is a fairly new GPT site, but offers some of the highest rates for completing offers and watching videos. You can earn twice as many points just by watching videos on RewardXP instead of Swagbucks. The same goes for offers—I saw a signup offer for AARP Rewards that paid out nearly $0.50 more on RewardXP than it did on Swagbucks.
RewardXP also offers some unique ways to earn that most rewards sites don’t. You can score points by playing computer and mobile games you already enjoy, like Second Life and Words with Friends. You can also win gift cards and points, which are called XP, by commenting in the giveaways thread of their Discord channel. RewardXP even has a survey algorithm that helps you maximize your rewards. It matches you with the ideal survey based on how much you want to earn and how much time you have. Cool, right?
Overall, I think RewardXP is a pretty innovative rewards site that everyone who’s looking to make extra cash should sign up for.
Monthly earnings: $50 or more
Survey Sites
Taking surveys is one of my favorite ways to make money from home. I earn about $100 a month just by filling out surveys while I’m watching TV at night. Here are the four main sites I use to make some side cash.
YouGov
YouGov is a survey website that pays you for your opinions about government, politics, and brands. Their surveys usually take under 10 minutes to complete and will net you anywhere from 500 to 2,000 points. If you take most of the surveys that YouGov sends to your inbox, you’ll earn around 25,000 points a month, which can be redeemed for a $15 gift card.
YouGov also offers two other ways to earn points—referring friends and downloading YouGov Pulse. It’s an application that tracks your internet usage for research purposes. You’ll get a few thousand points a month just for letting it run on your devices in the background. What could be easier?
Monthly earnings: $15
Pinecone Research
Pinecone Research is a survey site that you can only join if you have an invitation. I got my invite through Swagbucks and actually got paid to sign up. But if you can’t find a paid invitation on Swagbucks, you can get a referral link from blogs like SurveyPolice.
One of the great things about Pinecone Research is that they prequalify you for surveys based on your demographic information, so you’ll never get screened out. The surveys I’ve been sent have mainly asked for my opinions about products and brands. They take about 20 minutes to complete and pay $3, which is a solid rate.
Pinecone will also pay you $3 a month just for sharing your Amazon purchase history. And although this has never happened to me, sometimes Pinecone will send unreleased products to members to test out, which can earn you extra cash.
Monthly earnings: $10
Killi
Killi is an app that offers short surveys you can complete on your phone. All of the surveys I’ve gotten have had one or two questions and paid $0.05. But I’ve also heard that they offer longer surveys at higher pay rates to people in certain demographics.
Another way you can earn rewards is by getting friends to join the app. Killi will pay you $0.50 every time someone signs up using your referral link. Talk about easy money!
Monthly earnings: $5
Prolific
Another survey site I love is Prolific. It allows you to earn cash for participating in academic research. The survey topics are always interesting, and the pay rate is high. Every survey on Prolific is required to have an hourly rate of at least $6.50, but many pay more. So if you’re tired of spending hours on surveys that only pay pennies, check out Prolific.
Monthly earnings: $50
Cash Back Apps
Cash back apps enable you to earn rewards on the things you’re already buying, like groceries and clothes. Some apps allow you to scan a receipt from any store and get paid, while others apply discounts and cash back to your purchases when you shop online. Here are my favorite cash back apps, websites, and browser extensions that help me save hundreds of dollars each year.
Ibotta
Ibotta makes it easy to earn cash back at your favorite stores. When you shop online through the mobile app, you can earn cash back at more than 140 retailers, including Walmart, Petco, Target, and Amazon. You can also shop in-store and take advantage of cash back offers on everyday products like bananas, yogurt, trash bags, pet food, and more. Paying through the Ibotta app at participating retailers will get you even more money back—up to 10% on your entire purchase.
With so many ways to earn, it’s not surprising that people are getting hundreds of dollars of cash back from Ibotta. I’ve heard from multiple users that they made $500 on the app in a single year. If you want to maximize your rewards, make sure to plan your grocery shopping around the offers. You can even stack them with other coupons to get things for free or cheap.
But if you only purchase the products you were already planning on buying, it’s still possible to earn $100 or more per year in cash back with Ibotta.
Monthly earnings: $10 or more
Rakuten
Rakuten is a browser extension that gives you cash back when you shop online at major retailers. Rakuten gets a commission for sending customers to their retail partners, and passes on some of that cash to you.
According to Rakuten, you can earn up to 40% cash back at your favorite stores by using their browser extension when you shop. Keep in mind that many of the retailers they work with only offer between 3% and 10% cash back, so you won’t earn 40% on every purchase.
Still, you can save a lot of money by using Rakuten. I usually get at least $150 in cash back from them every year. And because the browser extension finds cash back for me, those earnings are completely passive. There really isn’t an easier way to make money, so I highly suggest you sign up.
Monthly earnings: $15 or more
Receipt Hog
Receipt Hog is another app that allows you to passively earn rewards on the things you’re already buying. All you have to do is snap a picture of a receipt from any store to receive coins, which you can redeem for gift cards or cash via PayPal.
Receipt Hog offers some other fun ways to earn, including paid surveys and an addicting game called Hog Slots. They also have giveaways for free shopping trips, which I’d love to win one of these days!
Monthly earnings: $15
Shopkick
With Shopkick, you can earn rewards just by stepping into a store and scanning the barcodes of certain items—you don’t even have to buy anything. You’ll earn anywhere from 10 to 50 cents for walking into a store, and 5 to 10 cents for scanning a product.
If a few items make it into your cart while you’re scanning, you can enter your receipt into the app and earn even more points, which are called kicks. Shopkick also allows you to rack up kicks by watching videos, shopping online, and using a linked credit card to make purchases at select retailers.
You won’t get rich off of Shopkick, but it’s a fun app to use if you’re already out shopping.
Monthly earnings: $5
Microtask Websites
Microtask sites offer short tasks that you can complete to earn extra income, such as transcription, data entry, translation, image tagging, and more. Usually tasks only pay a few cents each, but if you do them in batches, you can make a pretty high hourly rate. Believe it or not, I’ve even met people who make a living on microtask websites! Here are the sites you should sign up for if you want to get started with microtasking.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is the best, highest paying microtask site. They’re selective and don’t accept everyone, but it’s still worth applying. If you get in, you’ll be able to complete short tasks called human intelligence tasks, which pay between a few cents and a few dollars. Here are some examples of tasks you might do:
- Writing website content
- Performing online research
- Rating the accuracy of search results
- Filling out surveys
- Translation
- Audio transcription
Even though some tasks only pay a few cents, if you get in the groove and complete them quickly, you can earn a pretty high hourly rate. Experienced workers are able to earn between $6 and $12 an hour on the platform. Some turkers are even making a living on the site, raking in as much as $2,500 a month from home. Impressive, right?
I only make about $50 a month on the site and treat it as more of a side hustle. But it’s possible to make much more from MTurk, especially if you use scripts and browser extensions like HIT Scraper to help you find high-paying tasks.
Monthly earnings: $50 or more
Neevo
Neevo is another microtask website that allows you to earn up to $15 an hour working from home in your pajamas. A lot of the tasks revolve around categorizing audio and images. You may be asked to record yourself reading something or label and draw boxes around objects in photos. Tasks aren’t always available, but when they are, you can earn $50 or more for just a couple hours of work.
Monthly earnings: $50 or more
Clickworker
Clickworker allows you to complete short tasks on their website and mobile app to earn cash. They’ll pay you a few cents for each short task that you do, like writing a product description, categorizing some data, or proofreading a short passage. Once you get the hang of a task, you should be able to make $9 an hour according to Clickworker.
Although you’ll probably earn more on the Clickworker website, I prefer the mobile app. It gives you access to fun photo and video tasks that can only be done on your phone. Believe it or not, I’ve gotten paid for making funny facial expressions on video and taking cute photos of my pets. I probably would’ve done those tasks for free if I was bored, so it was nice to get paid a buck or two for them!
Monthly earnings: $50 or more
Usability Testing Websites
You don’t have to be a web designer or developer to make money testing websites. Businesses want to know what potential customers think of their website design, and are willing to pay you for your opinions. I usually complete a few usability testing jobs each month and earn around $100 in extra income from them. Here are the websites that I get most of my gigs from.
UserTesting
UserTesting is one of the most popular and well-known usability testing sites. They’ll pay you $10 to test out a website and record your thoughts for 20 minutes. That’s an hourly rate of $30—not bad, right?
To get started, you’ll need to sign up and pass a short sample test. Then UserTesting will start sending website testing gigs right to your inbox. I usually get a few tests each month and make around $50 on the platform. But I’ve heard of users making as much as $200 from UserTesting in a single month. It all depends on how many gigs you get, so try to provide helpful feedback on each website to increase your chances of being selected for tests in the future.
Monthly earnings: Up to $200
PingPong
PingPong is another usability testing website that allows you to get paid for giving your opinions on products and websites. To get started, you’ll need a computer with a working camera and microphone, because most of the interviews are conducted over video. Each interview usually takes around half an hour and pays $20, but there are also longer ones available for $40. Sometimes you’ll even luck into an interview that pays much more. I’ve gotten a test for $100 and have even heard of users getting compensated as much as $200 for an hour long conversation.
Monthly earnings: At least $20
Validately
Validately is one of the highest paying usability testing websites. You can earn between $70 and $100 for an hour-long, live video interview, and the pay for shorter studies is pretty good too. A 15 minute study usually pays around $10, which adds up to an hourly rate of $40. Not bad!
If your study goes well, your payment will be deposited right into your PayPal account within 7 days. New studies will get sent to you daily, but you’ll have to react fast and reserve studies quickly, or else other testers may beat you to it.
Monthly earnings: Around $50
Passive Apps
The following websites and apps are about as passive as it gets. They allow you to earn rewards just for downloading an app on your phone or searching the web like you normally do. If you want to earn rewards without putting in a lot of effort, these sites will be your new go-tos.
iMoney
iMoney pays you for downloading apps onto your phone. You don’t even have to use the apps—you just have to install them and open them once. For every app you download, you’ll earn between 10 and 30 cents. There are usually a few new apps to install every day, so it’s possible to earn $15 or more a month if you use iMoney consistently.
Monthly earnings: $15
Microsoft Rewards
With Microsoft Rewards, you can get paid for doing the same things online that you usually do—using search engines and watching funny cat videos! Every time you perform a search on Bing, you’ll get 5 points, up to 25 searches per day. If you use Microsoft Edge to browse the web, you’ll also be able to earn 5 points per hour, up to 150 points per month.
If Bing isn’t your favorite search engine, there are still some other ways you can earn on Microsoft Rewards. You can get points for taking quizzes and completing offers. Right now, for example, you can get 2,500 points for renting or buying 3 movies.
Each point you earn on Microsoft Rewards is only worth one-tenth of a cent. So if you want to redeem a $10 gift card, you’ll have to rack up 10,000 points, which could take a few weeks. But because Microsoft Rewards allows you to earn rewards passively, it’s definitely still worth signing up.
Monthly earnings: $10
Mobile Performance Meter
Want to get paid for using your phone? Then you should check out Mobile Performance Meter. It’s an app that mobile carriers use to measure call quality and internet speed. It runs in the background and collects data while you browse the web, scroll through Instagram, and do whatever else you would normally do on your phone!
Just by keeping this app open, you can earn between $0.15 and $0.50 per day. You can also earn extra cash by taking short surveys and getting friends to sign up.
Monthly earnings: $15
What are you waiting for? Start earning side money today!
Those were all of the best apps and websites for earning extra income right from your couch. They have no barriers to entry, so you can sign up today and start earning. I’m constantly on the lookout for additional sites to test out so check back often!
Which websites are you going to try out, and what are you going to do with all the money you make? Let me know in the comments section below!
