Three kinds of app, and they don’t share a rulebook
The one thing you can’t assume here is that what’s true of one of these is true of the next. Most of this site is about the four that pay, because that is where the writing is — but four of the eight pay nothing, and one of those carries no advertising at all. Here is the split before you pick one.
Four that pay you
Coins for reading a fact, walking, clearing an arcade level or finishing a task, converted to PayPal cash at 1,000 to the dollar with a first payout at $2.00. It’s pocket money rather than an income, and we would rather say so here than let you find out later.
Three that pay nothing
Taco Rain is sixty seconds of catching falling tacos, and you can play the whole thing in this browser before you install anything. Peel Frenzy is a hundred fruits and one strip of peel each, and plays in a browser too. Asteroid Duel hands a friend the other end of your phone, and its solo half plays here too. Nothing to buy in any of them.
One that collects nothing
Community Stress First Aid puts 9-1-1 and the 988 Lifeline one tap from opening. No advertising, no account and no server — its App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, which you can check on the listing rather than take from us.
Built so you can check us
The reward category runs on numbers that are hard to verify, so ours are published and identical for everyone. The rest of what we make gets the same treatment in reverse: the four that pay nothing say so on their own pages, above the fold, because a visitor arriving from any other page here would be right to assume otherwise.
- No balance expiry and no inactivity fee
- Cash out at $2.00, not $20.00, in all four reward apps
- The same published earn rate for every user
- Bonus ads are optional — declining slows earning, never blocks it
- The four that pay nothing say so before you install them
- One of the eight carries no advertising at all, and its store label says so
What one ad is actually worth
Three tenths of a cent to nine tenths of a cent, and we show the arithmetic in how reward apps make money.
What you can realistically earn
A few dollars over weeks, not a wage. The honest totals are on what you can actually earn.
How the big apps compare
We review our competitors and say where they beat us: Mistplay, Swagbucks, Fetch, Ibotta, Rakuten, Upside, Receipt Hog and Sweatcoin. When one of them closes, or stops being worth the effort, we write the replacement list too: apps like Shopkick, apps like Sweatcoin, apps like Fetch and apps like Ibotta. And when the question is what an app actually pays, we do the long division: how much Mistplay pays, how much Swagbucks pays, how much Sweatcoin pays, how much Receipt Hog pays, how much Fetch pays and how much Ibotta pays.
The four that pay you
Daily: Learn and Earn, Step and Earn, Play and Earn, and Todo and Earn — all free, and all four now on the App Store and Google Play alike. View the full app list, or see which of ours pays you best.
The three that pay nothing
Taco Rain is a sixty-second catcher, Peel Frenzy is about getting one strip of peel off a hundred different fruits, and Asteroid Duel is two ships on one screen for two people sharing a phone. No cash-out and nothing to buy in any of them — which is why they live in the games rather than beside the four above. The two newest are on Google Play and not yet on the App Store. We write about other people’s games on the same terms, in games like Flappy Bird, games like Fruit Ninja and games like Crossy Road.
The one that collects nothing
Community Stress First Aid has been on the App Store since 2011 and was rebuilt from nothing in August 2026, because the version before it still listed a suicide hotline number that had been replaced by 988 four years earlier. It is free, carries no advertising at all, and collects nothing — its privacy policy is its own, separate from the one covering the reward apps.
Start with the one that fits your day
If you want the payout, pick the app that attaches to something you did yesterday without being asked — that is the one still on your phone when the balance clears. If you just want the time back, take one of the games instead. And if you are here because somebody you know is having a bad week, Stress First Aid is the one to install, and it wants nothing from you at all. Everything here is free.
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