Before you sign up for a rewards site, it’s a good idea to find out whether it pays you or just takes up your time. There are quite a few sites like that, and in the end they don’t even pay you.
Rewardia is also a Get-Paid-To site. It pays you for surveys, for simple games, and for other small things, like watching videos, voting in the daily polls, or bringing your friends to the site. At first, everything looks legitimate and risk-free, a good place to make some extra money.
On Rewardia I’ve had both good experiences and a few really ugly ones, so I can’t give you a simple answer to whether it’s a trustworthy site or a scam to avoid. The pros and cons have to be put side by side.
I’ll go through them one by one, in detail, so you can see how risky it is for you and whether you’d be wasting your time there. I’ll also look at everything you get as a member, so you know up front what to expect.
The rest is up to you.
What is Rewardia and how does it work?
Rewardia only lets you join if you live in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or the United States. That’s it, 4 countries.
On Earnopolis or Inboxdollars, which are also GPT sites, you don’t run into a restriction this tight. Otherwise, Rewardia works the same way, as I explained above (meaning you do different tasks on the site and get paid for them).
For me, one of the big questions with a GPT site is how much you get out of it compared to the time you put in. You only see that when you take a close look at each way you can earn there, what it asks of you, how long it takes, and how much it earns you in the end.
So below I go through them one by one, because that’s the only way to tell whether you make money on Rewardia or just waste your time.
Rewardia Paid Surveys
When I went into the “Survey Center,” I found the list of paid surveys, and each one showed upfront how many points you get and roughly how long it takes to complete (approximately, as you’d expect). This helps me a lot, because I can weigh up right away whether to spend my time on a survey or not.
You’ll find surveys like these on almost every GPT site, and Rewardia is no exception. If you’ve done surveys on another site before, nothing here will surprise you. If you haven’t, paid surveys are exactly what the name says: you answer them and get a reward.
You don’t go straight into the survey, though. Each one starts with a few qualifying questions that show whether you’re who the people behind it are looking for. Then, if you’re a match, you answer the actual survey, and at the end you get the promised reward in your Rewardia account. If you’re not, the survey stops there and you move on to the next one.
Rewardia has a lot of surveys, and if you end up opening an account after this review, I think they’re one method you have no reason to skip, even if Rewardia doesn’t pay very well for them.
Marketagent and Triaba, two survey sites, pay better than Rewardia, and I think Rewardia now pays even worse than when I first tried it.
Too bad.
I’ll show you in detail further down how much they come to in money.
Playing Games
The games on Rewardia are for someone who plays Solitaire or Sudoku on their phone anyway, to pass the time. That way, bit by bit and with no effort, you build up to a $5 gift card in a month and have some fun along the way.
I saw them as soon as I opened Rewardia.com, split into three groups: Solitaire, Classic Bingo, and Mahjong under card and board games; Sudoku, Word Search, Memory Game, and Spot the Difference under puzzles and brain-training games; and Fruit Scratchie, Slots, and Fortune Wheel under games of chance.
You get the promised reward after meeting a condition, which is different for each game. Once it’s met, you can stop, and the points go into your account.
Instead of money by the hour, you get points for every round you finish or every puzzle you solve, and the harder the game, the more you get. An easy game earns you about 10-40 points a round, which is between 1 and 4 cents. On medium, it’s about 50-70 points (5-7 cents). On the hard level, for a complex game such as a Sudoku grid, the maximum is 100 points (10 cents). On good sites that pay you to play games, the amounts are higher than these.
How much does that come to per hour? Let’s say you pick medium. A Sudoku or a Word Search at that level takes you 5-10 minutes (done carefully, not rushed), so in an hour of playing them one after another you finish around 6-10, at an average of 50 points (5 cents) each. Your hour of play is worth between 30 and 50 cents.
A lot of time, little money.
And it’s no accident. Rewardia built them to pay poorly and keep you on the page, and while you’re there, it shows you ads. I think it’s worth knowing before you spend an hour on a Sudoku for a few cents.
Promo Codes
I took a code from Rewardia’s Facebook page, pasted it on the site, and the points showed up in my account right away. These codes are short strings of letters and numbers that come from Rewardia itself, and they work exactly the way the site says (as long as you use the code that’s valid that day).
You’ll find them in two places: on Facebook and in the emails they send you, which don’t come very often (both are in the image above). On a lot of sites that use promo codes, you’re lucky if you get one, but here they show up almost every day.
That’s not by accident. The codes are marketing bait to get you to visit the site every day, and they’re more of a bonus than a way to earn.
One code generally gets you 5 points, which comes to $0.005. A full dollar means entering 200 codes, one after another. Very little.
If you start hunting for them, clicking link after link on shady coupon sites that promise you magic codes, you lose time that’s worth a lot more than the half cent you get at the end, and the difference is obvious.
The official 5-point codes from their social media are the ones I’d enter when I’m logged in for a survey anyway (it takes a few seconds). Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother looking for them.
Refer a friend
Anyone who signs up for Rewardia with your link or code gets a reward too. When they reach their first 3,000 points, the site gives them another 3,000 on top (so it actually doubles them). That’s a big bonus. I think that for someone who still hasn’t decided whether to sign up, this carries a lot of weight.
You’ll find a referral program on most GPT sites, including this one, and your share is 10%. You get it from the base points that the friends you bring in earn from surveys or browser games, for the whole life of their account. Say one of them finishes a market research survey and gets 1,000 points. You then get 100, automatically.
The commission builds up without any work on your part, though it comes only from their work. Anyone who signs up and then does nothing more on the site doesn’t earn you a single point.
To bring them in, you can send them the link directly, post it on Twitter or Facebook, invite them by email, or give them your code, which gets them the bonus when they create their account.
The program seems like a good one to me, especially because of the big bonus the invited person gets. It gives you a concrete argument when you want to convince someone to join the site and stay active on it.
Who you bring in matters a lot, though. I’d only reach out to friends who already use GPT sites. Everyone else you have to convince, explain how it works to, and keep in touch with so they don’t give up, while you’re left with almost nothing from their points. Too much hassle for so little.
How do you get paid?
All the points so far, from surveys, videos, and browser games, build up in your Rewardia account, and on the site they act as money. You trade them for gift cards or, if you’re patient, for money sent by bank transfer.
Being patient is the hard part. For the transfer, Rewardia doesn’t let you request $10 or $20. The bank settings page says the minimum is $50, which is 50,000 points, and that same page asks for your bank’s routing number and your account number, so they can identify you and make the deposit.
On a site where the rewards are small for almost every task, I think $50 is a very high threshold. Too high.
The math gets even worse when you get to the conversion rate. There, Rewardia asks for 2,000 points per dollar, so the $50 transfer comes to 100,000 points, even though in the thresholds they had listed 5,000 points for $5 and 50,000 for $50. There are two rates on the same site (I couldn’t tell you which one is right), but with either one, getting the money to your bank takes a very long time.
The payments themselves are real, and the gift card vouchers do get approved. The methods are good, but the cash threshold spoils them.
So I don’t save my points for the transfer.
If you don’t want to lose anything, you can redeem an Amazon or Target e-gift card every time you have 10,000 points ($5, at the 2,000-point rate), while the balance is still small. I worry about large balances left to grow there. One system error or an automatic ban, and your hard-earned points aren’t yours anymore. Collecting 100,000 points means being on edge right up to the last one.
For gift cards, the threshold is 5,000 points, and the list is pretty long. In the US it includes Amazon, Spotify, The Home Depot, Best Buy, CVS Pharmacy, and other stores, and for Australia and New Zealand there’s Coles, Woolworths, Target, Myer, and a few more.
I got an electronic voucher they call a “Rewardia Card,” sent to the email address I signed up with. I clicked the link in it, their checkout portal opened, and there I could split my balance into whatever store cards I wanted, from $5 to $200 each.
How much money can you make?
You’ll find offers on Rewardia any time you open the site. What you collect from there depends mostly on you, on how often you log in and how much work you put in.
Paid surveys bring in the most points, and you can build up a good number from them. Then come the games and the other activities, which, like I said earlier, pay less.
Even though surveys pay best here, a lot of survey sites give you more for them, and without patience and some effort you won’t see the money.
On top of that, Rewardia gives you bonuses based on the level you reach. There are four levels:
- Bronze you get along with your account. At this level you get the base survey rates, with withdrawals processed in the standard 24-hour queue.
- Silver comes with some small cashback tiers, but how many points you need and what conditions it has aren’t listed in the public guides.
- Gold you keep if you collect at least 20,000 points ($20) every month, 3 months in a row. Then you get gift cards instantly, without the 24-hour verification queue.
- Platinum requires 30,000 points ($30) a month, 3 months in a row, but the promotion rules say 60,000 ($60), so their own rules don’t even match. You get a 3% points bonus on a $50-99 Flexi Gift Card (on a $50 one, $1.50), 5% on cards of $100 and up, and 1% on bank transfers over $100.
The idea behind it is that once you move up a level, the gift cards you get with points cost you less, and the higher the level, the bigger the discount. I like the bonus itself.
Next to FreeCash‘s program, though, this one looks very weak. When you move up, all you get is a discount, and only on the expensive gift cards, which take a lot of patience to reach. At Gold, for example, you collect at least 60,000 points over the 3 months ($60), and in return you only get the gift card instantly, without waiting for verification.
Rewardia isn’t breaking any law with these levels, but it makes them look better than they are, and Platinum beckons to us from a distance. The 3% bonus means dozens of hours of work on the site for another 50 cents or a dollar (if it works out for you). Dozens of hours for a dollar at most?
I wouldn’t build my schedule around Gold or Platinum. If you work at Rewardia like it’s a job with promotions, the monthly recalculation, which always starts over from zero, and the surveys that screen you out will get on your nerves. For me, Rewardia is a place to collect pocket change, enough to get yourself a video game or a pizza once a month.
Rewardia Trustpilot Reviews: What Users Really Say
What people write about Rewardia depends a lot on the country they’re writing from. On Trustpilot, the US site, rewardia.com, scores well, with 4.2 out of 5 from 904 reviews. The Australian one, rewardia.com.au, scores poorly, with 1.9 out of 5 from 435. On ProductReview.com.au, the rating goes up to 4.4 out of 5, from 1,849 reviews.
I went through all of the roughly 3,200 reviews on the two sites, and by my estimate, around 60% are positive, 20% neutral, and 20% negative. I didn’t come across any bursts of 5-star ratings posted all at once either, the kind you see when someone inflates the reviews (as far as I could judge from the bits of text I had to work with).
The Americans, who push the rating up, praise the large, varied selection of games, the daily puzzles, the fact that the whole site is designed like a game, and the forum where members chat with each other.
The Australians drag the rating down and complain about the same three things. They often get screened out of surveys (meaning they don’t make it past the questions at the start, which decide who gets in), they earn little per task, and they wait a long time for support when they have points stuck in pending.
Then there’s the withdrawal threshold of $50, and a lot of the negative reviews run up against it. One dollar is 2,000 points, which means that for your first withdrawal you’re collecting 100,000, point by point, from tasks that pay little and surveys that often turn you away. For a GPT site, that’s a very high threshold. Far too high. I think it stops a lot of people before they see any money.
It doesn’t look like anything is going to change, either. The terms of use and the privacy policy have hardly been touched since October 2018, and along with them, the threshold and the rest of the things people complain about have probably stayed put too.
Red flags you should never ignore
While you’re collecting points on Rewardia, the first payout sits at $50, the minimum withdrawal on the Redeem Points page. That’s a high threshold, and many people may give up before they cash out anything.
Even at the threshold, your balance isn’t safe. The Terms of Use let them take all the points you’ve collected and suspend your account, at their own discretion, on the mere suspicion that you’ve broken the terms in some way. When you reach $50, cash it out!
Your data is a different story. Just by continuing to use the site, you agree to have it sent abroad, to affiliates the Privacy Policy doesn’t name (you give that consent without anyone asking you for it). They don’t have the EU or UK representative that the GDPR requires. And even deletion, when you request it, doesn’t guarantee that nothing personal stays with them.
I file the high threshold and their power to suspend accounts at will under the verified risks that come from how the site is designed, while the missing representative is a verified gap on the regulatory side. On the other hand, I didn’t find a scam: no fraud actions from the authorities, and no evidence straight from the source that they disappear with people’s money.
Who can use Rewardia?
When I created my account on Rewardia, the sign-up form was followed by the country selection, and the list is short. You can choose between Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and below them there’s one more option, “Other Country,” for anyone who lives outside of them.
Who is it for, then, if you can’t sign up from outside those four countries? I don’t know. Maybe it’s there for the countries that might come next, because I’ve heard they’re thinking about expanding. But the list has looked the same for a few years, and I doubt it’ll ever get any longer.
Anyone who lives in another country or connects through a VPN has their profile flagged and deleted on the spot, for compliance reasons. Age matters too: 18 and up.
Then came the confirmation email, sent to the address I signed up with. I clicked the link and got 100 points, a bonus I was glad to get, since you earn it for something you’d do anyway. From there, I moved on to the offers.
The profile comes separately, with 24 questions, and it earns you 240 points, more than double the email bonus. Don’t leave it for later. The questions are about you and your household, including:
- date of birth, with month, day, and year
- gender
- ZIP code
- your home, rented or your own
- marital status
- who does the grocery shopping at home (yes, that too)
- income
From your answers, Rewardia builds the filters it uses to send the right surveys to your account. Even though it’s all legal, free, and encrypted, you’re giving the site a lot of data about what you buy and how you live. The 100-point sign-up bonus is worth 10 cents, the profile adds 24 more, and for all that data you end up with 34 cents. I think that’s a bad trade.
You might be tempted to make up answers in your profile so you get more surveys. Don’t do it! Rewardia has fraud filters that compare what you say from one survey to the next, and when something doesn’t add up, they close your account right away, just when you were close to a payout.
If you make an account, use it when you’re on your phone and want to pass the time. I wouldn’t ask more of it than that.
Can you use it on your phone?
I opened Rewardia in my phone’s browser and the site fit neatly on the screen. I didn’t have to pinch to zoom in on anything or drag the page from side to side to read a whole line, and the links to the other pages are so big that you can tap them easily without hitting something else.
For those of us who make money on sites like this, that matters a lot. You don’t have to wait until you get to a computer to work, and I think you earn more sensibly that way.
They don’t have an official app. You won’t find one on Google Play or in the App Store, although you’ll come across a few very similar names there. For example, “Rewardia – Daily rewards” is from JJ Tech Solutions, while “Rewardian” is a platform that some companies use for their employees.
However similar the names are (with “Rewardian” it’s just one extra letter), they have nothing to do with rewardia.com, which is about market research.
On a phone, Rewardia means the site in your browser. And it works well.
Is Rewardia LEGIT or SCAM?
Rewardia is built to keep you around. You get puzzles and trivia questions every day, the whole thing is set up like a game, people on their internal forum actually post and reply to each other, and that’s how you end up logging in one more time, then once more.
It doesn’t do badly on trust, either. The site has been around for a long time and belongs to a real Australian company that’s easy to look up.
The trouble starts when you want your money.
To cash anything out, you need at least $50 (a threshold you rarely see). Until you get there, you’re disqualified from surveys often, what you earn from surveys and offers is small compared to the time you spend on them, and many other sites pay better for the same effort. And how long do those of us who do surveys for money spend reaching the threshold, with surveys that keep kicking us out? A long time. On top of all that, the terms describe the reasons they can close your account very broadly, so you build up your earnings with a knot in your stomach, not knowing whether you’ll get the chance to withdraw anything.
Even though the money side drags it down a lot, Rewardia has its audience. If you like the games for their own sake and you’re in no hurry to withdraw, you’ll have fun and make some money on top of that. Steady income from surveys, with small withdrawals, isn’t something you’ll find here, though. I’d stick to the puzzles.
If you have comments, questions, or an experience of your own with Rewardia, write to me below.