What these apps really pay

I earn about $100 a month from this. Roughly $300 total over two to three months, across 11 apps, in Canada, on iPhone.

That number is the honest headline. Everything below is how it breaks down, and why the first week of any of these apps tells you almost nothing about the tenth.

The two-week cliff

JustPlay and Playtest Pro were generous at the start. I was making $5 to $10 a day mixing ads, games and bonuses, and I could withdraw twice a day. For two weeks it looked like the best thing I had found.

Then it collapsed. The same routine that had been paying $5 a withdrawal started paying around $0.50. Same games, same time, same effort. About a tenth of the money.

Nothing about the app changed on the surface. What changed was the rate.

Coins that are worth whatever they say later

This is the part that took me longest to understand, and it is the single most important thing on this page.

On these apps you do not earn dollars. You earn coins. The spin-wheel bonuses look great because the coin numbers are large. The problem is that the dollar value of those coins is decided when you convert them, not when you win them.

JustPlay has no fixed exchange rate. It sits around 80,000 coins per dollar, and it moves with advertiser spend and with your region. Per-session coins also decline the longer you stay in one game. So the wheel that paid you 40,000 coins was never a promise of fifty cents. It was a promise of 40,000 coins.

Playtest Pro is BestPlay’s own hub, running its own titles. JustPlay also wants an in-app identity video the first time you cash out.

Both apps run heavy ads inside the app and inside the games themselves. The games are clearly built around ad volume rather than being good games. Combined with terms that are not put in front of you, that was enough. I deleted both after about a month and moved the time into Freecash.

What a fixed rate looks like

Freecash works the other way round. The offers are milestone based and the payout is fixed before you start.

A typical offer runs 60 to 70 days with tiered payouts. Reach level 20 for around $0.60, reach level 40 for around $1. Those are small numbers and I am not going to dress them up. The point is that they are knowable. I can decide whether 60 days of a game I already enjoy is worth the total before I install anything.

That is the trade. Freecash pays a mediocre rate you can calculate. JustPlay paid a great rate for two weeks that you could not.

Payout speed is a separate problem

It took me a while to stop treating speed and size as the same axis. They are not, and some of the worst payers are the fastest.

Playtest Pro pays PayPal in minutes. It is also one of the apps I deleted, because minutes is not much use when the amount has collapsed to fifty cents.

Freecash pays PayPal the same day, usually within a few hours, and Bitcoin in about an hour. Other apps pay faster. Freecash is the one I trust, because sync worked about 98% of the time and I got a push notification the moment a level credited.

Mistplay is the slowest of the ones I kept. Redemptions take up to 48 hours, and in my experience it uses most of that window. It has never missed the window, which counts for something. In Canada it pays gift cards only, Amazon, Walmart and Starbucks. No PayPal, no cash. Its interface is the best of anything I tested, with leaderboards, bonuses and a strong game selection, and its milestones are hard to reach without spending money.

Tester Max gives you a $5 signup bonus in coins against a $20 minimum cashout. So a quarter of the way there before you start, and then the rest of the way through a thin, repetitive catalogue. I cashed out the $20 once and quit.

The money going the other way

One rule that has saved me more than any offer has earned me. If an offer needs an in-app purchase, and the purchase costs more than the tier pays, it is not earnings.

Spend $5, get $4.30 back. That is a discounted purchase with extra steps. I skip all of them.

Who should not bother

Most people, honestly.

If your life is fast paced, or you have an office job and you are planning to do this on breaks, this will not work. The coffee break promise in the ads is false. The time is too fragmented and the offers are too long.

It also assumes real mobile-gaming experience. Knowing when not to spend your in-game currency early is a skill. Spend it wrong and you hit a paywall sooner, stall, and the milestone you were chasing stops being reachable in the time you budgeted.

What it needs is what I happen to have. A desk, a second window, and dead minutes that were already going to be dead.