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. Four of the nine pay you, four are games, and one is crisis guidance that collects nothing — and the list keeps growing in more than one direction. 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 show you what that actually adds up to than let you find out later.
Five games, free, nothing to buy
Sixty seconds of catching falling tacos in Taco Rain. One careful pull on a hundred different fruits in Peel Frenzy. Two ships on one screen in Asteroid Duel, with a friend holding the other end of your phone. A fairground midway fifty stalls long in Pie Cannon, and a prize teddy you must not hit. And Ship It, an idle game about running a small app studio, which never went to a store at all.
Every one of them plays right here in the browser — Taco Rain, Peel Frenzy, Pie Cannon and Ship It whole, Asteroid Duel bar its two-phone mode. No install, no account, nothing to buy. None of them pays you — the four that do are here.
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
One rule covers everything we ship: the numbers that decide whether an app is worth your time are published, and they are the same for everyone. The reward apps state the earn rate and the cash-out. The ones that pay nothing say so above the fold, because a visitor arriving from any other page here would be right to assume otherwise. Whatever we build next arrives under the same rule.
- 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
- Every game says up front that it doesn’t pay
- One of the nine 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.
What we research
We also write about apps we did not make, from their own published documents, with the method and the full index on research. 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, how much Ibotta pays, how much Rakuten pays and how much Upside pays. The newest pages ask the question the other way round — what a reward app costs you, rather than what it pays: how much Fetch costs and how much Sweatcoin costs.
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 four games you can install
Taco Rain, Peel Frenzy, Asteroid Duel and Pie Cannon are the four you can keep on a phone; all four also run in a browser without installing anything, and the three newest are on Google Play and not yet on the App Store. They live in the games rather than beside the four that pay, because there is no cash-out in them. 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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