Product Name: InboxDollars
Minimum Payout: $30
Rating: Waste of Time
Are You Ready To Work Your Ass Off to Earn Your Lifestyle?
Are you tired of the daily grind? With a laptop and an internet connection I built a small website to generate income, and my life completely changed. Let me show you exactly how I’ve been doing it for more than 13 years.
What Is It?
Take surveys and sign up for trial offers to earn money.
Short Inbox Dollars Review
Not only are you making something like $2-$3 per hour doing this, but you are also putting your personal information at risk. InboxDollars is a legit company that does pay real money, but the hassle and time spent with this type of ‘work’ are not worth the reward.
Before You Start
IBD is the same old story we get with other similar sites. To make money, you need to:
- complete surveys
- sign up for free trials
- sign up for paid trials
- refer friends
- go shopping (get discounts)
- list to the radio
- watch videos
These guys actually have a toolbar that can be added to your browser, which I highly recommend you DON’T install. Toolbars are responsible for some shady stuff. I can’t say for sure if this one does this scammy stuff or not, but if you are getting paid to install it, there’s a high likelihood.
What type of scammy stuff?
Toolbars can provide a way for marketers to hijack your links. For example, if I open an email and click a link (while having the toolbar installed), it can actually send me somewhere I didn’t want to go!
Sometimes, they can even give you extra advertisements while you browse the web, thus, the reason why marketers will pay money to have you install it. They want to get their ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Aside from that, you should also be wary of all those “enter for a chance to win” ads that you see around the site, and other sites that you are directed to. No one really wins that stuff, and 99% of the time it’s just a ploy to get your personal email address and phone number.
What I Didn’t Like
Exchanging Time for Peanuts
The first indication of how much work you’ll be doing for what kind of pay is when you first enter the site. You have to complete 7 tasks for 50 cents. If those tasks take only 10 minutes, then you are making $3 per hour, less than 1/2 minimum wage in some states.
This is going to be a bumpy ride.
Hard To Make Money
Even though what you’ll be doing is mind-numbingly simple, actually getting to payday is going to be a long journey. Here are some screenshots from a lady that says it took her several months to read her $30 payout. Check out the response from the other lady below.
Granted, this is just one conversation and one example. But think about it this way: Doing unskilled labor like this is going to pay terribly. Even at $6 per hour, it’s a horrible job, sitting in front of the computer all day answering questions about where you live, how much education you have, and how much you earn per year.
No Fun
Just because the task is “simple” doesn’t make it “easy” to do. I started to do a few offers and was instantly bored. Maybe you have a higher threshold for stuff like this, but for me, reading advertising emails or watching videos advertising cheap online games or discount makeup is extremely boring.
You might say, “Well, no work is fun!”. I disagree. I work online, and I love my job. I will show you what I do below, but let me continue trashing InboxDollars for a few more paragraphs.
Personal Information at Risk
I don’t mean that the NSA will come to spy on you or that someone will steal your credit card information.
What I do mean is that these grubby companies can’t wait to get their hands on your email address and phone number. Why?! It’s an opportunity to sell you something! The whole reason they pay InboxDollars so they can pay you is that these companies want to make money off of you.
If you submit your real phone number, you can expect your phone to start ringing off the hook with telemarketers asking if you are interested in ABC or XYZ. Give a fake phone number, and you won’t get credit for signing up!
The same goes for your email. They check to see if you submit valid information. Many times, this involves clicking a confirmation link, something that adds even MORE time to the task and reducing the amount of money you make per hour.
Watch Out For Rebills
The biggest thing to watch out for with these types of companies is the free trial offers or the paid offers. Free trials pay more than surveys and less than paid offers. Paid offers usually pay something more than the trial – for example, a $10 trial might pay you $20.
But to get these products, you have to sign up with a real credit card, which means if you forget about the billing date, you could be charged the full amount! One forgotten bill can erase all your previous profits in just one day, and then you’ll be stuck with a box of wine or a decorative knife that you didn’t really need.
Playing Games For Money
This is probably one of the most confusing, and least profitable of the tasks. Too bad, because it was the most appealing. I tried to get in and sign up for the games, but once on the gaming website, it immediately became unclear how much money I was making, how I would be credited, and what I had to do to actually receive credit.
At the end of the day, do you want to be playing flash games to make a few pennies per hour?
Surveys Are The Bottom of The Barrel
I have a strong distaste for online surveys because they scam so many people out of their time. Yes, I’ve actually taken some before. A few things happen quite often.
- You finish the survey to find out that you don’t qualify
- In order to finish the task you need to sign up for another survey company
- Errors in the form cause it to erase all your previous answers
- You need to answer several questions before you find out if you ‘qualify’
Very often these surveys are targeted towards unemployed, uneducated, and elderly people. They want to know who is desperate or naive enough to purchase products*, then they call you to try to sell you junk.
*OK, I’ll admit that this is speculation on my part, but believe me, the real reason you are answering these questions is NOT that they are interested in your opinion.
One Thing I Like
Like Cash Crate, as far as trial offer and survey sites go, InboxDollars is not that bad. For me, it’s a complete waste of time and potential to make money in other ways, but I can see that this type of simple work might appeal to some people, even if they pay is terrible.
One thing I like about IBD is that the blog was active, meaning that they are investing time in communicating with their members. They even had a featured member post, which I think could be fun for people that participate in the site.
Final Review
It’s important to remember that it’s the companies, not you, that is making the real profit here. If you value your time and think that there are bigger/better things to be done, as well as more money to be made online, then this is not for you. Yes, they do pay, but at what cost?
The Inbox Dollars Review
Entertainment Value
Income Opportunity
Final Review
To be completely honest, doing online surveys will never earn more than minimum wage. In fact, most people rarely earn more than $1-$3 per hour, if they are lucky enough to get a payout.
You simply cannot rely on this for income.
If you want to legit make money online you need to invest time into building a website. Earn passive income through affiliate links & advertising revenue. Rather than spend an hour trying to answer boring questions, build a real web property that you can earn monthly income from.
To be completely honest, doing online surveys will never earn more than minimum wage. In fact, most people rarely earn more than $1-$3 per hour, if they are lucky enough to get a payout.
If you want to legit make money online you need to invest time into building a website. Earn passive income through affiliate links & advertising revenue. Rather than spend an hour trying to answer boring questions, build a real web property that you can earn monthly income from.
Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
Can You Really Make Money With Swagbucks?
Jozef
“No one really wins that stuff, and 99% of the time it’s just a ploy to get your personal email address and phone number.”
You should actually be very careful to whom you give your phone number, especially when it is a mobile phone number. These companies can send you paid SMS messages which will drain you out of the money through your phone bill. All they need is the phone number of the victim, they don’t need the consent of the victim at all. I would call this the biggest security hole in the cell phone network.
Jozef
In Slovakia (also in Poland) we actually have a bank that has perfect service for this kind of “trial offers”. They allow you to open multiple accounts with them and each account has its own debit card. The account don’t have things like permitted overdraft and nobody can charge the associated card when its associated account is empty. Transfers between these accounts is intanteous. The cards are “Visa Classic” so it looks like a credit card to the companies with the trial offers.
So with this kind of banking service you see how much money they want to take the trial, deposit that amount to the account with the card and then give the card info to the company. The company then charges the card (that charge will go through) and the account then goes back to $0. It is then good to be polite to cancel the offer but if you forget or the company does not follow its rules and tries to charge your card sooner than you want/expect, the unexpected charge will bounce as the account associated with the card is $0 at the time of the unexpected charge.
Jozef
“but the hassle and time spent with this type of ‘work’ is not worth the reward.”
I think the correct grammar would be something like this: “but the reward is not worth the hassle and time spent with this type of ‘work’.”
But I might be wrong. I am not a native English speaker.
Nathaniell
Haha. Good thing I used to be an English teacher. Both structures are correct 🙂
Jozef
I tried this program also and I also tried the game playing option so I can give you my information to complete the InboxDollar trashing.
Basically, you are competing with others. You are competing either for “victory points” or for cash. To compete for victory points you simply go to the website and start the game. To compete for cash you need to deposit your money and then once you did, you go and play the game. Each cash competition costs you a certain amount which is listed next to that “play for cash” button. The system then picks up an opponent “according to your past performance and according to its estimate of your current performance”. The opponent also had to pay the cash from his wallet. If you score more than the opponent you win about 90% of the pot (so you get your payment back and get 80% from the opponent’s money). If your score is below the opponent’s you lose your money.
The first problem is you cannot train yourself easily because the free version of the game and the cash version have all different graphics, throwing your performance off balance. The second problem is that when I was competing for “victory points”, I was able to win 2 times out of 3 but when I was competing for cash, I lost all of the 5 games I tried so I lost about 5 USD. However since I deposited $20, I got some bonus credit so actually I lost only $2.5 on it. The last game was extremely frustating because I made really stellar score (more than any other times I played the game) but the system managed to find an opponent who made even more stellar score so it still was a loss. After that I immediatelly requested they send me the rest of my balance to my Paypal and (fortunately) they did. I decided they either were cheating or their system was severely flawed.
Being a “computer nerd” I devised a way to try to cheat the games (yes I am THAT good with computers – I can pretty easily make the computer simulate me playing the game and pull off even more stellar scores) but then I decided I am not into cheating (especially when I am a Christian and God definitely is not into cheating) and simply forgot about it at all. Until I saw your post, that is.
Nathaniell
Haha. I had to laugh when I read about you trying to devise computers to help you cheat in this game. You really have tried it all man. It sounds like these “mystery opponents” that are amazing have invested a lot of time into learning the game. I wonder if time isn’t better spent learning how to run a real business and make dollars instead of ‘points”. thanks for the insight into the gaming at inbox dollars.
Jozef
Heh, Nathaniell, I did not just TRY, I actually DID find a way how to cheat that dumb game. I found a way to force Windows to click the mouse where my program wants and I even found a way how the program could watch the screen. That means I was able to build a program that interacts with the game instead of me and the game would not have idea that it is some sort of program clicking on it instead of me. As I told you, I am a computer nerd and I know awfully lot about the computers.
However I then thought about it a bit and then I realized that my skills might be better used elsewhere. And then I was talking about it with God and we agreed that cheating is not a good idea to make money. Actually I had awful time at that time and I had quite an argument with God over another bad event in my life. I wanted to date one girl and it seemed to me God was not willing to help me out so I told Him I will only use that program to do the cheating if I realize I cannot get help from you about my dating. About 2 years later He brought me to the girlfriend I have now and after I got to know her I decided God DID help me with this sadly mangled part of my life so I deleted all traces of the cheating program, telling God that when I can trust Him, I don’t have to resort to cheating in some gaming platform.