3 Best Apps to Make Money Online And Exactly How Each One Works
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I get asked some version of the same question almost every week, usually through DMs, sometimes in comments, occasionally from people who found me through a random Pinterest pin at 2am when they couldn't sleep and decided tonight was the night they'd finally figure out this "make money online" thing. The question is always some version of: "Which app should I start with?"
And
honestly, for the longest time, I didn't have a clean answer. Not because there aren't options, there are hundreds, hundreds of apps promising you passive income, side hustles, easy cash. The problem was never a shortage of options. The problem was that most of them are either outright scams dressed up in convincing branding, or they're technically legitimate but pay so little that your time would be better spent literally doing anything else.So this post isn't going to be another generic "50 apps to try" roundup where half the links don't work and the author clearly never used any of the apps themselves. I'm narrowing this down to three. Just three. Because I'd rather give you three apps I can explain in depth, apps I understand well enough to walk you through exactly how the money moves, than overwhelm you with a wall of forty options you'll never really start.
It's time to dive in.
Why These Three Specifically
Before I dive into the individual breakdowns, I want to explain my reasons for choosing these three out of the hundreds available, because I think understanding "why" matters just as much as the how.
I picked these three because they represent three fundamentally different categories of online earning, and understanding all three categories changes how you think about "making money online" as a whole.
Swagbucks represents active earning through tasks, so here you're trading small amounts of time and attention for rewards. Surveys, searches, watching videos, shopping through their portal, it's a direct exchange.
Rakuten represents passive earning through behavior you're already doing, specifically shopping. You don't change your habits at all, you just route your existing spending through a different door and get cash back for something you were going to buy anyway.
Honeygain represents passive earning through resources you already have, in this case, your unused internet bandwidth. You install it once, and it works without requiring your ongoing attention at all.
Three categories: active tasks, passive cash back on existing spending, and passive resource sharing. Together, they cover most of the realistic, legitimate ways beginners actually start earning online without needing a skill, a product, or an audience first. That's rare. You can start today, with nothing but a phone and an internet connection.
Now let's break each one down step by step
App One: Swagbucks
Swagbucks is a rewards platform that pays you in points, called SB, for completing various online activities. Once you accumulate enough SB, you redeem them for cash via PayPal or gift cards to places like Amazon, Walmart, and dozens of other retailers.
It's been around since 2008, which in internet years is really ancient, and the fact that it's survived, grown, and continued paying users for over a decade and a half tells you something important upfront: this isn't some fly-by-night operation that'll disappear with your data next month. It's a legitimate, established platform with millions of active users.
How You Earn With Swagbucks
1. Surveys
This is the most well-known earning method, and it's exactly what it sounds like, companies pay Swagbucks to have their users complete market research surveys, and Swagbucks shares a portion of that payment with you in SB. Surveys range from quick two-minute opinion polls worth a handful of SB, to longer, more detailed twenty-minute surveys worth significantly more.
Note that you may get disqualified from a lot of survey s and that is normal, not a bug, not you doing something wrong. Companies are looking for specific demographics, specific past purchase behaviors, specific opinions, and if you don't match what they're looking for, you get screened out partway through. It's mildly annoying, I won't pretend otherwise, but even disqualifications sometimes earn you a small consolation amount of SB, and the ones you do qualify for and complete fully add up steadily over time.
2. Watching Video
Inside the app, there's a section where you watch short video content, entertainment clips, trailers, brand content, and earn SB simply for watching. This is one of the lowest-effort earning methods available, you can literally have it running in the background while doing something else on a second device, though obviously you're maximizing your time by actually paying attention if the content interests you at all.
3. Searching the Web
Swagbucks has its own search engine, and using it instead of Google for your everyday searches earns you SB periodically. This one requires basically zero extra effort if you're willing to switch your default search engine, or even just occasionally search through Swagbucks for things you'd be Googling anyway. It won't make you rich, the SB from searching accumulates slowly, but it's earning you something for an action you were already going to take regardless.
4. Shopping Through the Swagbucks Portal
This s the most powerful earning method inside Swagbucks, and it functions almost identically to how Rakuten works, which I'll explain in detail in the next section. Essentially, before you shop online at thousands of participating retailers, Amazon, various clothing brands, electronics stores, you click through the Swagbucks portal first. This tracks your purchase, and you earn a percentage of what you spend back in SB.
If you were already planning to buy something, routing that purchase through Swagbucks first costs you nothing extra and earns you SB on money you were spending anyway. This is the closest thing to free money in this entire list, you won't be doing anything different, you'll just have to add extra click before checkout.
5. Playing Games
There's a games section where certain games, when played and certain milestones reached, earn you SB. This one I'd rank lower in terms of earning efficiency, some games require in-app purchases to unlock the SB-earning milestones, which obviously eats into whatever you'd earn. Worth exploring casually, it's not something I'd build a strategy around.
6. Daily Polls and Bonus Offers
Every day, there's usually a quick one-question poll worth a small amount of SB, takes ten seconds. There are also periodic bonus offers, sometimes tied to signing up for free trials of other services, downloading certain apps, or completing specific actions that partner companies are paying Swagbucks to promote. These offers pay significantly more SB than surveys or searches typically, but read the terms carefully before completing any offer, some require purchases or subscriptions to qualify, and you want to know exactly what you're committing to before clicking through.
How Much Can You Realistically Earn
Swagbucks isn't going to replace a job. If you're spending fifteen to thirty minutes a day engaging with surveys, searches, and video watching, you're realistically looking at somewhere between $5 to $25 a month for casual, consistent use. If you're more aggressive about it, actively hunting for high-paying surveys, consistently shopping through the portal for purchases you're already making, referring friends, that number can climb meaningfully higher, some dedicated users report $50 to $100+ monthly, though that requires real, sustained effort.
Swagbucks won't make you rich, but it's essentially getting paid for time you'd otherwise spend scrolling social media anyway, searches you're already doing, and purchases you were already making. Framed that way, even $15 to $30 a month for minimal daily effort is worthwhile, especially stacked alongside other income streams rather than relied on alone.
Getting Started With Swagbucks
Sign up is free and takes a few minutes. you'll need an email address and to verify your account. Once you're in, spend your first session just exploring the different earning tabs so you understand the full landscape of what's available rather than only ever using one earning method.
PRO TIP: check the app daily, even briefly. Many of the bonus offers and daily polls are time-sensitive, and consistency compounds here just like it does in blogging or any other online income method.
App Two: Rakuten
Rakuten, formerly known as Ebates before its rebrand, is a cash-back platform that partners with thousands of retailers to give you a percentage of your purchase amount back in real cash, not points, not gift cards necessarily, but cash deposited to your account.
This is important to understand upfront because it changes how you should think about this entire app: Rakuten isn't a "task" platform like Swagbucks where you're trading time for small rewards. It's purely about redirecting purchases you're already making through a different channel to earn a percentage back.
How Rakuten Works, Step By Step
Sign up for Rakuten so you can follow the processes
Step One: You install the Rakuten browser extension, or open the Rakuten app before shopping.
Step Two: You search for the retailer you're planning to buy from, let's say you're planning to buy something from a clothing brand, an electronics store, even everyday retailers like Amazon periodically run through Rakuten's cash back structure. You search that retailer inside Rakuten first.
Step Three: You click "Activate" or "Shop Now" through Rakuten, this is the critical step, this click creates a tracked link that follows you to the retailer's website. Skip this step and shop directly on the retailer's site without going through Rakuten first, and you won't earn anything, the tracking has to originate from Rakuten's click.
Step Four: You shop completely normally on the retailer's website. Nothing about your shopping experience changes, you're on the real, official retailer website, same prices, same checkout process, same everything. Rakuten is simply tracking that this purchase originated from their referral click.
Step Five: A percentage of your purchase, which varies by retailer, gets credited to your Rakuten account as cash back. This isn't instant, it usually takes some time to fully process and clear, sometimes weeks, occasionally longer for certain retailers, since Rakuten itself needs to receive confirmation and payment from the retailer before passing your share along.
Step Six: Rakuten pays out your accumulated cash back on a quarterly basis via PayPal or check, once you clear their minimum payout threshold.
Why This Works as a Strategy
Here's what makes Rakuten different from most other "make money online" methods on this list, and honestly different from most methods in general: it requires zero behavior change. You're not learning a new skill, you're not spending extra time completing tasks, you're not sharing your bandwidth. You're simply adding one browser click before purchases you were already going to make regardless.
If you're already an Amazon shopper, already buying clothes online, already booking things like flights or hotels occasionally, routing those purchases through Rakuten first costs you literally nothing extra and earns you a percentage back on money that was leaving your account either way.
The cash back percentages vary significantly by retailer and fluctuate over time, sometimes a retailer runs a special elevated cash back period, other times it's a smaller baseline percentage. Generally you're looking at somewhere between 1% to 10% cash back depending on the store, with occasional special promotions offering significantly higher percentages for limited windows.
Let's say over the course of a year, you spend $2,000 total across various online retailers that partner with Rakuten, this is a modest, realistic number for someone doing regular online shopping. At an average cash back rate of even just 3%, that's $60 back in your pocket, for changing literally nothing about your spending habits except clicking through Rakuten first.
If you're a heavier online shopper, spending closer to $5,000 to $10,000 annually across Rakuten-partnered retailers, which isn't unusual if you include things like electronics, clothing, subscriptions, and occasional bigger purchases, that cash back easily climbs into the $150 to $300+ range annually, again, for effectively zero extra effort beyond one browser click per purchase.
An Important Caveat
Rakuten should never be the reason you buy something. This isn't a method for generating income from scratch, it's a method for recapturing a small percentage of spending you were already planning to do. If Rakuten's cash back percentages start influencing you to buy things you wouldn't have bought otherwise, purely chasing the cash back reward, you've flipped the math against yourself, spending real money to earn a small percentage back is never a net gain.
Getting Started With Rakuten
Sign-up is free, and installing the browser extension is honestly the single best thing you can do to make sure you never forget to activate cash back before shopping, since the extension will often pop up automatically reminding you when you land on a partnered retailer's website. If you're primarily shopping through your phone, the mobile app achieves the same function, just requires you to remember to open it and activate before clicking through to shop.
So sign up for Rakuten if you haven't signed up yet, while we move to the next.
App Three: Honeygain
Honeygain is the most different app on this list compared to the other two, and it's the one that tends to confuse people most when they first hear about it, because the concept sounds almost too simple to be legitimate. I must say that's it's my favorite, and I've earned a lot from it.
Honeygain is a bandwidth-sharing platform. You sign up for the app on your phone, laptop, or desktop, and it runs in the background, sharing your unused internet bandwidth with Honeygain's network. Companies pay Honeygain for access to this distributed network of internet connections, primarily for purposes like content delivery, ad verification, and market research that requires accessing the internet from diverse, real residential IP addresses rather than data center servers. Honeygain then shares a portion of what they're paid with you, the person providing that bandwidth.
I know this sounds slightly abstract if you've never encountered the concept before, so let me break down exactly why this is a real, legitimate business model rather than something that sounds made up.
Why Companies Pay For This
There's a sustained business need for what's called residential proxy access, meaning internet traffic that appears to be coming from real homes and real internet service providers, rather than from a data center or a business server. Companies use this for things like verifying that their ads are displaying correctly in different regions around the world, conducting market research that needs to reflect geographically diverse browsing patterns, and various content delivery purposes where routing through diverse, real connections helps to improve speed and reliability.
Your unused bandwidth (the portion of your internet connection you're not actively using at any given moment) has commercial value for these specific purposes. Honeygain essentially acts as the middleman, aggregating millions of users' unused bandwidth into a network that companies pay to access, then sharing a percentage of that payment back to you.
How the Earning Mechanism Works
Once installed, Honeygain runs in the background, and your earnings accumulate based on how much bandwidth gets shared through your connection. Earnings are calculated in credits, with 1,000 credits equaling $1. The baseline earning rate works out to roughly $1 for every 10GB of bandwidth shared, though this can fluctuate slightly based on demand in your specific region and how many other Honeygain users are active nearby.
There are actually a few different mechanics contributing to your total earnings inside the app, and understanding all of them matters if you want to maximize what you're earning. They include:
1. Gathering, which is the standard, baseline bandwidth-sharing feature, kicks in automatically once you've signed up for the app, this is the core mechanism generating most users' baseline earnings.
2. Content Delivery is a feature that pays notably better when it's active, but availability depends on current demand from Honeygain's network and isn't guaranteed to be active constantly, some users find themselves queued waiting for this feature to activate, and it's also restricted to certain countries and regions.
3. The Lucky Pot is a small daily bonus you can claim with one tap after you've shared a minimum amount of data that day, it's a minor addition to your daily total, takes seconds to claim, and there's no reason not to grab it daily since it costs you nothing.
4. Referrals are honestly where the significant earning potential lives inside Honeygain, and this is worth understanding deeply since it changes how you should actually approach using and promoting this app. When someone signs up using your referral link and reaches a minimum of 2GB shared, you earn a one-time bonus of 500 credits, plus, and this is the part that matters most, a permanent 10% commission on everything that referred person ever earns going forward, for as long as they keep using the app.
Being Honest About Baseline Earning
I want to be transparent here rather than overselling this, because I think misleading earning claims are exactly what erodes trust in this entire space, and trust is genuinely the only real asset a blog like mine has.
Running Honeygain passively on a single device, without actively referring anyone, without running it across multiple devices, typically earns modest amounts, often in the range of just a few dollars monthly. This isn't a method that's going to move the needle significantly on its own if you're just running it quietly on one phone and forgetting about it.
Where it becomes genuinely worthwhile is through two specific strategies: running the app across multiple devices simultaneously, since your earning potential scales with how much bandwidth you're contributing across your total device footprint, and building out referrals, since that 10% lifetime commission is where meaningfully larger, more sustainable earnings actually come from over time.
Cashing Out
Honeygain has a minimum payout threshold before you can withdraw your accumulated credits, and payouts are available through PayPal or cryptocurrency options. It's worth noting that PayPal withdrawals typically carry a processing fee, so factor that in when deciding your cash-out method and timing, sometimes it makes sense to let your balance build a bit higher before withdrawing, purely to make that fee a smaller percentage of what you're actually receiving.
Getting Started With Honeygain
Installation is straightforward, sign up for the app on whichever device you plan to use, phone, laptop, or both, and it starts running automatically in the background. There's very little setup required beyond the initial install, once it's running, it requires zero ongoing attention from you.
The Bigger Picture Point I Want You to Take From This
None of these three methods are going to replace a full-time income. I want to be completely upfront about that. What these three apps offer is low-barrier, low-risk entry into earning something, anything, from resources and time you already have, without needing a skill, a product, an audience, or upfront investment.
For a lot of beginners, that first small taste of real money landing from something you did online, even if it's just $20 from Swagbucks surveys, or $40 in accumulated Rakuten cash back, or a slow trickle from Honeygain building steadily in the background, matters more than the dollar amount itself suggests. It proves the broader concept to your own brain, that earning online is real, that it's not some scam or fantasy reserved for other people, and that you're capable of doing this.
Start with these three. Let them run in the background of your life while you potentially build toward bigger, more scalable methods, a digital product, a blog, freelancing, whatever direction interests you. These apps aren't the destination. They're solid, legitimate on-ramp, and sometimes that's exactly what a beginner needs most.
So get started today.
ABOUT SMART TEE
Welcome to Smart Tee Digitals. I'm Perfect Tee, the founder of Smart Tee Digitals. I love teaching and guiding people toward success in fields where I have expertise.
I started this blog to live out that passion further, and once I realized I could actually earn from it, I leaned fully into that.
I'm passionate about understanding my audience and finding real ways to help them, so I can keep teaching more 😊
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