Like other sites we tested, InboxDollars is a survey aggregator. So clicking on a survey opportunity typically redirects you to a third-party site. In most cases, I was led to a typical survey setup: starter questions about my age, gender and ZIP code, followed by either a disqualification or questions on a specific topic. A few survey topics I covered include McDonald’s, insurance and grocery stores.

Most of the surveys on Inboxdollars actually range up to $5.00 on surveys depending on the survey provider. Please note that InboxDollars works with Market Research companies (survey providers) who create, provide, manage and credit the surveys. InboxDollars does not make any requirements or qualifications for a survey. Each advertiser may be looking for a particular demographic to get the information they need for their services/products/etc so they will have qualification questions when this occurs. Our minimum requirement is $30.00 as a minimum and members can get there pretty quickly if they do a variety of activities on the site. We have some members who cash out once a month but again this is due to how often they are on and how much they do.
When I first joined and I had issues I thought I’m new at this and will keep at it ti at least get one payout from them. After many surveys telling me that I didn’t qualify after completing the entire survey I got nothing while they got all my answers. This happened quite a bit and the ones that I did get paid for is a few cents for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. So it took me like four months to make $68 and wouldn’t you know what as soon as I make a request for my payout I get told I’m not getting anything because my account has been terminated.

Above all, thanks for that great article. I really enjoyed reading it all for the last 5 minutes with a mug of coffee! Despite this article being next to perfect, if I can, I’d like to add one of the best survey sites, in my mind, to this list. It would be, “ClixSense”. They’re a really old, and huge, presence in the research industry and have partnered with many of those listed in this very post. So, signing up on ClixSense lets you take paid survey invitations from multiple survey sites and research firms, like Opinion Outpost, Nielson Media Research, YouGov, I-Poll, MySurvey, Toluna and more. Almost half of all of those survey sites are listed here.
You build your trait score simply by being active on the site and completing surveys. The surveys from Paid Viewpoints are some of the shortest surveys you’ll find. They even advertise that a survey will take only 2 – 3 minutes. In whatever case, even if a survey takes more than twice the advertised time, it will still be the shortest out there. On the average, they ask about 10 questions. To make things easy for you, they set a character limit for each survey answer (between 90 – 120).
Your review made me crack up laughing “inboxpennies” thats honestly what it should be called. You never qualify for a survey. Theyll make you take the whole thing thing when your almost done they tell you..sorry but you didnt qualify for this survey. Ive spent 30mins on a survey to be told I didnt quality. The only way to make ‘money’ on this site is to actually spend money on their offers. My spam folder is soo full because of this site its ridiculous. I still have yet to reach my first $30. Based on other reviews ive read it could take months just for them to pay me. Once I do finally get my money im done with them. Maybe ill try one that actually values their subscribers.
Here’s my experience with InboxDollars. I was a member for over 5 years. I cancelled my membership about 3 years ago. Frank is right. They should’ve called themselves InboxPennies, and that’s exactly what it’s worth, pennies. I didn’t take a lot of surveys because you won’t qualify for many of them. I also didn’t do any of the trial offers because I don’t trust giving out my credit card info to these crooks, plus I was looking to make money, not spend it. But, I did all of the paid emails, and they amounted to about 3 or 4 cents per paid email. The minimum payout is $30. I made about $2 or $3 a month. Now you do the math on this one. I remember it taking about 12 months or longer to reach payout of $30! I even signed up a few referrals and never made anything; I guess they figured it wasn’t worth their time. InboxDollars should be shut down. Getting paid pennies is a direct insult to anyone’s intelligence. There are too many of these type companies that sucker you into believing you’ll make some decent money. Nobody’s trying to get rich, but at least a real part-time job will pay you about 200 bucks a week. We all have been bamboozled and hoodwinked.

They don’t give a reason for this, but I assume it has to do with taxes. You see, if you pay someone $600 in any given year, you are required by law to report that earning and send them a tax form at the end of the year. And since 60,000 equals to $600, I assume they have that rule in place so they don’t have to deal with all that paperwork come tax time.


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.
Inboxdollars is not a scam. You won’t qualify for every survey but you will for some. I can make an average of $1.50 a day. by doing like 3 surveys a day. I have already cashed out my first $30 to see if it pays out and they do. In about 2 weeks I have already made another $20 but I’m going to save this payout for a couple months from now until I hit $100.

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.


I belong to almost all of the sites you listed and out of all the surveys I take I don’t qualify for 95% of them. I will spend 15 minutes with generic questions with them collecting information about me then when done they say I’m not eligible for the survey or they have reached the required amount of people for that research. I can understand the reaching the required amount of people but I would think I would qualify for at least 1 or 2. It’s really discouraging when you take all that time to do the survey and not even get any points for doing so!
In my opinion, Inbox Dollars is a scam. After registering and wasting hours upon hours to make a few cents I started receiving a swarm of emails, 83 in one day to be exact, from the companies I was questioned about in the surveys. Not to mention an abundance of calls from unknown numbers. What an invasion of privacy! This is not worth the hassle. Be smart and don’t fall for this one!
Your review made me crack up laughing “inboxpennies” thats honestly what it should be called. You never qualify for a survey. Theyll make you take the whole thing thing when your almost done they tell you..sorry but you didnt qualify for this survey. Ive spent 30mins on a survey to be told I didnt quality. The only way to make ‘money’ on this site is to actually spend money on their offers. My spam folder is soo full because of this site its ridiculous. I still have yet to reach my first $30. Based on other reviews ive read it could take months just for them to pay me. Once I do finally get my money im done with them. Maybe ill try one that actually values their subscribers.
Inboxdollars does not tell you this – you have to find it on your own. After uninstalling Firefox 54, and installing this version required, the issue with those partner ads still persist. I am still seeing the majority of ads as inboxdollars offers.. So I guess this means I will have the “feature” disabled again. Despite screenshots of the ads, showing them what I am seeing it is being blamed on some security setting, adblocker, or those plugins not being enabled. Rather than checking with their site, or the partner and checking their own ad rotations. When an ad starts to play sometimes it just vanishes and an inboxdolls offer pops up.
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.

Inboxdollars Andrew Smith


NO PAYMENT GUARANTEE. PandaResearch does NOT guarantee that a member will receive credit for a completed survey and offer. PandaResearch will make reasonable efforts to track and report your signing up for offers but does not guarantee the precision of the process. We reserves the right to refuse the credit to members for offers for variety of reasons, including, but not limited to , Lack of appropriate information, Improper signup, Improper browser settings, Errors in third party reporting, and / or any other reason.
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.
Most of the surveys on Inboxdollars actually range up to $5.00 on surveys depending on the survey provider. Please note that InboxDollars works with Market Research companies (survey providers) who create, provide, manage and credit the surveys. InboxDollars does not make any requirements or qualifications for a survey. Each advertiser may be looking for a particular demographic to get the information they need for their services/products/etc so they will have qualification questions when this occurs. Our minimum requirement is $30.00 as a minimum and members can get there pretty quickly if they do a variety of activities on the site. We have some members who cash out once a month but again this is due to how often they are on and how much they do.

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.

Inbox Dollars Blog


When brands want to find out what consumers think about their product and services, they turn to market research companies. Market research companies are the ones actually administering the surveys on behalf of the corporations looking for data/feedback. Think of online surveys as a type of focus group, except in this case, everything is done online.
Another important thing is that the points you earn in HCD Research can only be converted to cash. You will never have to redeem your points for prizes/ vouchers. The minimum payment threshold is 1,000 points, which is $10.00. Once you’ve accumulated that amount of points, you can proceed to request your reward, and a check will be sent to you. You can only get your rewards via check by mail; as a result, you’ll have to wait about 6 – 8 weeks before receiving the payout.
Totally not legit company. Yes it is possible to get a check from them.. But you can also not get it cause they randomly close your account when you get close to cashing out. Save yourself a lot of time and heartache when they don’t pay you out and go with a company like Swagbucks or any of the other legit ones that reward more fairly. Long story short I know enough about these pricks to advise anyone to avoid using their services. I personally had amounted almost enough money to cash out, and attempted to sign up for one of their Lyft offers. Lyft says they got the promo code and inboxdollars closed my account (gave me some bullshit excuse when I followed up on the promo code) and screwed me on the 100$ sign up bonus as well. So in my opinion, YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM INBOXDOLLARS!
Honestly I’ve been using this app for a less than 1 year and have thus far made more than $150. Don’t do the surveys unless the title is specific and you know the market they are searching for. But they are a waste of time!!!I just use the TV part of the app. I use to be able to make $2 a day just with that, but they lowered it to 50 cents. I use this app while I’m at the office or in school. Just leave it playing and have your phone make money while you’re not using it. You don’t have to actually watch it. That’s where everyone is getting this app mixed up. It’s not a waste of time if you’re not actually paying attention and doing something else productive. I don’t think about $.50-$1 a day but making $30 a month and $360 a year for doing nothing.
These methods are certainly less tiresome, monotonous and refreshing compared to just filling up random surveys all day. Some users (chiefly “premium” members) have mentioned how they received money from InboxDollars on referrals from offers. Additionally, some members have also stated how they earned  a proportion of money from InboxDollars’s “qualified surveys” and other features.
Why would you put InboxDollars on your list? They owe so many people money, including my $36.00. I will never get it, and I contacted them 3 different times. Each time I got the same answer, which did not work. Then, someone else from InboxDollars emailed me with the same information, that does not work, so I emailed back. Now they ignore me. I am on my 4th or 5th email with no answer. I think my next step is to report them.
The survey sites online fall into three broad categories: (i) those that are outright scam sites that will only waste your time and not pay you after taking the surveys (ii) those that will pay only paltry amounts that do not justify the time spent on the surveys (iii) those with which you can earn decent additional income and get paid instantly through Paypal.

Inboxdollars Amazon


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.
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