Many of us are looking for some extra money, and if you live in Canada, one of the sites that promise it is AskingCanadians. You share your opinion on products from big Canadian brands and get a reward in return, a gift you pick yourself from several options.
When I first read that promise, I wanted to smile and be skeptical at the same time. The gifts sound nice, but on a site you’re not familiar with, there’s no way to tell whether they’ll ever reach you. And that’s the question I want to answer here. Is AskingCanadians a site you can trust, or is it a scam?
My answer doesn’t come from ads. I was curious, created an account and tested the site, so I could give you real information about it. Below you’ll find everything AskingCanadians offers and what to expect from it. And you’ll see whether it’s better than other survey sites or just another one like them.
Once you’ve read everything, it’ll be easier to decide whether to sign up. And if it isn’t worth it, at least you find that out without wasting your own time!
What is AskingCanadians and how does it work?
When I hear about paid surveys, I think of money that goes straight into my account. That’s not how it works at AskingCanadians. It’s an online research community, around since 2005, where people who live in Canada fill out marketing surveys and get loyalty points for their time in rewards programs that are popular in Canada.
I wouldn’t count on it for rent or shopping money. If you spend a whole hour on surveys, it comes to about $4-5, and that’s only if you don’t get disqualified from any survey along the way. Then you wait another 2-4 weeks for the reward to arrive. Anyone who needs reliable money on time will end up with more frustration than help, and I’m afraid that’s exactly what happens to a lot of people who sign up with high expectations.
But for the little things, it’s a different story. A free Slurpee at 7-Eleven every few weeks is a good reason to visit the site. The same goes for your Air Canada frequent flyer account, which you keep active without paying anything out of pocket. And the site is very secure and follows data privacy rules, so you can use it in your free time without worrying.
It’s a site you can trust. You finish the survey and you get the reward. That’s about it. It seems pretty simple to me, and you’ll see why below.
It all comes down to how you collect the points. That’s where you can see what you need to do and whether it’s worth your time.
Before I started, I thought a survey I didn’t qualify for would just waste my time. With AskingCanadians, that’s not quite how it works. Every survey starts with a few qualifying questions (in market research they’re called pre-qualifiers or screening questions), which aren’t part of the actual survey. Through them, the company finds out whether you fit the group of people it’s looking for. If you don’t fit, the survey stops there. But you still get something for your time, because they send you to another page where you get 2-5 consolation points (for example, 2 Aeroplan points) or an entry into a prize draw.
It’s very little money. I’m not getting rich off 2 Aeroplan points. But I liked that even the screening questions count for something, because that’s where your time goes, even when you don’t get any further. If you qualify, you move on to the real survey, and when you finish it, you get the promised reward, the one you saw before you started.
Invitations come in from time to time once you sign up as a member. Active members usually get around 2-5 a week, sent straight to their email. You can also find them without the email, in your member account, where all the surveys you can take show up right away, and you start the one you choose with a click.
Each survey tells you up front how much it pays and roughly how long it takes. That helped me a lot when I had several surveys at once and not much time, because I’d put the amount and length of each one side by side and decide on the spot which one to start with and which one to leave for later.
You just can’t leave them too long. Each survey has a maximum number of people who can take it, and once that number is reached, AskingCanadians doesn’t let anyone else in. If you want to get as much as possible out of the site, answer them as quickly as you can. Otherwise, I’m afraid a good invitation will close before you get to it.
And that’s all there is to do here, because paid surveys are the only way to earn on AskingCanadians. The system is simple, and you get it right away. But when you don’t have any surveys, you don’t earn anything, because there’s nothing else on the site to make up for it.
If you want more options, I’ve also written reviews of UserTesting, Shopper Thoughts, and Eureka Surveys. Read them to see how each one works, and then compare them with AskingCanadians.
For me, a site with only one way to earn works better alongside others than on its own.
How do you get paid?
The rewards list on AskingCanadians has gotten shorter. Sago, the company that owns the site, redid the public page and now puts only 3 options up front, compared to the 5 there were before. Here’s what became of each one:
- AC Points, the in-house points for Amazon gift cards, are still there
- Aeroplan is still there too, now as Aeroplan Points
- 7-Eleven’s 7Rewards is new, and it’s the option the company is pushing now
- HBC Rewards, the Hudson’s Bay program, no longer shows up
- Petro-Points is gone from the page, but not from the database
- VIA Préférence, same as Petro-Points
The two old programs weren’t removed completely. There are still members who send their payouts to them through certain back-end portals on the site. But the company is putting all its attention on the new partnerships with stores, like 7Rewards, and I don’t know how much longer it will keep the old programs connected.
And whichever option you pick, you don’t get money. The site doesn’t pay in cash, by check, or by direct deposit to your bank account. You only get digital loyalty points, and you have to choose just one type, because AskingCanadians doesn’t let you receive more than one type of reward. And what if you need money for a bill? You have no PayPal, no Interac e-Transfer, only points. Cash rewards simply don’t exist on the site. For cash, I recommend Earnopolis or Timebucks, two of the best sites of this kind, which pay through PayPal.
The payout threshold depends on the option you choose. If you go with Aeroplan or 7Rewards, you don’t have a threshold to reach. The points get processed and go into your partner account on their own. With AC Points, you need at least 500 points, worth $5, to get an Amazon.ca eGift card. That works out to 100 points per dollar. If you don’t shop at 7-Eleven and don’t fly Air Canada, you’re left with AC Points, saving up for a small Amazon card, with long waits before the payout comes. It’s a shame to put time into surveys for such a small amount.
Still, I feel comfortable with the payouts here. They’re safe and verified, and the site doesn’t ask for your bank account number or card details, because it doesn’t handle them. The points add up slowly, and you redeem them with the partner once you’ve collected enough.
I also found a use I hadn’t thought of. If you have an old Aeroplan account, a few points from a short survey show up as a transaction in your airline profile and stop your travel points, which are worth a lot more, from expiring, without you paying anything for it. The few survey points end up protecting the big ones, and that part was music to my ears.
How much money can you make?
When I started, I thought the points on AskingCanadians would add up quickly, especially since you get an official minimum of 200 points for every completed survey. But 200 points isn’t much. I did the math based on what the points are actually worth, where 50 points are around 75 Canadian cents, and a 200-point survey comes to about $3 CAD in rewards. And that’s not money in your hand, because the site doesn’t pay in cash, by check, or by transfer to your bank account, as I said above.
How many points you get depends on how long the survey takes and how urgent the topic is. Regular surveys, the 10-to-30-minute ones, pay between 200 and 500 points. I’d have liked to find the short surveys too, the ones under 5 minutes that used to pay around 35 to 100 points, but they’ve pretty much disappeared from the current survey list.
One small boost at the start is the welcome bonus from the active partnerships. Right now it’s the 7-Eleven promotion, where you get 625 7Rewards points one time if you sign up and finish your first survey within 60 days.
The big problem is time. A 200-point survey takes you at least 10 minutes, and if you add up all the minutes spent on forms and compare them to the points you got, it comes to about $4 to $5 CAD an hour, far below the legal minimum wage in any Canadian province. The time is worth more than that. It’s a shame to spend it this way, especially on the 30-minute surveys.
There’s no way to collect more, even if you wanted to. Invitations come by email from the team that runs the panel, 2 to 5 a week on average, because companies are looking for strict demographic profiles and there aren’t many open surveys. Because of that, an active member usually tops out at around $20 CAD a month. On top of that, there’s the wait. Points can take up to 30 days after the survey closes to reach your profile in the partner loyalty program.
Survey by survey, the site pays okay. But the monthly earnings are small, because there are few surveys, and when you don’t have any, which happens often, you earn nothing. For steady income, it’s not the right site.
But AskingCanadians has a use I hadn’t thought of, and I know about it from Canadians who fly a lot. Big loyalty programs like Aeroplan wipe out your entire points balance if your profile has no activity for 18 months in a row. A single short survey on AskingCanadians counts as a valid transaction. Even if you’re disqualified and only get 2 points, the activity shows up in your profile history, the 18 months start over from zero, and your miles balance stays legally protected. In this case, 2 points that are otherwise worth almost nothing keep a whole miles balance alive.
So even a disqualification, something that otherwise annoys me, ends up being good for something.
How do you ask for help?
When I looked for help on AskingCanadians, I expected a message sent to support to reach someone who would actually read it. The “Contact Us” button is easy to find, at the top and bottom of the site, and it opens a standard form where you describe your problem and send it straight to the support team. But a lot of the time, what comes back is an automated reply that follows a template, and no one really looks into your problem.
I’m especially annoyed by what happens with other companies’ surveys. If an outside company’s survey breaks at 99%, support often says it can’t verify whether the data reached them, and it doesn’t give you the points. You got almost to the end, you gave the survey all the time it asked of you, and you walk away without a single point, over a problem that lies with another company’s page.
Because the site deals with a very large number of small transactions, an error of a few points goes to the bottom of the list. For 200 missing points, worth around 3 Canadian dollars, you can wait 1-2 weeks before a real person writes back. Many people give up and abandon the ticket. I’m not surprised. With 3 dollars at stake and that much waiting, you come out behind.
But not every problem goes through the form. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page has set rules for survey links that don’t work, for how long points take to process, and for changing your password. From there you also get a link to a separate automated tool for when a survey freezes while you’re filling it out, and it catches and reports the exact code that failed. I like that at least the technical side no longer depends on how well you explain it.
Support is reliable, but it’s slow, and with small technical errors it doesn’t help you much. It works well for important account issues, such as unlocking a frozen profile, verifying your identity, or manually changing an email address. If a brand’s survey crashes halfway through and you end up a few points short, the ticket rarely fixes anything.
There’s also the rule about points, which don’t reach your account until 30-60 days later. By the time you notice something is missing from a survey and find out why, months can go by. Anyone who uses the panel has to accept that every now and then they’ll lose a few points and won’t have an easy way to get them back.
As for me, I’ll write to support about a locked profile and leave the small point amounts alone.
AskingCanadians on BBB
Sago presents the site as “Canada’s Premier Proprietary Research Panel” and says it has included the ESOMAR 37 questions for quality control. Market research firms have a good opinion of it too, and its reputation in that industry is strong. The information about the questions comes from the Sago website, and I had no way to check it.
I expected a reputation that good to show among the people who take the surveys too. It doesn’t. I gathered the reviews from Sitejabber, Survey Police, and BBB and ended up with 39, about half of them one-star. Sitejabber (SmartCustomer) has 6, written between 2016 and 2024, with an average of 2.7 out of 5. Survey Police has 33, with an average of 3 out of 5 and 48.5% one-star ratings.
I know 39 people is very few compared to how many are signed up for the panel. But this isn’t a stray complaint here and there, because people complain about the same things on both review sites:
- points missing from their accounts
- surveys cut off at the end with a “survey full” message and no points for them
- support that doesn’t reply
- accounts suspended without warning and with no explanation at all
One more complaint comes up often, and it makes a lot of sense to me. The account page shows only the number of surveys completed, not a record of the points received. How are you supposed to tell that points are missing if you can’t see anywhere how many you’ve been given? You can’t, really. And I’m afraid this is where many of the other frustrations start.
The reviews show that people are upset mostly about three things: points they can’t keep track of, payments that arrive after 2-4 months, by their account, and poor support. For a payment, 2-4 months is a very long time to wait.
I did find people who were happy with it too, but not many, and in older reviews, from around 2020. They praised the wide range of Canadian reward partners and said they had received their gift cards. But the good things written back then are mostly about partnerships that have since ended or been scaled back.
I don’t think this is an organized attack on the site. The complaints go into detail about the account page and name specific partners, like Petro-Canada or HBC. Someone who only wants to damage a site’s image doesn’t make up that much detail. I believe them.
Red flags you should never ignore
When you collect points on a survey site, you want to see what you got for each survey, or else you don’t know whether everything was counted. With AskingCanadians, almost everything that bothered me goes back to the points and the support:
- The account shows only the survey numbers, without the points awarded for them. Many members make the same complaint, and that’s where the disputes over earnings that never showed up come from. I’d have a hard time asking for a missing point without any list of what I got.
- People write that their accounts were suspended with no explanation, that support pointed them to the Terms of Use and then stopped replying.
- I checked several complaints about emails sent to support, and it’s true: you get an automated reply or nothing. And then a regular person is left with the dispute unresolved.
- The privacy policy is from 2014. The site has since been taken over by Sago (2021/2023), but the document doesn’t say so. It doesn’t have the data retention periods GDPR requires today, or a contact for the data protection officer (DPO). I’m surprised a company that big left it like that.
The site itself is legitimate. It’s a real market research tool, owned by a large research firm that works worldwide, and the checks show no financial fraud or viruses. The risk is in what you put into it: you answer, you collect points, and you can end up without them, with no one to complain to. Nobody takes your money. Only your work can go unpaid.
Who can use AskingCanadians?
There are only two sign-up rules, and they’re written so clearly that there’s no way to misread them. Both come from Sago, the company that owns AskingCanadians, and they’re strict. You have to live in Canada, because the site is completely blocked for anyone who lives outside its borders. And you have to be at least 16. An 18-year-old student, for example, qualifies and can set up an independent profile under their own name.
But where you come in from also matters, before you even get to the form. If you click the regular button on the homepage, you don’t get any welcome bonus. The site doesn’t give out automatic bonuses that are the same for everyone, and whatever you get when you sign up depends on partners’ promotional links. That’s how the partnership with 7-Eleven works. Through the official 7Rewards marketing portal, you can get up to 625 bonus 7Rewards points. But you don’t get them just for creating your account. The partner’s rule requires you to finish your first official survey within 60 days of creating your profile. For a single survey, 60 days seems like quite a lot of time to me.
After I picked “Join” from the main menu on the official site, I ended up on the page with the form. It’s simple but long, and it has these fields, all of them required:
- First Name and Last Name
- email address (you’ll use it to log in)
- password, at least 8 characters
- sex assigned at birth and the gender you identify with today
- home postal code
- date of birth
- preferred language, English or French
- education level
- the reward you choose (ASKINGCANADIANS POINTS, AEROPLAN POINTS or 7REWARDS POINTS)
- Aeroplan number, the last 9 digits on your Aeroplan card
You also answer whether you want to get survey invitations in both languages, English and French. The form asks for quite a bit of information about you, from your postal code to the gender you identify with. It reassures me that signing up is free, low-risk, and very safe.
Once you submit the form, you look for the confirmation link in your inbox and click it to activate your account.
I thought this was where the surveys started. But there was still one more short survey to complete your profile. Calling it short is a stretch. It’s actually several unpaid profile surveys, with questions about your household habits, what you like to buy, and the tech devices you own, and for me they took around 15-20 minutes, with no points at the end. I understand why they ask for them, because they use these answers to match you with clients. But it’s a shame that nobody pays you for the first minutes you spend on the site.
Only then can you log in and start taking surveys, if they have something for you at that point. And from this point on, the time you spend on the site can earn you points.
Can you use it on your phone?
There aren’t many spots in a survey. Each survey accepts only a limited number of respondents, and you compete for those spots with the other panel members. That makes your phone really useful here, because the invitation no longer sits in your email until you get home.
However, AskingCanadians doesn’t have an official app in the App Store or on Google Play. If you find apps there with similar names, they don’t belong to the platform, and it’s safer not to install them. The platform is just a website that you open in a browser on your phone, tablet, or computer.
I was worried that without an app it would be hard to use on a small screen. It isn’t. The site works well on a phone too, and you can take surveys right in the browser. For me, it works for short surveys, the ones you can finish on public transit, in a waiting room, or on a break between classes.
And there’s also the Aeroplan account. The miles in it expire after 18 months, and one click from your phone on a simple link in an email resets the expiry date and costs you nothing. A small effort for miles that would otherwise be lost.
It’s different with long, complicated surveys, especially the ones that pay more than 500 points. If the page reloads by accident, if the connection freezes for a moment, or if someone calls you right then, you can lose everything you’ve filled in up to that point, and on a survey that pays that many points, it’s a shame. I save them for my laptop or the computer at home, where I’m much more likely to make it to the end.
Is AskingCanadians a legitimate platform for earning money?
I thought a long-running panel, run by Sago, a large research company that operates all over the world, would be just as well set up for the people who answer the surveys. And it’s a legitimate Canadian panel, one that universities and government institutions trust when they collect data. There’s no financial fraud involved, and no malware either.
But what you risk is your time, and that risk is high. You start a survey, answer the questions, and at some point it suddenly stops, and you get nothing. I resent those minutes, because there’s no way to get them back.
At the very least, I expected to see clearly which points I’d earned. The account, however, hides the points transactions. If you think something is missing, there’s nowhere to check, and when you write to support to dispute it, often nobody replies. The only record you can rely on is the one you keep yourself, point by point.
The site’s terms have also fallen far behind. They say nothing about the companies that recently bought it, and they don’t keep up with current rules on personal data protection. Would I call that reassuring? Not really.
The site used to have more reward partners. Most of them have disappeared, and there are fewer safe options left for redeeming your points.
What I’m saying here is based on few reviews, compared with how many members the panel has. But the complaints are similar and come up again and again, about the same problems.
All things considered, AskingCanadians sits somewhere in the middle, neither bad nor very good. I don’t see it as a main site for earning. Alongside other sites, as an extra, it works. It’s for the person who does surveys on autopilot, without much at stake, and who doesn’t mind having to write down every point.
I recommend it only if you’re looking for one more survey site and you don’t mind getting gift cards or rewards from the platforms AskingCanadians works with. Although, given how many partners have left, that list is shorter than it looks. And don’t expect much money. There are few surveys, so there’s no way your earnings can be high.
If you want cash or a site you can rely on, you’re better off going to my list of the 7 best survey and GPT apps. They all have good earning potential, most of them pay in cash, and you’ll find at least one you can join, wherever you live.
I’d be glad to hear in the comments how AskingCanadians went for you, and I’ll be waiting there for any questions you have!