Hi! I'm Jeff. A personal finance nerd and entrepreneur at heart, I'm here to bring you all the latest cool ways to make and save extra money. I've been quoted in several online publications, including Entrepreneur, NBC News, GoBankingRates, Student Loan Hero, Business.com, Credit Karma, The Simple Dollar, US News & World Report, Lifehacker, MSN Money, Moneyish, Zumper, IdeaMensch, Discover Bank, PrimeRates, Credit.com, Yahoo! Finance, Club Thrifty, Guru Focus, Rent Track, Fit Small Business, Coupon Chief, and more.
How it works: LifePoints is the survey platform of a company called Lightspeed, which is owned by Kantar (one of the world’s largest market research and consumer data analytics firms). The platform was formed as a merger of two of the company’s other products, MySurvey and Global Test Market, and gives users a variety of ways to earn points that can be redeemed for cash:
How it works: LifePoints is the survey platform of a company called Lightspeed, which is owned by Kantar (one of the world’s largest market research and consumer data analytics firms). The platform was formed as a merger of two of the company’s other products, MySurvey and Global Test Market, and gives users a variety of ways to earn points that can be redeemed for cash:
Yes, InboxDollars is legit. They’ve worked with Netflix, Target, Walmart, and other Fortune 500 brands, and have been accredited for 13 years by the Better Business Bureau with an A+ rating. They’ve been around since 2000, which makes them a rare bird in the internet space, with millions of users around the world. Plus, they have over 6,000 positive reviews on Trustpilot. So, is InboxDollars legit? Yes, without question. Don’t believe the “InboxDollars scam” rumors. It’s not a sweepstakes, and they never ask for your credit card. Any so-called “earning opportunities” that do are a scam.

I like InBox Dollars! I have earned approximately $200 in 4 months! Once you understand the variety of ways to get $ – it usually takes about 2 weeks to get up to the $40 milestone and then you request payment and I get my paper checks in a couple of days…and if you get friends or family to sign up – you get $1 for each of them- up to 5… but if they start doing surveys and keep doing them – you get 30% of their earnings credited to you!!

Lately they keep disabling this service claiming I have an adblocker BUT I DO NOT! They advise me to make sure java, and flash player plugins are enabled. Which they are, the reenable this service just to disable it again. There’s a few problems with their scenarios a: enable java plugin – Mozilla no longer supports java. You have to download an older version to use java now. This version will support java until March 2018.


In addition to earning real cash and helping brands with critical marketing information such as consumers’ preferences, you can also earn so-called “spins”. You can use these to play the Billy the mascot’s Spin and Win game which will earn you additional money, survey tokens and sweepstakes. Consequently, you will bank even more cash after completing a survey.
This is a joke, it isn’t a scam but its not worth the trouble. It works don’t get me wrong but it takes FOREVER to make any actual money plus you have to hit a certain dollar amount before you can even cash out. Surveys said to be 4 minutes long pay out the same as survey that will take 50 minutes, and it only pays $0.25 for most surveys! $0.25 for an hour!? What! When you do find a higher paying one (meaning $0.50-$1.00), it’ll say its full or you don’t qualify EVERY time. The “Billy Spin Win” IS cool but also it is rigged. You NEVER land on money only “no win” or survey tokens. Out of 50 spins I landed on “cash” ($0.02 & $0.09!) twice. Like really? Complete waste of time honestly, SurveyJunkie pays better and you can cash out at $10 not $30! I’ve made $40 in about a month with SurveyJunkie rather $9 with Inbox Dollars

Inbox Dollars Paypal


Hi, I live in South Africa and have made quite a few US dollars from various sites over the past few months. For me, Toluna is definitely the best, and they offer nearly daily surveys. You don’t always qualify, but when you do the survey reward is quite substantial. I have never had problems from them and at regular intervals receive money in my PayPal account. However, I cannot say the same of Panel Station. Even though I have sent various requests asking why I have not been paid they do not even have the courtesy, so far, to answer any of my mail – whether they were submitted on the site or sent via e-mail to their “South African” address. I must say that I am very disappointed with them, as they are recommended by quite a few other sites, as well as your own.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing. I suppose that online surveys may generate a few extra dollars on the side for some people, but it does require you to qualify for certain surveys online. In many cases you may not qualify, and will result in having to search for more surveys. This can be time consuming and in most cases not as profitable as may be expected.

IOCS is a not-for-profit research organization that conducts studies and experiments on shopping-related behavior – things like how we, as consumers, evaluate products, how we make the buying decisions, etc. Although the focus is mostly on shopping related behavior, some of their experiments and studies include broader areas of marketing, psychology, and economics.
I made about $280 over the 1st 4 months after joining. But I quickly learned that the higher the $ for a survey, the less likely you to qualify for it. So I would only do the 25 cent ones and only if I had an additional 25 cent spin. So a 10minute survey would pay 50cents but you are almost 100% assured of qualifying. I too got tired of getting to the end of survey, only to be disqualified for entering the demographic info. I was “watching” videos, because i found that some just looped,so if i was cleaning or cooking, I could turn them on for background noise. I made too much that way, so I was disqualified from watching additional videos. The offers are mostly scams, but not all of them. Again, the higher the payout, the more likelihood of not getting it. I eventually just ran out of ways to make money,and stopped all together. Put inboxpennies is a hilariously accurate description. I ended up making about $2-3 an hour. Another bad thing is that if you do make more than $300 in a calendar year, they want your tax info, and I wasn’t willing to give them that.
First, thank you for providing this extensive list. I wanted to offer a quick follow up. After reading your post I decided to give Survey Junkie a try and I’ve already closed the account. Yes, I can tell it’s well organized and it is definitely a user-friendly platform. The problems I experienced were first that not one of the surveys they emailed me about were available. I did, however, complete several surveys from the site itself and I found them to be lengthy – in itself, not a problem, but 3 out of 5 told me I didn’t qualify after I’d already invested 10 – 12 minutes filling out the forms. They got more than enough information from me to be useful which is an old and highly unethical trick in market research – which happens to be my background. All in all, it was a LOT of wasted time.
Inbox dollars is a scam. They will pull you in by offering $5 to begin and another $7 for completing some other tasks. It all goes downhill from there. I quickly realized that filling out countless surveys. I really gave them a try, I tried and tried and tried. Finally I snapped and said “No More!” What happens is that once you start a survey and it could be 15-20 minutes of filling questions, they will reject you based on answering a question as “no”. So you could answer “yes, yes, yes” for multiple questions and after 20 minutes of tedious (and yes, boooring!) questioning you are rejected from survey by punching one lousy “No”. Then they offer “sweeps” which is a raffle ticket that will never win you anything, pathetic! So, after seeing what a sham I got myself into I just decided to get my $30 by strictly opening the “paid mail” and using “paid search”. I had opened the account with them 1.5 years ago and finally was able to collect my $30 (actually $27, they even take $3 for “processing fee” – a final slap in the face) after countless hours of filling surveys and opening stupid paid mail. They pay 2 cents per one paid e-mail so yes it will take a while. I will be closing my account with inbox dollars now that I recovered a small fraction of what my time is actually worth, and I recommend staying clear from them and finding another way of making $$$. 
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