How I Earned $90 Using Cash-Back Apps for a Month

For example: To earn cash back, you have to first select the offers you’re interested in by clicking the “+” symbol, then use the app to take a picture of your receipt and submit it for proof of purchase (unless you shop at one of the 80 retailers that let you link your loyalty account for access to your receipts online).

Because I typically buy less expensive store-branded items, I didn’t rack up big bucks on in-store purchases. The majority of my Ibotta earnings came from buying cash-back gift cards for CVS, Old Navy, Regal Cinemas and Sephora. 

Fetch

Earnings: 11,819 points (equivalent to a $10 gift card)

Fetch users earn points when they make purchases with specific brands, products or restaurants and submit their receipts, shop online through the app or refer friends to the app. You get 100 points for signing up, 200 points for the first receipt you scan and 25 points for any receipt you submit after that, including electronic receipts from online retail accounts that you connect to the app. The new Fetch American Express credit card lets you earn points on every purchase. You can also accrue points by downloading and playing mobile games.

The app’s 12.5 million active users earn an average of $410 per year, according to Karlie Fitzgerald, Fetch’s director of communications.

Unlike with Ibotta, you don’t have to click on offers before making purchases — the Fetch app automatically detects any qualifying items on your receipts, a convenient feature. Plus, “most of the offers you see in the app are available at any store that sells the product,” says Birk Cooper, chief of staff at Fetch. Points can be redeemed for a prepaid Visa card; retail, restaurant, entertainment or travel gift cards; charitable donations; Fetch merchandise; or entries for sweepstakes.

The 11,819 points I earned on Fetch can be redeemed for a $10 gift card, but I’m waiting to earn more points so that I can get a higher-value card.

Shopkick

Earnings: $0  

Shopkick users earn points, called “kicks,” through in-store purchases of specific products, online purchases with its more than 100 retail partners and app referrals to friends. Shoppers can also earn 10 kicks by walking into certain retail locations, scanning barcodes of specific products (no purchase necessary), and engaging with videos and quizzes in the app’s “Discover” section. Kicks can be redeemed for cash through PayPal or gift cards for stores, restaurants, entertainment or travel, with 250 kicks equivalent to $1.

Shopkick has been downloaded more than 31 million times, and its most active users earn an average of 43,000 kicks a year, says Brandon Strauss, vice president of sales at Shopkick. However, I struggled to earn kicks because the product offers were more limited than with the other apps I tried, and I wasn’t willing to take the time to earn points by scanning product barcodes in stores or engaging with the app’s content. (I did talk my 14-year-old son into watching some of the videos for me, but he received only 33 kicks.) After a month of using the app, I had accrued a paltry 78 kicks — nowhere near the number I needed to redeem them for cash or gift cards. 

Lessons learned

I gained several key insights using cash-back apps for a month. The first: Before you begin using them, watch their tutorial videos or read their how-to guides to learn how they work. Otherwise, you might overlook some of the earning opportunities they offer.

Some apps make it easier than others to find these resources. When in doubt, click on your account profile icon in the app, or check the “support” tab on its website. There are forums on the discussion platform Reddit where you can find tips from other users on how to maximize rewards.

Here are some more pointers I picked up in my month of cash-back app shopping.

Read the fine print

A week into my experiment, I was ready to throw in the towel after spending nearly 30 minutes carefully aligning my phone camera to capture a lengthy grocery store receipt and uploading it repeatedly to Ibotta, without getting credit for my purchase. On closer inspection, I discovered that the cash-back offer couldn’t be combined with the coupons I had used.

I had failed to heed an important tip from Strauss: “Pay attention to exclusions.” The apps’ retail and brand partners establish the parameters for cash-back offers, he says. For example, you might be able to earn cash back only on certain products rather than everything sold on a retailer’s site. And product-specific offers often require you to buy a certain quantity, dollar amount, size or variety of an item to earn the rewards.

Compare offers to find the best deal

Before making a purchase, I checked each app to see if it offered a cash-back reward for the retailer where I wanted to shop. Comparing offers paid off because cash-back amounts can vary greatly. 

For example, a recent check of offers showed that users could earn up to 12 percent cash back on purchases at Macys.com through RetailMeNot, 2.5 percent through Ibotta, 15 points per $1 spent through Fetch and four kicks per $1 spent through Shopkick.

Double-dip

There are ways to earn cash back from multiple apps on the same purchase. For example, I bought Native brand body wash and earned $2 from Ibotta and 3,750 points from Fetch by submitting the receipt on both apps. 

Natalie Van Raalte, senior business development manager at Ibotta, offers another strategy: When you purchase retail gift cards through Ibotta, you instantly receive the gift card numbers and PINs. This allows you to essentially double up on rewards when you use those gift cards to make purchases from online retailers that offer cash back through the app. More than half of my cash-back earnings on Ibotta came from purchasing gift cards.

Rack up rewards without shopping

You don’t have to make purchases to earn points through some cash-back apps.

Fetch lets you earn points by downloading and playing games. You have to allow the app to track your activity on the games so it knows what levels you’ve achieved and can award you accordingly, but if you’re OK with that, answer “yes” when Fetch asks you about tracking.

Shopkick also offers ways to earn points without making purchases. You can click on the “discover” tab and interact with content provided by retailers to unlock kicks. Or, you can get out of the house while earning points by entering select stores and scanning product barcodes; it’s the most common way Shopkick users earn points, Strauss says.

Know your privacy rights

To be clear, all of these apps collect data about you to evaluate your shopping habits and provide you with cash-back opportunities, personalized product recommendations and targeted ads from their brand and retail partners.  

Their privacy policies, available on their websites and in the apps (check the account settings), provide detailed information about the data they collect and how they use it. All four apps I tried allow you to customize your privacy settings. Fetch, Ibotta and RetailMeNot have easy-to-use forms to opt out of letting them sell or share your personal information. Shopkick allows you to opt in or out of information sharing, depending on the privacy laws in your state.

The apps claim to use security measures to protect users’ personal information from unauthorized access, but they acknowledge that data breaches can occur.

A worthwhile experiment

After my monthlong experiment, my husband asked why I was still scanning receipts using the apps. My response: “Why not? It’s an easy way to earn cash.”

I don’t expect to earn anywhere close to $50 a month through RetailMeNot going forward, but I plan to keep using the app to make a few bucks with eligible online purchases. Buying gift cards through Ibotta to pay for purchases has become one of my favorite shopping hacks. I also plan to continue using Fetch, as the app makes it easy to accumulate points by submitting receipts. And Shopkick, while not my favorite, could be great for retirees who have the time to visit multiple stores and scan barcodes to earn cash back without spending a dime.

A word of caution, though: It’s easy to get caught up in the appeal of earning cash back through these apps. If you’re not careful, pursuing rewards can lead to buying things you don’t need.