The Truth About Cash Back Apps

today today I'm reviewing 10 moneysaving cashback style apps so we're going to talk about fetch iata Receipt Hog receipt jar miles Checkout 51 frisbee upside swag bucks and coin out technically I'll get to that in a second this is what I used to do as a side hustle I would review these moneysaving apps and I would write my reviews on them for websites like the ways to wealth which I think my review from their site is still like in the top 10 search results which is just funny and could I make a lot of money by telling you all of them are great and use all of them yes you can get referral points for all of these little apps um but I'll be I'll be honest I can really recommend too so I'm not going to be raking in the money why am I making this video again oh right because I care about you and I don't want you being taken advantage of this video isn't sponsored by anybody first the one big caveat for this is that you need to understand before you use any of these apps is that you are not the consumer you are the product in one of two ways either one in the ways that they can like mine your data aggregate it and then a big businesses want to know about General consumer spending patterns other way that you become the product companies pay in the form of cash back or coupons or rebates to get that get your eyeballs on their product they're either directly or indirectly advertising to you all that nice stuff said let's get into the stuff you really want to know which is like which apps are really crazy banana is good and which are scams I'm going to rate each app using the thumbs up the thumbs eh and the thumbs down rating scale and I'm going to use this system three times the first for how simple it is to use do you need a PhD in computers to figure out how to use this darn app will it take you a thousand years to upload a single receipt that's what ease of use covers second is privacy how much data are they mining what are they doing with the data that they do mine how much of it can you opt out of I can't tell you how many privacy policies and legal I had to sift through to make this video and number three how much it can save you over the course of doing all this testing which was uh what 1 2 three which was like four or five months of testing that I used all these apps and I tried them all out over the course of all that testing I made about $57 but not all of that is in my pocket I'll get to why that is in a little bit but of course some apps are better than others so without further Ado let's talk about app number one which probably all of you have heard before if through nothing other than sponsorships on other Frugal Living channels is fetch fetch is probably the most popular receipt scanning app on the Google Play Store the app store so I wanted to make sure I did a really thorough job on it however I have nine other apps to get to if you want a really in-depth review of fetch specifically just let me know in the comments and I'll make sure I I'll do an entire separate video on a really deep dive I have been using fetch for at least the last four years and it is good but it is far from perfect thumbs up for ease of use you can scan any receipt be that from the mom and pop Shore down the road gas stations restaurants groceries whatever any receipt you don't have to activate any offers beforehand it's not going to take a million years it's very intuitive click button click skin resite explains how to take correct pictures very very simple thumbs eh for privacy I mean these guys basically can know everything about you if you give them access to it and they would love you to give them access to it if you give them permission they will have complete access to your email to anything you post publicly on social media where you live literally anywhere you go if you turn on GE location any websites you're going to and worst of all they they don't want to be super clear about what they're doing with this data so if you go to their privacy policy they'll use language like I got to read this directly we may not specifically track you but instead use a probalistic modeling to estimate certain measurements so it's like and we won't really track you we're just going to use certain data points and make really sophisticated guesses about you using all our computers to run the numbers to make sure we're right most of the time that's that's how it translated for me luckily you can opt out of certain portions you don't have to provide your email although there will be offers locked if you choose not to do that you don't have to provide them any of your credit card data you don't have to turn on geolocation you can also use uh web browsers that minimize how much data you're publicly sharing so like I I use Duck Duck Go Again not sponsored it just it doesn't track you and that goes for all of these apps the more private you can be online the better thumbs way up for savings and I actually I wrote this script and was ready to go 2 weeks ago and and I'm so glad I waited because they introduced a new savings feature I scanned 91 receipts this year I earned 49,97725 points because I don't buy a lot of name brand products so most of my receipt reips are boring and have generic store brand products and so I'll get a 25 fetch points which roughly equates to about 2 cents a receipt which is pretty garbage over the course of like all the other apps pretty garbage average however it does take every receipt so however in the last month fetch just introduced a new partnership with my local grocery store in the area Hanford and they've been offering massive rewards for uh doing Carside To Go pickups which I already do and so I'm like yes thank you I will take an extra $5 a receipt just for doing Hanford Carside To Go which I already do yay it's not going to last forever but I'm happy to take advantage of the offer while it's there let's go on to app number two that I've been testing again for many many years but I'm going to limit it to the last couple months I Bata thumbs down for ease of use well like technically it is easy to press the buttons and it doesn't glitch and everything it is a huge time sync to have to go through this is one of those receipt apps where you have to activate each offer and it just takes a long time to scroll through all the different there's hundreds of different products that they're offering offers for every week which is which is good because it means there's a very wide variety but it's bad because it can kind of be overwhelming and you're just sitting there scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll trying to find something you might actually be purchasing let's say that I bought a Hatter offer for Tyson checken if you go to the store and buy Tyson chicken but you don't activate the offer you do not get the rewards so you have to go and click all the things that all that button clicking takes time I Bata I'm giving a thumbs down for privacy because they also like fetch are collecting an insane amount of data on you however they have a lot of stores within their systems that you cannot get offers through unless you link your store loyalty card which means they they have access to literally everything you buy from that store even if you're not activating offers it is passively in the background getting and scraping all the data from all the purchases you're making so uh that's not my favorite thing that a kit opt out of that and of course in addition to all of that purchase history they also know about your web browsing habits tracking you across other websites whether or not you're an EBT user like they they know a lot I've been using ibata for years now I checked before I filmed this video and my first offer that I activated was in 2018 you know the story I've told on this channel about me crying over not knowing how to figure out the apps and the couponing it was ibata all those years ago back then I was getting $112 each receipt just click it all the rewards and all the offers because and I will say that this is my theory I've never talked to anyone from my Bata to confirm this but my theory is that they want you to get used to using the app they want to reward you very quickly and give you some quick wins they give you a ton of offers they flood you with offers and available ones that you're actually going to be able to do they have a feature called um the any item offers so instead of having to buy Tyson brand chicken it will just say any chicken and anytime you buy any chicken in the store is as long as you've activated the any chicken offer you get 10 cents usually which cool and when I first started using the app there was ton of that getting a lot of quick offers the first couple times you've used it cuz they want to encourage you to keep using the app but now you have me and iata has like five six years worth of data on me and they know I'm like this Frugal lady who only wants to buy the generics and is very rarely tempted to upscale unless they're offering me like something free it's very hard for me to activate a lot of ibata offers it's just not worth it cuz when I tried when I tried playing those games back in the day I realized that I more often was losing and so now I just am not clicking most of the offers over the course of using ibata since August I made $1.75 which I can't even get access because they have a $20 cash out limit which is the highest Cash Out limit of any of the apps I've tried app number three we're going to talk about receit hog and I'm going to give receit hog a for ease of use yes it's easy to to scan your receipt they have like a a gambling element to try to keep you coming back called The Hog slots and I it's a very confusing system to try to figure out how many slot pulls you earn based on receipt it's very confusing to me they have things delayed by a couple days to what the point when you get them so it's very hard to keep track unless I were writing down in a notebook which receipt got me 5 cents and which got me 10 cents which you know what I'm not going to do so I I'm not a huge fan of that th f for privacy they also would love you to link to your Amazon account and a bunch of your other online accounts but they give you the option to not but again like all the rest of these it is a data mine so none of these are going to get a good thumbs up for me for privacy let's just tell you that right off the bat which brings me to thumbs down for savings I just last week after submitting my 40th receipt finally earned 1,000 points which equals a whole $5 m- not worth it next we're going to talk about receipt jar thumbs for ease of Use SNAP receipt for anything get cash I mean it sounds simple enough but I found the interface frequently glitchy and just really slow probably because it has a lot of animated elements like trying to get your attention and focus on stuff and that can really just slow down the app I also hate that it has of all the apps the shortest receipt window length of 7 days if your receipt is older than 7 days old you cannot scan it and I don't remember frequently enough if I if I do a receipt scanning once or twice a month I'm doing really good so I I can't keep up thumbs down this was this has to have been the app with one of the worst privacy policies specifically because it explicitly stated in their privacy policy that yes it is going to scrape all of the data it can from your emails oh oh what's that oh if you want to cash out you need to provide them with your email so you can't get any money unless you give them the email that they say they're going to scrape all your data from excellent and thumbs down for savings this is just all around not the best one if I synced all of my online accounts like my Costco and my Amazon and my Walmart all the online accounts and uploaded a receipt every day so I could play their gambling Elements which also has a very confusing schedule maybe I might be able to earn something but all I want to do is take pictures of my receipts and I tried scanning dozens of receipts and all I could make out with was $150 and I can't even access that because it's too low for the Cash Out thresholds next let's talk about miles thumbs up for ease of use great tutorials super easy and intuitive no friction when you're trying to do stuff Flawless great job thumbs down for privacy so the first thing the app asked me to do when I sub made my account is enable geolocation so that they could track me luckily I was able to say no and I'm not sure if you can do this if you have an Android device I can because I have an iPhone and it says ask app not to track yes 100% of the time ask app not to track even though I was able to disabled the GE location look at the name of the app Miles because the main way you earn money with this app is to have geolocation open so in the background it's constantly tracking you which also drains your battery by the way and then you can get bonus cash on top of the money you earn for your miles if you answer survey questions like where were you going why were you going there how long will you stay like creepy much I don't want people knowing everywhere I go and what I do and why like No And thumbs down on savings so I didn't realize until I got partway into this app that there's not even a receipt scanning function if you want to make money with Miles app you have to either enable geolocation but also other stuff like buying subscriptions or paying for hotel stays and then you get miles like their their point system cash back and also surveys I'm not buying crap I don't need to get a $5 gift card to Starbucks I did do two pretty quick surveys that earn me a dollar but it's not a groundbreaking amount of money and I can't cash out even until I've hit a $5 threshold so I'm never going to see that $1 because I'm not going to go back to this app and take more surveys like there's just no point to that next check out 51 thumbs huge way down for ease of use this app is like iata in that you need to activate each offer before you'll get any money but it's even worse because at least ibata has a pretty large selection of offers that you can choose from and so you probably if you buy name brand products you're going to find something that you buy on the ibata app almost guaranteed especially once you've trained it to know your preferences but Checkout 51 had like nothing thumbs eh for privacy it is a day to mind it's not the best I've seen it's not the worst I've seen and thumbs down for savings again I couldn't make money on this app even when I was trying to well I suppose if I was trying to I would just go buy random crap I don't need to get 10 cents in rewards but that seems to be backwards doesn't it next we're going to talk about frisbee frisbee is a new one to me I've never heard of frisbee before for and so technically I will be honest I didn't use frisbee since August I had like 1 month maybe month and a half worth of data thumbs way up for ease of use it's clean it's not glitchy it just takes the picture of your receipt and it tells you how many points you earned the one thing that is a downside is I'm still a bit confused on how the point systems work I tried receipts with large amounts of spending receipts with small amounts of spending receipts from different grocery stores I just I can't figure out their internal math of how they give you points for certain receipts I don't understand that yet but there's no clipping of offers it accepted receipts from every place I tried including like the post office like anywhere they took all the receipts thumbs for privacy again say it with me it's a data mine but I didn't see anything in their privacy policy that really wigged me out and it had very clear and understandable Layman's language which I appreciated I was also able to um opt out of a lot of these extra tracking features like I definitely didn't have to Prov provide my GE location access to any of my emails my debit cards none of that and unlike something like fetch that didn't negatively affect uh any of the offers I could receive and I will say thumbs up for savings remember with fetch you could scan any receipt and get 2 cents roughly per receipt when I'm scanning things into frisbee I'm getting somewhere between 5 and 44 cents per receipt which is pretty cool but you know what in addition to the thumbs up for frisbee I'm also going to give it a gold star for having the lowest um check cash out Point I've ever seen in an app which is literally one penny like any amount of money you earn if you want that amount redeemed thank you please and very kindly through PayPal or whatever they'll give that to you I I redeemed 68 cents into my PayPal account because I wanted to test it even worked and it did 68 cents to PayPal so there's no games where you have to keep playing in order to cash out or you never actually get all of your money cashed out because of these stupid limits and gift card card thresholds if you make it and you earn it you get it back which is really cool and I haven't seen anywhere else before all right we're getting there Friends next is upside which is an app specifically I see a lot of people talking about for gas points and gas rewards which is unique among a lot of these thumbs up for ease of use so upside rewards you for spending money at certain gas stations or certain restaurants and it's still stuff that most of us need to buy unlike miles which is trying to get me to buy a subscription to hellofresh or something though I will say they aren't partnered with any of the gas stations in my town they did off they were partnered with some of the restaurants like Applebees and Duncan so if I ever go to those I could get cash back on those receipts but that's so rare but they do partner with gas stations in other towns that I frequent at least once a month so it's fine I could still test it out thumbs up for privacy with an as so I mean it's kind of like it's not quite even an ad more like this cuz I promis you nothing is completely an up cuz it is still a data mine they had very explicit instructions in their privacy policy policy about what you could do if you wanted to see all the data they had collected on you if you wanted them to delete all the data they had collected on you which is a cool feature you don't have to have any cards linked you don't have to have geolocation enabled or they don't have to have access to your email there's such little amounts of data that I am giving them and in return thumbs up for savings basically I was able to successfully use this app one time but even that one time I made as much as trying to scan dozens of other receipts for other apps I got $147 it was already the cheapest gas it was even 30 cents cheaper than the gas I would have gotten at my own gas station here at home so I was already winning and then it gave me an additional discount 12 14 cents a gallon cheaper because I use the upside app and so I got $147 deposited into my upside account so I'm going to keep using upside it's probably going to take me a while to actually cash out because they do have a pretty high Cash Out limit but that's okay I'm okay making money slowly second from the last we're going to talk about Swag bucks thumbs way way down for ease of use this was the glitchiest app I might have ever seen never mind of the 10 that I surveyed it kept crashing on me it kept rerouting me through these same Loops like yes I want to have a receipt yes I'll hit this button wait I just had to I just pressed that button yes I want to rece yes and I it' have like it' have me running through tutorials I've already done and three different screens popping up trying to get me to press buttons at the same time it was a nightmare they also have one of those systems where you must scroll through all the offers and activate all the off offers before you can get it and and they don't and even worse than that is that if you're at least trying to look for a specific product like chapstick do they have an offer currently for chapstick it just brings it to like a Google Search and not through their app oh it was so bad and the weirdest thing is like I did a review for swag bucks a while ago for when I was doing reviews for a side hustle it was not that bad on their website thumbs eh for privacy part of me wants to give them a giant thumbs down just for sheer over overwhelmed because this was the app that had 14,000 word privacy policy and I literally tried to copy and paste it into chat GPT to have it summarize it for me and chat GPT said sorry this is too long when you got down to it is a data mine there wasn't anything totally egregious in their policy or anything really crazy that they are collecting data on or doing with your data that I could tell so just run the- Mill and again thumbs down for savings I tried a bunch of times to scan receipts and because it was so glitchy and because you have to try to find all the offers and it just wouldn't let me find the offers I just I couldn't make any money there are a bunch of different ways you could make money through swag books like you could take surveys I don't know there's a bunch bunch of different ways but it was just such a bad user experience I didn't want to get into it even when I tried here's one here's something funny even when I tried to take surveys they had a system where they would promise you a certain number of points even if you couldn't complete the survey because often times like you answer a few questions that it's like oh we only wanted to do a survey on dudes and you're a lady so can't have you in this survey pool usually if something like that happens and they have to kick you out they will award you some hity points for trying the survey and I did those things and it promised to be points and it didn't give them to me so it just made me very very unmotivated to keep trying especially when it took so darn long like I put 5 10 minutes into this one survey attempt nothing finally let's talk about coin out honestly I shouldn't even include this in this Roundup because it was glitchy to the point where it wouldn't even let me make a profile who thumbs and like one no I'm not going to get my foot up there who thumbs and a foot down for ease of use so bad I don't know I the only thing I can think of is that I like it didn't like that I said ask app not to track and so after that it just like wigged out and wouldn't let me go forward any it didn't tell me to go back and change the setting it just stopped I'll show it to you I just I just kept getting stuck on this page trying to give them my email and password and it just didn't nah ah we're not going to let you move forward didn't make any money I didn't even bother to look at the privacy policy honestly they might have a stellar privacy policy that would have made me weep tears of Joys to read but I I didn't read it right so again after all this work I earned $57.63 but because of the cash out thresholds I wasn't able to get some of that out so I was able to take home $51.84 using I'm not giving you referral codes to All 10 of these because seven of them I just don't consider worth using if you want to try out any of the three that I am recommending I will leave my referral codes to those below and that's a way you can help support the Channel first Fetch and I'll be using it very intentionally at least until this $5 per receipt Bonanza ends and then I will be uh removing its access to my email and probably just kind of doing it casually I don't really feel like focusing that hard on an app that gives me basically 2 cents per receipt but but I'm going to use it a lot right now next I'm going to be using upside intentionally and in a dedicated manner at least once a month when I go to the other town that has a gas station that it partners with upside good experience good money yay and then the last following app I will be using but more in the background casually certainly not as my main method of saving money on groceries and that is frisbee because it was so easy such a low cash out threshold limit and it's another one of those scan any receipt apps which are pretty darn cool do want to thank everybody who has taken my annual subscriber survey whether or not you're actually a subscriber to this channel even if you're just a very casual viewer but you've liked what you've seen and you want to give me some feedback I can't tell you how much it means to me so thank you to everyone who's already taken it if you would like to take the survey it is live for the rest of December I will leave a link to the survey description below now I'll say it bye YouTube

Channel: Homegrown Hillary

Views: 5,351

Keywords: Cash back apps 2024, Cashback apps, Frisbee rewards app, Frugal living, Money saving apps, Money saving apps 2024, Money saving tips, Upside app, best cash back apps, best money saving apps, fetch rewards, frugal living hacks, frugal living ideas, frugal living tips, getupside app, how to save money, money making apps, save money, top cash back apps, upside app review

Id: bqW9gQcVuqY

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2023