Swagbucks
Product Name: Swagbucks
Product Description: Swagbucks is a site that offers several money-making opportunities as long as you follow the rules.
Summary
Swagbucks lets you play games, shop online and take surveys for the chance to earn Swagbucks. Once you earn enough SBs, you can cash them out for retailer gift cards or transfer to your PayPal account.
Overall
Pros
- Can cash out via PayPal or earn retailer gift cards
- Can choose to earn SBs in several different ways
Cons
- Can take a while to earn real money
- May need to buy games to earn SBs
- Process of earnings SBs can be confusing
Swagbucks is a money-making app and website that lets users play games, take surveys, and watch videos to earn points or Swagbucks (SBs). You can also use Swagbucks to find discount codes at retailers or while shopping online.
Once you earn enough SBs, you can redeem them for gift cards to popular stores and retailers. Like other Get-paid-to (GPT) sites, Swagbucks can require a huge time commitment – maybe more than you realize.
Learn if Swagbucks is worth your time – or if it’s worth skipping.
At a Glance
- Can earn gift cards to popular retailers
- Can earn money in several different ways
- App available for both iPhone and Android devices
Who Should Use Swagbucks
If you get bored trying to make extra money, using a service like Swagbucks that lets you choose between several different options can be helpful. Sick of taking surveys? Try watching a video. Don’t want to watch any more videos? Play a mobile card game. The variety of options can keep you engaged with the app so you make more money.
If you spend a lot of time on your phone, either during your commute or during slow times at work, using the Swagbucks app can help you earn a little extra on the side.
Swagbucks Alternatives
 |  |  | |
| Ways to earn | Surveys, online shopping, games , and more | Surveys, sharing your internet usage data, | Surveys, games, brand offers |
| Cash out minimum | $15 for first cashout and then $10 after that | $5 | $0.50 |
| Learn More | Learn More | Learn More |
Table of Contents
- At a Glance
- Who Should Use Swagbucks
- Swagbucks Alternatives
- What Is Swagbucks?
- Can Convert Swagbucks to Real Money
- How Do You Earn Swagbucks?
- Swagbucks Discover
- Swagbucks Daily Activities
- Swagbucks Shop
- Play Games
- Answer Questions
- Easy to Create an Account
- Redeeming Your Swagbucks
- Swagstakes
- How to Convert Swagbucks to Dollars
- Swagbucks Alternatives
- FAQs
- Is Swagbucks Worth It?
- Summary
What Is Swagbucks?
If you’re familiar with other GPT sites, then you’ll probably understand how Swagbucks works. The app and website are designed to give users several different ways to earn points, rewards, or Swagbucks. The more time you spend on the app, the more Swagbucks you can potentially earn.
One of the most common ways to earn SBs is to take surveys. Before you access the surveys available, you’ll have to take an initial basic survey which will determine your eligibility. Don’t worry – you’ll still be paid for this endeavor. The survey will be used to get basic information about you that will be sent when you complete other surveys. This will include basic demographic information and only takes a few minutes to complete.
Swagbucks is owned by parent company Prodege, which is based out of El Segundo, CA.
Because Swagbucks is one of the oldest and largest programs of its type, it has some advantages over other platforms.
Can Convert Swagbucks to Real Money
If you want to trade in your Swagbucks for real cash, you’ll have to connect your PayPal account to your Swagbucks. Then, go back to the Swagbucks site and redeem your SBs for PayPal cash. It can take a few days for the Swagbucks to be converted to your PayPal account. Once the money is in your PayPal account, you can either leave it there or transfer it to your bank account.
How Do You Earn Swagbucks?
You can earn Swagbucks by completing the following activities on the Swagbucks website:
- Daily poll: Earn 1 SB for voting each day. It’s a fun little multiple-choice question.
- Daily “Crave”: Auto-surf websites. (Usually 2-3 sites for 1 SB on the first take.)
- Searching the web: You can randomly earn points by using Swagbucks Search, which is powered by Yahoo! (which is powered by Bing).
- Special Offers: Various brands partner with Swagbucks to offer members trials or discounts. You can earn points by taking advantage of these offers.
- Swagbucks surveys: There is an unending supply of paid surveys to complete on the Swagbucks platform.
- Cashback shopping: Swagbucks has a cashback shopping portal that allows you to earn rewards for shopping at your favorite stores through its portal.
- Playing games: You can win Swagbucks by playing games on the app or website. If you enjoy playing games for cash, you can also check out our list of games that pay real money.
- Refer friends: When you refer your friends, you can get 10% of their Swagbucks earnings for life.
- Daily bonuses: If you earn enough Swagbucks rewards in a single day, you can earn bonus rewards.
If you’re a longtime Swagbucks user, you may notice that the “Watch videos” feature is not on this list. Unfortunately, Swagbucks discontinued the Watch features in June of 2022.
The Swagbucks website states that it was discontinued to bring members higher-paying activities. Watching videos on Swagbucks never paid much.
👉 Get $10 from Swagbucks Today
(take advantage of the $10 sign-up bonus!)
Swagbucks Discover
Swagbucks Discover allows you to take advantage of exclusive deals and offers from well-known partner brands. You can earn Swagbucks for signing up for new services or trying free samples. Swagbucks Featured Offers are often on top of existing bonuses the service is offering to members.
For example, and this offer may not be there by the time you read this, here is one from DraftKings Sportsbook:
With this offer, you can get an extra 5,000 SB (worth about $50) when you sign up for DraftKings through Swagbucks and make a single $10 bet. Even if you lose the $10 bet, you’ll still get $50 from Swagbucks.
This is on top of whatever DraftKings promotions are being offered, such as their “Bet $5 and Get $200 in bonus bets” offer.
Swagbucks Daily Activities
You can earn a few points each day with daily activities on Swagbucks, like answering a daily poll. These aren’t extremely valuable, but they may add a few cents to your balance each day until you see a larger offer on Discover.
The lowest “fair” tier for point redemption is 300 points, so by only answering daily polls, it would take you a year to get a $3 gift card – not worth it.
Daily polls is similar to receipt scanning apps – it won’t make you rich, but every little bit counts. I have the receipt, so I might as well turn it into a few cents before I trash it.
Swagbucks Shop
Swagbucks Shop gives you cash back when you shop online through the Swagbucks portal. You can earn cash back when shopping at over 1500 retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Starbucks.
It’s similar to other cash back programs, such as Ibotta and Rakuten, and I personally use it to maximize my cash back on travel. You sign up, link up a credit card, and then go about your day. Whenever you shop at a SB partner store, you’ll earn cash back. Just be sure you’ve accessed the store’s shopping site through the Swagbucks portal.
Play Games
You can earn SB when you play games on the Swagbucks site or mobile app. You’ll earn the most SB for playing games that you’ve purchased through Swagbucks’ partner, GSN.
However, there are several games that you can get for free on Swagbucks. With the free games, you’ll earn SB randomly, but not as frequently as you will with purchased games.
Answer Questions
Swagbucks Answer is the platform’s “answer” to paid survey websites. As with most survey sites, you’ll have to answer a few questions to see if you qualify for a particular survey.
Once you’ve qualified, you go on to complete the actual survey and then earn SB for completion of the survey.
Swagbucks will let you know how many SB you’ll earn before you go through the process of qualifying for the survey. In addition, the surveys give you the estimated amount of time it should take you to complete the survey.
Easy to Create an Account
Creating an account on Swagbucks is fairly simple and straightforward. You’ll have to provide some basic personal information – especially if you want to take surveys to earn SBs.
You can use Swagbucks on a desktop browser or via their mobile app, which has a 4.2 out of 5 rating on the Google Play Store and a 4.4 out of 5 rating on the iPhone App store.
Redeeming Your Swagbucks
Each Swagbuck is worth a penny, and the minimum redemption is 100 SB, which is worth $1. You can redeem your SB for gift cards or PayPal cash. For example, 2500 SB could get you a $25 gift card or PayPal deposit.
There are often “sales” where you can get certain gift cards at a discount. A Visa $100 Virtual Reward for 9,900 SB, a $50 Cracker Barrel gift card for 4,900 SB, things like that.
My pick is always the $25 Amazon gift card, which is as good as cash in my house. You get a 12% discount on your first $25 gift card redemption each month, so a $25 Amazon.com gift card comes out to only 2,200 SB.
You can also get Walmart and Target gift cards, along with a host of other retailer cards.
Swagstakes
You can the Swagbucks you earn to purchase entries to Swagbucks’ sweepstakes contests, called Swagstakes.
Depending on the contest, you may be able to use your SB to purchase one or multiple entries. Look on the Swagstakes section of your account page to see the status of Swagstakes you’ve entered.
How to Convert Swagbucks to Dollars
Converting your Swagbucks to dollars is easy. The first step is to connect your PayPal account to your Swagbucks account. After you select PayPal as your rewards option, you’ll see a button that prompts you to connect your PayPal account. From there, you’ll be taken to the PayPal website.
Once you’ve completed your login into your PayPal account, you’ll be taken back to Swagbucks, where you can complete your redemption for PayPal cash.
It usually takes a couple of days for Swagbucks to deposit the money into your PayPal account. From there, you can transfer the money to your bank account if you wish.
Swagbucks Alternatives
One of the best ways to increase your earnings using rewards apps like Swagbucks is by signing up with more than one app. GPT sites like Swagbucks are free to join, including the following Swagbucks alternatives.
InboxDollars
InboxDollars is similar to Swagbucks in that you earn rewards in a similar way – watching videos, answering surveys, doing their offers, and shopping online. It’s not as big as Swagbucks, but there are more ways to earn a few bucks here or there, such as clicking on emails. They are actually owed by the same company. You can double dip on some offers but not others.
Swagbucks beats InboxDollars in the areas of payout threshold ($2.50 for Swagbucks and $30 for InboxDollars). Swagbucks also boasts a better signup bonus ($5 for InboxDollars and $20 [with conditions] for Swagbucks.
However, InboxDollars offers a more generous referral program.
Here’s our full InboxDollars review.
👉 Get $5 from InboxDollars Today
SurveyJunkie
While Swagbucks provides a variety of different ways you can earn money, Survey Junkie is more niche. Just like the name suggests, Survey Junkie is a site where you can take surveys to make money. If you share information about your browsing history with Survey Junkie, you’ll also get the opportunity to earn more points.
When you successfully complete a survey, you’ll earn a certain number of rewards. Once you have enough rewards, you can transfer the associated dollar amount toward your PayPal account or redeem them for electronic gift cards. You must have at least $5 worth of rewards to cash out.
Here’s our full Survey Junkie review.
👉 Get started with SurveyJunkie
Freecash
Like Swagbucks, Freecash is a site where you can earn money in a few different ways. For example, you can take surveys but you can also get cash if you create a TikTok account or sign up for Netflix.
Freecash has a 4.1 out of 5 rating on the Google Play Store, and is not available on the iPhone app store. You can also take advantage of Freecash on the website, which seems to be fairly robust. Some users on Reddit say that Freecash has higher payout opportunities than Swagbucks.
FAQs
Once you have enough Swagbucks, you can visit the “Redeem SB” portion of the website or app. There you will see a list of possible options including gift cards from popular retailers like Amazon, Target and Walmart.
The minimum redemption amount depends on the type of retailer, but can start as little as 110. Also, Swagbucks often has special sale periods when certain retailers are less expensive.
However, you need to have at least 1500 SBs in order to redeem your first reward. It can take a while to earn that much unless you’re diligent about your efforts.
When you shop online at a designated list of partner stores, you can email your e-receipt to Swagbucks. They’ll give you SB just for doing so.
Swago is a game that works similarly to bingo. As you play Swagbucks, you check off boxes that list activities you’ve completed. You earn SB for each completed activity.
Swagbucks mostly provides electronic gift cards when you want to redeem your points. But if you would rather have a physical gift card, you can pay an extra $3 fee to get a physical card instead.
Unlike other types of money-making apps, Swagbucks has a shopping section where you can get cash back when you shop with certain retailers. Cash back percentages can vary wildly depending on the merchant. There are also special deals where you can buy a heavily discounted item and get cash back on top of that.
If you add the SwagButton browser extension, it will signal when there’s a Swagbucks cash-back opportunity. If you have other cash-back browser extensions, you’ll have to choose between using those or using SwagButton.
Is Swagbucks Worth It?
So, is Swagbucks worth it? Like many things in life, it depends on how much your time is worth.
If you’re just looking to earn an extra buck or two each month, Swagbucks can help you do that. And if you could only join one get-paid-to website, Swagbucks is your best option. You won’t get rich, but you may earn enough to subsidize your coffee habit or cover a couple of streaming subscriptions.
That said, there are much better ways to make money in your spare time. For example, you could try product flipping, dog walking, food delivery apps, or selling your services as a freelancer. The possibilities really are endless. For inspiration, check out our list of weekend side hustles.
Summary
Like other surveys, video and game websites, it takes a lot of work to earn money with Swagbucks. There’s almost little reason to use Swagbucks as your side hustle, if you can choose an option like Rover, Uber or DoorDash.
Swagbucks is better for those who have a long commute on public transportation or a lot of downtime at their job when they can’t do much beyond being on their phone. In those circumstances, Swagbucks can be one of the few ways you can earn a few bucks.
Hey Jim,
I like SwagBucks and I’ve been using it for a couple of years now. When i first started I was earning about $20 per month through the site. These days I ave less downtime and I probably only earn about $5 on average, but it’s still worth it since there’s so little effort involved.
Great review Jim. I’ve found that the apps like these, where there is very little required on the end of the user often makes whatever the rewards are worth it. After all, if it doesn’t require that much of a change, why not use it? I’ve gotten a couple gift cards fro musing them, so I’d rank them as useful. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for writing this! I’ve been using Microsoft Rewards (formerly Bing Rewards) to get a little return from my downtime. It sounds like Swagbucks is worth a try to complement or replace it.
I have a bookmarks folder with Bing, InboxDollars, Swagbucks, and Mintvine. Each morning, I open them all up, click a bunch, and collect my equivalent of like a dollar. I started doing it because I wanted to write reviews of these different services, then it just kind of became a fun little habit. It’s like picking up pennies… it’s usually not “worth your time” but I can’t help myself.
Swagbucks is one of the largest and most trusted reward websites.
You can get paid for doing many different things online. From taking a survey, visiting a website, playing a game, making a purchase, and many other ways.
If you are interested you should sign up on their website and download their mobile apps.
They make hundreds, if not thousands of dollars from your personal information from surveys you take and by selling your email and phone number to their sponsors and you make a penny here and there in return. The site is definitely not worth it. It’s just another information milking site no different from all the other existing survey sites. On top of that you have to spend a lot of cash on their sponsor businesses just to get a few pennies in return. This is certainly not a money making website. Been on the site for years and sti have… Read more »
Stay away from the free trials. ALL of them require you to stay in at least a day or two past the trial end date triggering a credit card charge. So if it’s a seven day trial you have to stay in for eight. If it’s a month you have to stay in for thirty-two days. Either way you’re going to have to pay a fee to that company to get the credit. And does it make sense to spend $30 on something you probably don’t want to get $10?
Swagbucks is a site giving more surveys. However to check whether it is legit to get money after earning the required SB.