Why I built this

I work from home as a developer. A large part of my day is now spent waiting. I start an AI task, it runs for a few minutes, and I sit there with nothing to do. That dead time is what got me into this.

I play iOS games through iPhone Mirroring on macOS. The game sits on the same screen as my work, next to the editor. When a task is running I tab over, play for a few minutes, and tab back. I never pick up the phone. That detail matters more than it sounds, and I will come back to it.

Over two to three months I earned roughly $300, so about $100 a month. I tested 11 apps, all in Canada, all on iPhone.

The two rules I play by

The first rule is that I only take offers in genres I already play. If I do not enjoy the game, the hours stop being free time and start being work, and the pay is far too low to be work. I skip poker offers completely. I do not know how to play poker, and learning it to chase a payout is a bad trade.

The second rule is about money going the other way. Plenty of offers require in-app purchases to reach a milestone. If I have to spend $5 to unlock a tier that pays $4.30, that is not earnings. That is a discounted purchase. I skip those. The maths has to work before I install anything.

Both rules sound obvious written down. Neither was obvious to me at the start.

The mistake I made early

I rushed. I saw an offer, the number looked good, and I installed the game without reading the terms properly. Then I found out the tier I was chasing needed something I was never going to do, or a spend I was not willing to make.

Reading offer terms is a skill. It gets easier with practice. On Freecash the terms are clear once you learn how to read them, and now I read them before I install rather than after I am forty levels in. That single habit changed my results more than any app choice.

The trap nobody warned me about

Here is the one that cost me real time. Playing an iOS game through the Mac App Store does not credit offerwall milestone offers. The game runs, the levels go up, and the offerwall sees nothing.

The offer has to run on the iPhone. Mirroring the phone to the Mac works, because the game is still running on the phone. Installing the same game natively on the Mac does not. It looks identical on screen. It pays differently.

I found that out the way you would expect.

What existing coverage gets wrong

The ads for these apps promise money in your coffee break. That promise is false. It is the single most common claim and it does not survive contact with the actual grind.

What I could not find anywhere was the number I actually wanted: how many hours a given offer takes against what it pays, and how often it credits at all. An offer that pays $80 and never tracks is worth zero. Nothing I read priced that in.

So I started logging it. Every offer I attempt, the hours it took, what it paid, whether it credited, and how long the money took to arrive. That log is the reason this site exists. The reviews are downstream of it.

What is here

Three things, roughly.

The offer log, which is the raw record and the part I care most about. Reviews of the apps I have spent real time in. And posts like this one, which are the parts that do not fit in a table.

If you want the numbers, start with what these apps really pay. If you want to know which ones I removed and why, that is the seven I deleted.

I am not going to tell you this replaces income. It does not. About $100 a month, on a setup that already has me sitting at a screen with dead minutes to fill, is what it is. Whether that is worth your time is a question only you can answer, and I would rather give you the numbers to answer it than sell you on a total.