﻿So with everything going on I know a lot of y’all have been looking for ways to make
extra money -- particularly from home -- given that many businesses are shutting down again
and there’s a pandemic going on and everything, so I decided to look into ways that y’all can make
money from home, and one site that I kept see being recommended on blogs over and over again
is this site called Inbox Dollars, so I decided to check it out, hey, I mean if it’s worth it,
I’d want to share it with you, right, during these trying times, so that’s what I’m going to
do. So I actually took an hour of my time to use InboxDollars to see how much I made, I’ll tell you
the details on that later in the video -- spoiler alert, it wasn’t very much money at all, and I’m
frankly not terribly impressed by InboxDollars -- but I’ll fill you in with all that, but I
don’t want to taint your opinion of InboxDollars just yet, wait for the end for that, but before
we get into that, let’s start from the top, InboxDollars, OK, you can do this on your phone,
I think they have an app, but it was easier for me to record on my computer, so I’m just going to use
my computer here. So signing up was pretty easy, took all of about a minute or so, drop your email,
your password, click sign up, you do get this five dollar bonus for activating your account,
but of course you can’t take that out immediately, the lowest threshold to cash out is fifteen
dollars, okay, so don’t look at this as an easy five bucks, because it’s not, you will have to
spend hours of your life in InboxDollars to hit the fifteen-dollar threshold to cash out. How many
hours? I’ll tell you later in this video, at least my experience. Then you do this kind of sign-up
survey thing, and of course they want you to do this so they know about you, and your demographic
data because what they do is essentially sell your data, not you as an individual, they don’t sell
your individual data, but you grouped along with others in your demographic based on what you do in
InboxDollars, what ads you click on, your survey responses, and all that. And you get fifty cents
for completing that survey, so it took me all of three minutes to sign up, complete that survey,
and get five dollars and fifty cents in my InboxDollars account. OK, not bad,
right, but again, you can’t cash out until you get fifteen dollars. Now, I will say this, you can see
it here right underneath the message saying I got fifty cents for completing that profile survey,
one way to hit that fifteen-dollar threshold fast is to sign up for one of these offers that
they pitch, for example, if you sign up with Stash Invest you get twenty-five dollars, you
may have to wait a while for that to credit, but that’s one way to do it. Just keep in mind that,
say, for Stash Invest you’re opening a brokerage account, so it’s a little bit involved, you have
to give your social and all that, and how this works is Stash gives InboxDollars a commission
for getting people to sign up, and then of that commission they get from Stash InboxDollars gives
you twenty-five dollars if you sign up through them so InboxDollars gets the commission,
that’s how this game works, right. I didn’t do any of this. Another thing to keep in mind here
is that the offers you see in InboxDollars or any other platform like this might not be the best
offer you can find on the internet, you might be able to get thirty bucks for Stash somewhere else,
and it’s the same for the cash back you get for shopping through the InboxDollars shopping portal,
I’ll mention that later. Okay, so I finished the survey and all that,
back at the home screen, and what do I do, a see a trivia question for one of my favorite
holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, it asks in that film who lost eight thousand dollars?
Answer is obviously Uncle Billy. So I answered that, and what happened? I got my little bar at
the top filled up to that first dollar sign box. That doesn’t mean I actually earned money for
answering that trivia question, all that means is that I have a chance to use a virtual scratchoff
to potentially win some money, so keep that in mind. After I answered that trivia question, I got
hit up for a survey. It said the survey would take about twenty minutes and pay twenty-five cents,
that’s like the equivalent of seventy-five cents per hour, not worth it, not doing it,
so I was like meh. Then I checked out the rewards, and sure enough, the minimum
threshold to get paid out is fifteen dollars, you can get fifteen dollars into PayPal,
which I would do because that’s cash, or possibly maybe an Amazon gift card, but there are a lot of
other gift cards with various cash out minimums, you can see them here. Full disclosure here, I did
not spend enough time in InboxDollars to hit the fifteen dollar threshold, so I can’t independently
confirm that it actually pays out as promised or the timeline, but InboxDollars says in their
Help section that payments are processed on the first Wednesday that occurs at least eight days
after payment was requested. it could take Then I checked out this list here where it says complete
these activities and get a fifty-cent bonus, I was like, OK, I’ll check it out, so next one on
this list because I already activated my account and completed the profile survey, next one on
the list is to print a coupon, so I clicked “do”, and I was taken to a screen that told me that if
I print a coupon I will get two cents and if I actually redeem the coupon I will get ten cents,
so I saw a coupon for cereal, selected it, I had to verify my phone number,
that was easy with Coupons.com which is apparently InboxDollars partner here,
then I printed the coupon, I did decline to input my email address because I don’t want spam,
now I have not confirmed yet if I actually get the ten cents for the coupon,
the coupon for a dollar off did work at the grocery store, but InboxDollars says it could
take twelve weeks for the ten-cent bonus to go into the account, and that’s well beyond when I
want to get this review out. So look that’s not a lot of money, two cents for printing a coupon
and ten cents for using it, but look if you were going to buy any of these products anyway,
it’s kind of a nice additional twelve cents off essentially per coupon you use. Obviously you
don’t want to buy anything on here just because you have a coupon, only use coupons on things you
would buy anyway, right. So the coupon thing, doesn’t pay much, but it appears to be legit,
at least the coupon was legit, though I have not actually verified if I get the ten cents
because it would take twelve weeks. Alright, then what did I do, then I went to the to-do list
and decided to play games and see how much I could make, so here’s the list of games,
I like word games, so I picked the one called Word Wipe, interesting name and colors, there’s kind of
an association for me with toilet paper here, with the word “Wipe” and the blue background like water
and the white tile colors like white the color of unused toilet paper, but anyway I decided to play
this one, and I must say, the game was actually fun, it’s basically a word search game, and every
time you advance, your scratcher bar increases toward the two-dollar-sign scratcher box. Now,
I played this game for twenty-six solid minutes, and I’ll tell you at the end how
much this scratcher got me, it’s not a lot, let’s just say that much. Alright, so next thing I did
was I clicked on the videos tab, where apparently you can earn money for watching videos. I clicked
“Take a Discovery Break” to earn two cents because that sounded interesting, but it was actually
anything but interesting. Basically what this “Discovery Break” was was essentially showing you
search results for a highly-monetized search phrase such as “college loans for student”
with the hope that you will click on the search results and click on one of the advertisers. You
don’t have to actually click the advertisers or even the search results for it to count,
you can simply click “Next Page”, then wait about twenty-five seconds or so,
and then click “Next Page” again. So all in all twelve search results at about twenty-five seconds
each, so that’s about five minutes of your time to make two cents, yeah, yikes, that’s about
twenty-four cents an hour, so better than games, obviously, because this is directly monetized I
imagine, but still nothing to write home about. Alright, so what did I do next? I went back to
the home screen and watched a how-to video. It was just a how-to video about Inbox Dollars, and
I wasn’t paid for it! So that was lame. Then the last thing on the checklist to get a fifty cents
bonus is to confirm your first paid email, so I checked my email inbox for that, and I saw it,
but I didn’t confirm it, because it said, “You may receive up to four emails per day. Confirm
the PaidEmails to earn rewards, complete the offers and the surveys to earn more cash rewards!”
So I don’t want InboxDollars spam in my inbox, if you watch this review and are like, yeah,
I want to do InboxDollars, maybe worth it for you, but I don’t want that in my life, I get enough
emails, so I didn’t get my fifty cents bonus. But I wasn’t done with InboxDollars just yet.
I explored the Shop feature, which is basically a cash back portal, right, you make a purchase at
one of these sites through InboxDollars, obviously InboxDollars gets an affiliate commission on that
purchase, and they give you a portion of their own commission typically equal to some percentage of
your purchase, so that’s how that works, again, it’s very possible that you will find a better
cash back percentage at a given store at other cash back sites, like for example I use Rakuten,
link in the description below where you’ll get a bonus if you sign up for Rakuten through link,
but anyway yeah different cash back portals have different cash back percentages at different
stores, and sometimes it pays to actually kind of shop around among cash back portals to see
which one offers the highest percentage back at the store you’re looking at. So I didn’t
actually test out the InboxDollars cash back portal because I didn’t want to spend money,
but I have no reason to doubt its legitimacy, this is a very common thing on the internet these days,
these cash back portals. Then I checked out the InboxDollars referral program,
and basically you get thirty percent of the lifetime earnings of friends you refer,
only thing I would say if you do refer people to this, don’t make it sound like they’re going
to make a whole lot of money and get their hopes up, I hate these blogs and a lot of these sites
that make sites like InboxDollars sound like they’re amazing, but as you’ve seen, it’s pennies,
right, it’s pennies, the surveys are a little bit better, and I’ll talk about those in a bit. But
yes, there is a referral program. Alright, last up I checked out the surveys. I basically scanned
the list of available surveys and looked for the one with the highest payouts per estimated time,
picked one that would pay a dollar for supposedly fifteen minutes, which would come out to
four dollars an hour, which while less than minimum wage is still a heck of a lot better than
the twenty-four cents an hour for the “Discovery Break”, right? So I answered a bunch of questions
for a good couple minutes in this survey, but then at the end it told me I didn’t qualify, so that
was lame. And InboxDollars doesn’t give anything for surveys you don’t qualify for, so that was
basically a wasted two minutes of my life. Then I saw another survey opportunity, fifty cents for
ten minutes, comes out to three dollars an hour, not bad, so I clicked Take Survey, spent about a
minute answering questions for this one only to be told that I don’t qualify. So that’s lame,
but last but not least I did one more survey, earn seventy-five cents for ten minutes, comes out to a
four dollars and fifty cents hourly rate right, so not bad at all. So I did this one, it was all
about ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft, it was actually a fairly fun, interesting survey
to answer that forced me to think of why I tend to prefer one over the other of Uber vs. Lyft,
by the way, which one do you prefer, let me know in the comments? Anyway, this survey did in fact
take me only about eight and a half minutes, so even less than the ten minute estimate, and my
account was credited the seventy-five cents, so that was cool. So overall, surveys,
I spent basically about thirteen minutes taking surveys, and that includes the time I spent not
just clicking in the surveys, but also choosing surveys and checking my earnings, and all that,
for seven-five cents, so what does that come out to if you extrapolate it to an hourly rate,
that comes out to three dollars and forty-six cents per hour taking surveys. But of course, keep
in mind that I specifically selected the surveys with the highest payout for the time estimate,
and if I continued to do surveys, I would probably be forced to take surveys with diminishing payouts
for the time put in, so over time that hourly rate would get smaller and smaller. What I’m saying is,
sure, I made an extrapolated hourly rate of three dollars and forty-six cents in this example,
but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to sit down for eight hours a day
and make that consistently. For one thing, you’re eventually probably going to run out of surveys,
and for another thing, as you get desperate for more and more surveys,
you might be taking surveys that take you twenty minutes but only pay you twenty-five cents, which
is the equivalent of seventy-five cents per hour, so keep that in mind. So the last thing I did
in InboxDollars was “Search”, basically you use InboxDollars to search for things on the internet,
and you earn progress on the scratcher bar, and you can do up to four searches a day, and once
you do four that day you get a little bit of progress on the scratcher bar. Speaking
of the scratcher bar and scratchers, let’s go back to the game earnings real quick because I
haven’t covered that. So like I said I played that word game for about twenty-five minutes,
and what did I get for that? I got a scratcher, and what did I win on that scratcher,
I won three cents, so the hourly rate for those games basically came out to six-point-nine cents
per hour, not a very good hourly rate, but hey, if you’re gonna play word games like this anyway,
I guess you can make a dime doing it if you play for a couple hours, right. But I will
say the game was somewhat entertaining, it was a pretty fun word search game, and it was fast and
didn’t glitch out on me, so there’s that, there’s the fun factor here, you technically do get paid
for playing games, but again, it’s seven cents an hour, not seven dollars an hour, seven cents an
hour, at least in my experience. So overall, in my one hour in InboxDollars, I made six dollars
and thirty cents for that hour, but keep in mind that five dollars and fifty cents of this
was just the five-dollar signup bonus as well as the fifty-cent profile survey bonus,
take that away and it was a measly eighty cents. So based on my own experience, I’d
estimate that you will make about six-point-nine cents per hour playing Inbox Dollars games,
maybe about twenty-five cents an hour doing highly monetized activities like that Discovery
Break thing with other activities in InboxDollars in that range, with the exception being surveys,
which I would estimate you could make, probably at a maximum, three dollars and fifty cents an hour,
but like I said you need to keep in mind that you won’t be able to sustain that for an eight-hour
day, either you’ll run out of surveys, or the survey quality will be extremely low, meaning
the more surveys you do, the more you’re going to have to be willing to take surveys that could
last twenty minutes but you only make twenty-five cents, and that’s like seventy-five cents an hour.
So overall, pros and cons, pro, they didn’t seem to send me spam, now if I had confirmed
that first paid email thing that I mentioned previously, I probably would have been spammed,
and they clearly want you to do that because they offer a fifty-cent bonus for doing that,
but because I didn’t do that I haven’t been spammed, they do send a few emails a day,
but it’s nothing crazy. Another pro is that they do offer cash out via PayPal, a lot of other sites
only do gift cards, but InboxDollars does have a PayPal cash out option. Con, biggest con is
just the low earnings like I detailed previously, you’re not going to make a lot here. Another con
is despite the low earnings, you have to wait until you hit fifteen dollars in your balance
to actually cash out, which could take you a while. And if I had to guess, I’d guess that
part of the business model here is assuming that the majority of individuals who sign up for the
site will never have enough in their balance to cash out, meaning that the website got their data
that they can combine with the data from thousands of other people who never hit the cashout minimum
and package that data and those findings and sell it without paying the actual survey takers. So
know that. Another con is that you don’t get anything for surveys you don’t qualify for,
not even a penny or two, so that stinks. So what am I saying? I’m saying, look, InboxDollars does
“pay” you a very low amount for easy tasks you can do on your phone or your computer,
but it’s very little money, and you have to keep in mind the fifteen-dollar cash out threshold,
which can take you hours upon hours of doing stuff in InboxDollars to even reach in the first place,
and before you hit that threshold, you may just be tempted to give up.
So, look, if you just want to make a few bucks here and there, maybe make ten bucks a month,
twenty bucks a month, have at it, fine, but don’t think you’re going to get anything more
than that out of this, OK, if you’re looking for a sustainable source of long-term income,
this ain’t it, folks. So that is my InboxDollars review, thank you so much for watching, and I
want to know from you if there are any other apps or websites you would like me to review,
let me know in the comments, and I will see you in the next video, buh-bye.