If you want to make some extra money each month, paid surveys can be an honest way to do it. You won’t get rich from them, but a little extra money adds up. The idea isn’t new. Every year, dozens of sites pop up promising to pay you for your opinion, and some are a lot more reliable than others (and they bother you less with messages and offers). That’s how I ended up on CrowdTap. I wanted to see for myself how it compares to the others.
Is CrowdTap a scam? It isn’t, and I’m telling you that right at the start. But if you start using it without knowing what to expect, you can waste a lot of time, and nobody’s going to give you that time back.
Further down, I’ll tell you what I found after I created an account and whether, in my experience, it’s worth putting your time into it. I want you to know exactly what you’re getting into before you sign up!
What is CrowdTap and how does it work?
On CrowdTap (crowdtap.com), you answer short questions about brands and products, and you get points for them, which you then exchange for gift cards. It’s a market research site (meaning big companies want to find out what people like you and me think of their products), and your answers actually get to them.
And they get there fast. Your answers show up almost immediately for the marketing people at the companies that are CrowdTap’s clients, in an account of their own, where they see all the opinions collected in one place. Where do the points come from? I think they’re funded by these companies, because they’re the ones who want to know what people think.
Every day, you’ll find a few short sets of questions there. You also get the chance to try physical products or do an online interview, for points as well. Specifically, the points come from four things:
- surveys
- standalone questions you answer quickly
- live interviews and focus groups (group discussions about a product)
- testing missions, where you get a physical product to try
The surveys and standalone questions are the quick part. Interviews and tests ask more of you, because you talk with people or have to try a product before you say what you think of it.
The site belongs to Suzy, Inc., a company registered in the United States and based in New York. It was originally called CrowdTap, Inc. and changed its name along the way, after the project, which started in 2009 inside an advertising agency, was spun off in 2011 as a separate company. It has a long history.
The founders are Brandon Evans, Kareem Kouddous, and Matthew Britton. The company is now run by Bryan Silverman, the chief executive officer (CEO). Matt Britton, one of the three, stayed on as non-executive chairman, meaning he’s part of the leadership, but he doesn’t run the company.
Below, I’ll show you how you collect points on CrowdTap and how much time it takes, so you can decide whether it’s worth it.
Short surveys
On Crowdtap, you find the surveys in your account, on the home page, as cards placed side by side (the same on a computer and on a phone). Each card is a survey, and to start one, you click on it.
Crowdtap doesn’t work with other survey companies. They make all the surveys themselves, and the surveys sit on their own site, which belongs to Suzy, Inc. You don’t end up on Lucid, Cint, or Pollfish, meaning the sites that gather surveys from several clients and send you from one place to another, where you run into different rules each time about who is allowed to answer. You stay on Crowdtap the whole time.
You give your details only once, when you sign up, through a few profile questions. The answers stay saved in your account, under Member Profile Data. Then, when a company wants answers from people of a certain age, a certain gender, or a certain place, Crowdtap checks what the company is looking for against your profile. You don’t see this part. You only see the card, which shows up in your account if you have the right profile.
How many cards you get is something you can’t plan. In its ads, Crowdtap talks about “thousands of questions” every day, but your account doesn’t get the same number every day. Dozens of cards can show up at once, many of them with a single question, and the page can also sit empty for weeks on end. I think “thousands of questions” sounds a lot nicer than the account looks when that happens.
You can’t search for a particular kind of survey, and you can’t put the cards in a different order either. You answer whatever Crowdtap picks for you. Sometimes it lets you know by email or with a notification on your phone that you have an “Action” (a bigger survey or a product to test). But most of the time, nobody lets you know. To catch the cards, you have to log in yourself and look at what’s new.
You get points for each card. You can trade 1,000 points for a $5 gift card, so one point is worth $0.005, half a cent. The short cards, the regular ones, pay between 3 points ($0.015) and 100 points ($0.50). For $5, you need 10 cards if they’re all 100 points, or 334 if they’re all 3 points. How long does it take you to get there? It depends on the cards Crowdtap gives you, because you don’t choose them. Top members sometimes also get invitations to group discussions or interviews, both live and in writing, paid at $25-$50.
The surveys here take very little time. A regular card has between 1 and 5 quick questions, and most of the time you finish it in under a minute. But with 334 cards at 3 points each, those minutes add up.
You almost never get disqualified. Crowdtap checks your profile before it shows you a card, so once a card is in your account, you almost always finish it and get the points, with nobody stopping you halfway through. That’s a good thing, because the time you put into a card gets you its points. But you get nothing for a card you leave half-finished, because there are no actual disqualifications, and there are no points for the part you already did either.
If you want a $5 Amazon or Walmart gift card every now and then, earned on the bus or in front of the TV, I think Crowdtap is very handy, with its one-minute surveys and with nobody kicking you out of them along the way. It doesn’t work as money you can count on, because you don’t know what you’ll find in your account when you log in. I see it as an app for pocket change. As soon as you reach the 1,000-point minimum ($5), cash it out.
If you want to look at other survey sites or apps too, I recommend my reviews of InstaGC, Keep Rewarding, AskingCanadians, and Responesta. They’re just a few of the ones I’ve tested, and if you have time, you’ll find many more on the blog.
Profile questions
Everything you get on Crowdtap depends on your profile, because the app looks at your personal details when it sends you questions from brands. Many apps like this send you to long surveys on other sites that gather surveys from several companies. Crowdtap doesn’t do that. Everything happens in the app, so what shows up in your account is based on exactly what you entered in your profile.
The profile is created when you sign up, from a few questions about you: how old you are, where you live, your gender, how much your household earns, and how far you went in school. These answers are saved and stay as the basic details of your account.
Then come the small questions that show up often in your account, about your daily habits, how you shop, and your favorite brands (beyond your ZIP code and the rest of the basic details). If, for example, Sony or Pepsi is looking for a certain kind of shopper, Crowdtap picks you for their paid cards based on what you said here. Cards are the sets of questions you see in your account.
The basic details are locked for exactly 3 months after you save them. Until then, you can’t change them from your account, and the only option is a formal request to support. I’m not sure whether the rule also covers the preference questions, since it only mentions the basic details. Whatever you got wrong about your age or income stays wrong, though, until support resolves the request.
So what do you earn from all these questions? Right away, usually not much. Signing up and the basic profile cards don’t come with a big points bonus. Their point is something else, because a complete profile unlocks surveys tailored to you, which pay better.
The short questions the app uses to see whether you fit a survey, and the preference questions too, pay from 3 to 100 points per card, which works out to $0.015 to $0.50. For a $5 gift card, you need 1,000 points. With 100-point cards, you get there after 10. With 3-point ones, after about 334. I think this is where you can see most clearly how much the profile matters (you only get the big cards if you match who the brand is looking for).
Sometimes there are also sweepstakes for new users. Anyone who fills out the whole profile and has a verified account is entered into the monthly drawing for 2,000 points, which is worth a $10 gift card.
On Crowdtap, the only thing you have to give in exchange for money is your profile data. If your profile is only half done, nothing shows up in your account for you to do, and there’s no way to earn.
The profile can’t be changed for 3 months, so rushing it will cost you. If you fill it out on autopilot, with random answers, the surveys you get will be meant for someone else, not for you.
But what costs you the most is something else. Crowdtap automatically compares what you answer on the short daily cards with what you saved in your profile. If, say, your profile says you don’t have a car and on a card you say you do, the account gets flagged for contradictory information and is closed immediately, for good, along with all the points you’ve collected in it. Watch out for this!
Personally, I’d fill out the profile slowly and carefully, treating it as a task that needs attention. With an accurate profile, the short cards, the ones you finish quickly, will keep coming steadily, and they’re the reason the app is worth it.
How do you get paid?
The only way to get your money out of Crowdtap is an electronic gift card. There’s no PayPal, Venmo, bank transfer, check, or crypto payout option.
And the cards are for the United States only, because the app only works there. They’re all in dollars and you use them at US stores, with no options for other countries and no conversion to another currency.
The point value doesn’t change: $5 for every 1,000 points. One point is worth half a cent ($0.005). 1,000 points is also the minimum payout, so you can request a withdrawal of $5 or more.
The upper limit has gone up. Until recently, you couldn’t take out more than $20 in a single withdrawal. Now you can choose cards of up to $150 at popular stores (Amazon and Walmart, for example). In points, the $20 card costs you 4,000 and the $150 one costs you 30,000. And you don’t pay any fees. Because they’re electronic codes, no middleman keeps any of it, and the card holds the full amount you chose. On small withdrawals of $5, I think this is really important, because any fee would eat up a good chunk of them.
You have around 47 gift cards to choose from, plus a few donation options and digital subscriptions. The ones people pick most often right now are:
- Amazon (the card can go up to $150)
- Walmart (same, up to $150)
- Target
- Sephora
- Starbucks
- Whole Foods
- Google Play
I think Amazon and Walmart are the easiest choice once you’ve collected more points, because that’s where the large cards are available too.
You get the card code by email, at the address on your account. Officially it takes 2 business days, but the code often arrives sooner, sometimes within the first 24 hours after you request it.
Your first withdrawal has an extra step, and so does a withdrawal after a long break. The app texts you a one-time security code, and there’s no way to skip this step. That’s why your phone number has to be a real one. If you give a virtual or VOIP number (a number that runs over the internet, without a phone network behind it), the app flags your account. For the first withdrawal, your account doesn’t need to be any particular age. What you do need is for the points to be available in your balance. If some of them are still tied up in a survey in progress, you can’t cash those out.
Is it worth letting your points pile up? No. It’s best to cash them out as quickly and as often as you can. The threshold is only 1,000 points, and a point’s value stays the same no matter how long it sits in your account, so keeping a $30 or $50 balance (6,000 or 10,000 points) there doesn’t get you anything extra.
If you’d rather have cash instead of gift cards, I’ve also tested Earnopolis, Prolific, and Prime Opinion. I have a review for each one on the blog, and I think you’ll find them interesting.
How much money can you make?
Crowdtap doesn’t pay much per hour, because it’s all made up of very small actions. Most of what’s in your account is cards (on the site you’ll find them under the name tiles), each with a short survey that takes less than a minute and gets you 3-10 points. Since 1,000 points make $5, one card earns you between 1.5 and 5 cents. If you do cards one after another for a full hour, you end up with around $1-3.
The big money is in live interviews, by chat or on video, and in focus groups, meaning small-group discussions about a product, held right on Crowdtap. There, one session pays $25-50, sometimes more. But you rarely get one, because companies choose their people strictly, based on profile.
The country you live in doesn’t change anything about pay, because Crowdtap is open only to people in the United States. If you’re outside the U.S., you don’t have access to it.
The monthly amount depends on how often you log in and how sought-after your profile is. When you’re new, you can realistically collect $10-20 in your first month, mostly from the questions about yourself at the start and the small tasks waiting in your account. People who log in often and have been on the site for a long time average $10-50 a month in e-gift cards. Someone who only logs in now and then collects about $5-10 a week. And the people who earn the most don’t have a particular trick. They just have a profile companies want (for example, they’re the ones who do the shopping for the whole household or have a certain technical job), and they manage to get picked for the rare interviews that pay $25 or more.
But these numbers don’t really match up. Someone who collects $5-10 a week ends up with around $20-40 a month, so a person who only logs in now and then would come out above the minimum for very active users. I think it’s safer to go by the monthly figures.
How long do you wait for your first withdrawal? Not long. The minimum threshold is 1,000 points, which is $5, and a new account reaches it in 2-5 days, even if you don’t log in often. That’s assuming new cards keep showing up in your account.
Disqualifications are almost zero on Crowdtap. Your profile is checked before you see the cards, so only the ones that fit you show up, and any card you start earns you the points. Everything you do ends up in your balance.
The real risk is something else. Points can be taken back, and your account can be blocked automatically. When the site catches you answering too fast or giving answers that contradict each other, it wipes your whole balance, right when you request a withdrawal. Take your time and answer every question carefully!
I mentioned above that, according to their promotional materials, Crowdtap has “thousands of questions” every day, so you could earn as much as you like. But in reality you also run into stretches when your account sits empty, with no surveys at all, sometimes for weeks at a time. And users report that cards now pay fewer points than in past years, so it takes you longer to reach the threshold.
Compared with Branded Surveys or Swagbucks, Crowdtap does better on one important point. It doesn’t bounce you between sites that gather surveys from several companies and send you on to them (survey routers), and it doesn’t disqualify you either. Those are exactly the two things that make you lose time on other sites.
I think Crowdtap only gives you pocket money. It’s not side income, and I wouldn’t treat it as such. What you collect there pays for a coffee, a skin in a video game, or a small purchase on Amazon. And because the automatic checks often block active accounts right at the withdrawal request, I wouldn’t count the balance as mine until the gift card code reaches my main inbox.
How do you ask for help?
On CrowdTap, you only have two options if you need help. You can submit a ticket through the form on the site (meaning you describe your problem and leave it with them until someone picks it up), or you can email them at [email protected]. There’s nothing else: no chat, no phone, and no place in the app where you can send them a message on the spot.
You get to the form through “Help,” which is in the menu both on the computer and in the phone app. The link takes you out of the surveys page and over to Zendesk, a site outside CrowdTap where companies receive their support requests. There, just like over email, you can only write in English. They haven’t published their working hours anywhere. All you know is that the company is based in New York and that the team looks at issues on business days there, like any office in the US.
If you want to look for the answer without writing to them, there’s the help center, with four basic categories: account settings, how to earn points, how to redeem points for gift cards, and the rules in the terms of use. Honestly, it doesn’t help much. It’s written like a manual for someone who’s brand new to the site, not like a guide where you can find out how to fix something, and when you get a serious error or something isn’t working in your account, you still don’t know what to do after reading it.
In its legal terms and data privacy agreements, CrowdTap says it usually replies within 10-14 days after you submit a ticket. That’s almost 2 weeks, and in practice that’s how long it actually takes. For something simple, like a change to your account details, a reply can come in as little as 24-48 hours, but only sometimes. But if you’re missing money or they’ve suspended your account, the ticket often sits for weeks with no reply at all, until you follow up with emails as well. So if it’s about money, don’t wait for them to get back to you. Keep following up by email until someone pays attention.
I think CrowdTap’s support is like a big, slow office, not a friend who writes back right away. As long as everything is fine with your account, you won’t even need them. The problem comes when something gets stuck in your account or when it gets suspended automatically, because then nothing gets resolved quickly. You can wait as long as 2 weeks for a reply and in the end get only a standard message, sent automatically, telling you your account is blocked for good. That’s why I’m telling you again what I already said above in the article. Don’t leave your money sitting in the app. Cash it out as fast as you can!
CrowdTap on Trustpilot
On Trustpilot, CrowdTap has around 890-970 reviews and an average of only 1.4-1.7 stars out of 5. Most of them are angry, and the anger is almost always about money.
The story that shows up most often there goes something like this: someone takes surveys for months, saves up points, reaches a higher withdrawal threshold ($20, for example), and that’s exactly when their account gets closed. Many people are convinced that CrowdTap has very strict anti-fraud filters that close accounts and cancel points right before a bigger payout. That’s their opinion, not something the company admits, but it keeps coming up from one person to the next. And not just on Trustpilot. On BBB (a US site where people complain about companies) and on SurveyPolice, quite a few people say their rewards never arrived or disappeared from their account, so payouts are the topic where opinions clash the most.
If this happens to you, support won’t get you out of the jam quickly. In CrowdTap’s Terms and Conditions, I found that a reply usually comes within 10-14 days, so you could go up to 14 days without finding out what happened to your points.
On the App Store, opinions are much better. People praise the very short tasks, since a survey can have as little as a single question, and they say you rarely get disqualified along the way (you don’t find yourself kicked out halfway through a survey because you don’t match the profile they’re looking for). They like how the app looks, that it’s simple to use, and that you collect points quickly, even if not many. The only thing they complain about, without getting too upset, is that a gift card is slow to arrive after you request it.
Does this mean that almost everyone who uses CrowdTap goes through the same thing? Not necessarily. People who are happy leave a review on an independent site less often than in the app store, so the nearly 900 reviews on Trustpilot and the forum threads mostly show the bad side. Still, I think that when it comes to money, the complaints carry more weight than the praise.
The forums also show how opinion of CrowdTap has changed. Older posts recommended it as a source of pocket money, while those from 2024-2026 warn that you can lose your account for no clear reason.
The easy part, with the short surveys and small point amounts, works well, and people praise it. The risk grows along with your balance, once you’ve saved up enough points to reach a higher threshold and want to withdraw them.
Red flags you should never ignore
On Crowdtap, the rule in section 4.16 of the terms is what can cost you the most. The company can suspend your access, close your account, and cancel all the points you’ve collected, with or without a reason, at its own discretion. So points are only safe once you’ve redeemed them for a reward.
The other risks have to do with your data and the points:
- For “Photo Verify”, the app asks you for selfies, which means biometric data, processed through Microsoft Azure.
- Crowdtap collects what it infers about you, your political views, and your exact location, and your answers go, the way you gave them, to the companies that buy its services (section 9 of the privacy policy).
- Points expire one year after the last day of the month in which you earned them (section 4.7), so all the points from a given month disappear on the same day.
- On SurveyPolice and Trustpilot, several people write that they were banned right when they requested their reward or got to identity verification.
The rule above and the first three items on the list are the company’s own words. The bans at cash-out are something only users describe, and I have no way to verify them, but the rule in 4.16 makes them possible. I think it’s best not to let the points here sit in the account for long, and I’d only send the selfies for Photo Verify if I were sure I wanted to stay on the site.
Who can use CrowdTap?
Crowdtap only accepts people who live in the United States, in any of the 50 states or in the District of Columbia.
You can sign up on your own if you’re 16 or older. If you’re younger, you need consent from a parent or guardian. But in their privacy policy, the minimum age is 13. I think this means that between 13 and 16 you can only join with your parents’ consent, and under 13 you can’t join at all (the rules don’t say this in a single sentence; I put the two numbers side by side myself).
Signing up doesn’t cost anything. You can use your email address or link the account to a social media profile, and on the form you enter your first name, last name, email and a password.
Between creating your account and cashing out for the first time, you go through a few checks:
- The activation email, with a link that arrives right after you fill out the form.
- Identity documents, which you aren’t always asked for when you sign up.
- A code you receive by SMS on your mobile phone at your first withdrawal, so without a real phone number you have no way to take anything out of your account.
- Proof of address, if they ask for it, to verify the details in your profile.
Money just for creating an account? No, Crowdtap doesn’t give a fixed amount at sign-up. Your first rewards come from the first profile cards that match you (the ones where you fill in details about yourself), and those are a good place to start.
As long as you sign up with your real name, with your own phone number and from your home internet connection, creating the account is simple. But the rules are strict, and if you break them, your account can be suspended automatically.
The easiest way to get suspended is through family and friends. The official rules allow more than one account in the same household. Their automated system that looks for cheaters is very sensitive, though. When a family member or a friend logs into their own account from your phone or your laptop, the same device and the same IP address (a kind of address for the internet connection in your home) show up on two accounts. That can wipe out your balance faster than almost anything else. I don’t like this, because anyone who reads the rules sees that it’s allowed and has no way of knowing that the automated check can penalize them for it.
Keep your phone and laptop for your Crowdtap account only! Otherwise you risk losing your balance before you redeem your first gift card.
Can you use it on your phone?
Yes, you can use Crowdtap on your phone, and it’s actually built mostly for that. If you want to answer short questions from your phone, you have two options: the app or the browser.
It has two official apps, one for Android on Google Play and one for iPhone on the App Store. On Google Play, the Android app is rated 3.2 out of 5, from 10,500 reviews. The iPhone app beats it by a full star, at 4.2 out of 5, from 7,300 ratings (on a 5-point scale, that’s not a small gap). The latest official update is version 1.97, released on July 11, 2025.
Only install the app from those two stores. For Android, there are also installation files circulating online, shared through all sorts of links, the so-called APKs. If you install a file like that, you can end up with a virus on your phone or with a fake copy of Crowdtap made to steal your email login details. No survey is worth that.
On Android, your phone needs Android 5.0 or a newer version. On iPhone, the app is about 194.5 MB and can only be installed on an Apple device. Both work on compatible tablets.
When you install it, the app asks for, among other things, internet access, permission to send you notifications, and access to your location. The first two are normal for a survey app. Location access isn’t exactly a given, so it’s good to know about it before you tap Install.
I’d use Crowdtap through the phone’s browser or the official iPhone app, because those are the safest options. There’s a reason for the Android app’s low rating. The app has bugs that keep showing up, and your points can disappear right when you try to redeem them for a gift card, while the main page of your account stays completely empty. And that’s the part that scares me, because you lose them at the exact moment you were supposed to collect them.
The browser on your phone works very well and takes up no storage space at all, so you can do without the apps. Log into your account in the browser, do the 1-minute surveys you find there, and when you reach 1,000 points, request the $5 gift card right away (that’s 200 points per dollar) and close the window, so the money you’ve earned stays safe.
Is CrowdTap worth it?
Yes, CrowdTap is a trustworthy site, but I don’t think you can count on it as a steady source of money. The site is owned by Suzy, Inc., a company that does market research, and it gives you points when you answer the company’s surveys.
The good part is that everything moves quickly. A survey often has just one question (it’s more like a poll than a questionnaire), so you don’t spend long on it. And you almost never get stopped halfway because you don’t fit the profile they’re looking for, so the time you put in there actually gets paid.
But withdrawals are where things go wrong. To catch fake accounts, CrowdTap checks accounts very strictly, and the rules it follows for this aren’t stated anywhere. An account often gets closed right when the person wants to cash out their points. At that point, you lose everything. A few readers have told me it happened to them, with no reason given, and I think this is the biggest risk, because you have no way of knowing ahead of time whether your points will ever turn into a gift card.
Besides that, you never get cash. You only get gift cards, and the rewards are small. The site only works if you live in the US, and unused points expire after 1 year (if you rarely log in, you might not collect enough by then). And you’re asked for biometric data, meaning data about your body, plus very personal details about you, like your age, your gender, or where you live.
So, is it worth it? It depends on what you’re looking for. If you live in the US and you like answering a few questions now and then for a small gift card, it’s a nice site to keep alongside other ones. If you want a steady income in your spare time or you don’t want to hand over such personal data, I wouldn’t pick it.
What do you think of CrowdTap? If you’ve tried it or have any questions about it, let me know in the comments!