Do you like shopping with coupons and earning rewards? How about answering surveys for money? MyPoints, a rewards site that pays you in gift cards, allows you to combine those things and more.
In this article, I’ll explain how MyPoints works, how MyPoints compares to its competitors and whether it’s worth your time if you want to make money online.
Table of Contents
- What Is MyPoints?
- How MyPoints Works
- MyPoints Review: How Much Money I Made
- MyPoints Review: My Experience With Surveys
- Ways To Make Money Using MyPoints
- Is MyPoints Worth Your Time?
- MyPoints Pros
- MyPoints Cons
What Is MyPoints?
MyPoints is a survey and shopping rewards company. Founded in 1996, MyPoints, Inc. is a subsidiary of market research company Prodege. It acquired MyPoints for $13 million in 2016.
Located in San Francisco, Prodege also operates similar brands: Swagbucks, InboxDollars, Upromise and Ysense.
Although surveys seem to be a main focus, Prodege’s brands offer multiple ways to make extra cash and save money shopping.
Prodege claims to have paid out more than $1.9 billion to 120 million unique registered members.
How MyPoints Works
All I needed to sign up for a MyPoints account was an email and password. You do have to be at least 13 years old to sign up.
Once I created and confirmed my account via email, I started earning points inside the MyPoints ecosystem immediately. Before I even reached the homepage, I was presented with a pop-up menu that offered me earning opportunities.
When I reached the homepage, MyPoints asked me to fill in more personal information.
MyPoints Rewards: Can You Earn Cash?
As you’d probably expect, MyPoints keeps track of your rewards via, well, points.
MyPoints offers two main ways to redeem your points for rewards: gift cards and cash.
One point is typically worth six-tenths of one cent, or $0.006, but sometimes you can redeem your points at a discount.
That’s a good thing but can be a little confusing. For example, if I want a $5 reward, I need as few as 730 points and as many as 790. The $10 rewards range from 1,460 to 1,590 points.
MyPoints offers 85 different rewards starting at $3 (Amazon or Dunkin’ Doughnuts) and topping out at $500 (American Airlines or Delta).
If you want cash, you can exchange your points through PayPal or for a Visa prepaid card. You’ll need a minimum of 1,590 points for either option, which will get you $10.
Your PayPal account has to be connected to the same email address you use for your MyPoints account. You must verify it by linking it to a bank account (which you may have done already in the sign-up process) and clicking through some links on the MyPoints website.
Gift card options include dozens of companies including Apple, CVS, DoorDash, Macy’s, Nike, Starbucks and Walmart.
MyPoints Review: How Much Money I Made
I earned 1,029 points during my review. That’s the equivalent of about $6.51 over eight hours. Or, in more painful terms, $0.81 per hour.
That’s at the low end in terms of the survey-based sites that I’ve reviewed. If you want to make money online, know that I don’t consider survey sites such as MyPoints to be jobs.
These sites can earn you extra cash in modest amounts. They can provide you with a constructive outlet if you’re bored and have extra time. But they don’t provide true income.
I will say that the MyPoints’ site is easy to use and not quite as cluttered as some other brands under the Prodege umbrella.
MyPoints Review: My Experience With Surveys
I completed seven of the 30 surveys I attempted: 23.3%. That’s among the highest rejection rates I’ve experienced while reviewing survey sites.
My biggest reward was 170 points, the equivalent of $1.08. MyPoints estimates how long a survey should take and how many points you’ll earn if you complete it. The company claimed that this particular survey would take 18 minutes. Instead, it took one hour and 16 minutes to complete.
The survey required me to watch a rough cut of a new cooking show. But I got no indication before or during the video that it lasted about half an hour. I had to press keys throughout the show to rate things I liked or didn’t like. But even while the video played, I had no way to know how much time remained.
Once the video ended, I answered a lot of questions about the show. The survey started to glitch near the end. It forced me to submit my answer for some questions multiple times.
On another day, I took a 20-minute survey that finished on what I thought was a static page notifying me that I’d completed it. I closed the browser tab after a few seconds. Inside my account dashboard, MyPoints never indicated that I participated in the survey. I think the final page wasn’t actually static but was eventually going to redirect me to MyPoints. By closing the tab first, I think I forfeited the points I earned. In short, the survey portion of the site isn’t all that easy to navigate.
Most survey sites present “prequalification” questions prior to connecting you to an actual survey. Prominent survey sites tend to aggregate survey-based companies. So it’s hard to tell sometimes when the prequalification questions end and the actual survey begins.
Some survey companies claim that these prequalification questions help match you with appropriate surveys. I appreciate that the MyPoints prequalification questions are relatively short and simple. Much like other Prodege brands, you can earn 5 points for each failed survey attempt, up to 25 per day.
Ways To Make Money Using MyPoints
MyPoints offers at least 12 ways to earn or save money.
1. Answer Surveys
This seems to be the most sustainable way to actively earn points on the site.
2. Shop
MyPoints offers quite a number of ways to save or earn by shopping. It advertises many coupons. You can earn cash back on purchases via rewards points. You can even buy gift cards to specific stores. But the most unique earning method to Prodege’s brands is “Magic Receipts.”
Log in to the site before you go to the grocery store, add items to your virtual cart and then scan your receipt. For example, you can earn 170 points by buying any brand of eggs through Magic Receipts.
3. Deals
Sign up for partner services to earn points. For example, join Blue Apron for 10,000 points or join Acorns for 7,000 points.
4. Watch
This is a double arbitrage play by media companies — mostly Yahoo! — and survey sites. They’re paying sites like MyPoints to deliver traffic to stories with auto-play video ads. The revenue from the ads is almost certainly more than they’re paying MyPoints. And the amount that MyPoints is earning is almost certainly more than what it pays you. You’ll need to hover or scroll on eight different links for at least 15 seconds to earn between two and three points — or as much as two cents in rewards.
5. Games
Other Prodege sites allow you to earn points by downloading games and reaching certain levels within the game, even if you don’t spend a penny. You have to make in-game purchases to earn MyPoint.
6. Travel
This is an extension of the shopping elements I mentioned earlier in this list. But it’s interesting because MyPoints includes “Travel” as a separate item in its main menu. I haven’t seen another survey site so closely affiliated with major airlines. So if travel-related rewards appeal to you, MyPoints may deserve a small bump.
7. Refer
You’ll get 25 points when someone you refer signs up for MyPoints. You’ll get an additional 750 points when they “spend” $20 or more through the service’s shopping perks. On top of that, the company will give you a bonus equal to 10% of everything your referral earns.
8. Email Offers
Sign up to receive free emails from some of MyPoints’ partner sites and get rewarded with a small number of points.
9. MyPoints Score
Earn 100 points when you add the MyPoints browser extension, which notifies you of potential deals and discounts when you shop online.
10. Point Perks
MyPoints says it occasionally posts codes on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that you can type into a box on the website to earn extra points. This seems like a clever way to build the brand’s social media following.
11. Daily Goal
Get bonus points by hitting a quota on enough consecutive days.
12. Search
Search the web through a page on the MyPoints site for the chance to earn up to 170 points at random. I tested this feature to figure out why it exists, searching for the word “food.” The results contained a myriad of MyPoints partners with discounts and coupons.
Is MyPoints Worth Your Time?
MyPoints is free to join. If you do a lot of online shopping, it’s worth testing or at least perusing. It can be a shopping companion that you use to capture deals and savings.
There are almost certainly online jobs that pay more than 81 cents per hour. Even if you only want to make pocket change by taking surveys, there are other companies that pay more per hour, in my experience. For example, I made $2.02 per hour with Opinion Outpost. That’s no great shakes, but it’s more than twice as much money per hour than I made with MyPoints.
You can access MyPoints through an app. Because it’s totally flexible, you can complete surveys anywhere and anytime.
It’s not worth my time and it’s not a job replacement. But if you get random moments where you need to kill time, earning a little change by answering surveys may appeal to you more than scrolling through social media or playing a game on your phone.
MyPoints Pros
Here are some of the biggest positives to MyPoints:
- Flexibility. You control when, where, how and for how long you work toward earning money with MyPoints.
- Multiple ways to earn and save. Many survey sites only allow you to answer surveys. This company lets you choose how you want to earn points, save on your purchases or both.
- Plentiful rewards options. Your rewards probably won’t be large. But you will get to choose from dozens of gift card options from well-known companies.
- Helpful to frequent shoppers. If you’re willing to download the MyPoints browser extension, add items to “Magic Receipts” before buying groceries and otherwise spend time looking through the deals on the site, you’ll find opportunities to save money and earn shopping rewards.
MyPoints Cons
Here are some of the biggest downsides to MyPoints:
- Redeeming points isn’t consistent across rewards. Although I appreciate the “discounts” on some of the rewards, it’s a little jarring. I prefer to know exactly how many points equal a dollar.
- Rewards take time to pay out. If you make enough money to trade your points for a gift card, your reward won’t necessarily be in your possession instantly. It takes time to process. If you order an Amazon gift card, for example, there’s a multiple-email process that includes verification and eventually getting a code.
- Low pay rate. No matter how you couch it, making 81 cents per hour is not good. I reviewed the site to pass along accurate information rather than to make income. But it still feels frustrating that’s all I made.
- High survey failure rate. Compared to other survey sites, I experienced a higher failure rate (i.e., more time spent with no reward) on the MyPoints surveys than I did on most other sites. That’s consistent with other reviews I’ve read about the company.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re interested in taking surveys for money or finding the perfect shopping rewards program, you can probably do better than MyPoints.
If you’re looking for a survey site and a shopping companion rolled into one brand, there are probably better opportunities than MyPoints without even leaving the Prodege umbrella.
If you’re out to make money online, MyPoints isn’t a job or even a side hustle. It’s more of a paid hobby.
