For every paid survey site that’s actually worth it, you’ll come across around six that keep you sitting in front of a screen without paying you properly for your time.
And yet, I haven’t given up on surveys. I’ve been taking them from my couch at home for years, and on the right sites I still make a decent amount every year. It’s not for everyone (I mean, not everyone has fun answering questions about detergent), but it’s simple and you don’t need anything special to do it.
Where does SurveyLama fit in? Is it one of the good ones, worth signing up for now if you want to make some extra money? Or is it another one of those six?
I signed up, tested it thoroughly, and compared it with the hundreds of paid survey sites I’ve tried so far.
In this review, I’ll walk you through everything on the site from top to bottom, so you know exactly what to expect when you log in and can quickly tell whether it’s right for you or one to avoid from the start!
What is SurveyLama and how does it work?
On SurveyLama, you collect points. You earn them by filling out surveys for companies that want to know what people think of their products, in other words, market research. The points are called LamaPoints, or LP for short (the llama in the site’s name made it into the name of the points too). Sites that pay you for small online tasks like this are called Get-Paid-To (GPT) sites, and SurveyLama is one of them.
Points aren’t instant money. You can only exchange them for money or gift cards once you reach a certain threshold. How high is the threshold, what’s a point worth, and how long does it take to get there? I’ll get to all of that later, when I talk about payouts.
There are two ways to collect points: paid surveys and the daily bonus. That’s it. Those two alone tell you whether the site is worth your time, so I’ll go through them one at a time right after this.
I also looked up who’s behind the site. The French business registries societe.com and pappers.fr list Globe Media, a French company registered in Saint-Jean-d’Illac, Bordeaux, with Yvan Abraldes as president (that’s a person’s name, and you can look it up yourself).
When it started is less clear. The site’s footer says © SurveyLama 2020 – 2026, as if it’s been running since 2020. According to pappers.fr, the “SurveyLama” trademark was registered on May 18, 2022, not by Globe Media but by GLOBEE MEDIA, with an extra “e”. It’s probably the same company, and someone hit an extra key when registering it. But that’s just my guess.
Give opinion and earn money
The surveys you can start directly on SurveyLama are under My Polls. Each one has its own card, showing how long it takes (on my screen, between 1 and 6 minutes), how many points you get (between 24 and 38 LP), a reference number that’s more useful to the site than to you, and the “Participate” button. On my account, the surveys there came from NAXELIS-SURVEYS and CPX (CPX Research), and I had 6 I could start right away.
Partner Offers is the other section, and things work differently there. The tiles don’t lead to a specific survey. They take you off SurveyLama and send you to a partner, which has its own set of surveys and routes you through them. The ones I got were Opiday, Mr Survey, Zummi, and FoxyPanel.
These partners and the surveys above are what I found in my country. You’re in a different country, so you’ll see other names and other surveys. The number of surveys you get per day isn’t fixed either. SurveyLama says new surveys are added every day, but how many reach you depends on your country, your age, and what’s in your profile. If you don’t see many, the internet is full of survey sites. I’ve covered a lot of them on the blog, and I’d also recommend reading the reviews of NiceSurveys, OnePoll, KnowledgePanel, and InstaGC, to see which ones are a good fit for you.
In theory, taking a survey is simple. You look at the minutes and the points on the card and pick one. On my account, the shortest was the NAXELIS-SURVEYS one, the first in the top left, worth 24 LP for one minute. The CPX one paid the most, 38 LP, but took 4 minutes. Four minutes for 38 points, or one for 24? Put them side by side and the short survey comes out ahead, at 24 LP per minute versus not even 10 at CPX.
Once you press “Participate,” you first get a few questions from the company behind the survey (CPX, for example). They ask who you live with, what you do for work, how you shop. You answer them honestly (even if it’s tempting to guess what they want to hear), and if you’re not the kind of person their client is looking for, you’re out right away. Having a card in My Polls doesn’t mean you get to finish. This is called a disqualification, or a screen out.
It can also happen around halfway through, when the company already has enough people with your profile or your answers no longer fit. When that happens, you lose the survey’s points, and SurveyLama gives you 1 LP, or one cent, for the minutes you put in. To get to a payout on those alone, you’d need 2,000 disqualifications!
If you make it to the end, the points are added to your account. Some surveys show them in your balance right away, others after a check that takes up to 24 hours, so it’s good to know that before you decide they’re lost.
At 100 LP to the dollar, the surveys on my account were worth between 24 and 38 cents. Completing all 6 would have earned me $2.28 at most. You can’t cash out to PayPal or Amazon until you reach 2,000 LP, which is $20, and getting there with surveys like these means finishing between 53 and 84 of them, plus every one you’re screened out of at the first few questions. There’s no way of knowing ahead of time how many of those there will be.
SurveyLama daily bonus
The daily bonus counter on SurveyLama tracks the surveys you finish in a day, up to 3. When it reaches 3/3, you instantly get an extra 20 LamaPoints (LP). It’s designed to bring you back to the site every day so you don’t break your streak.
To count as finished, you have to reach the final confirmation page. If the system drops you from a survey partway through (a screen out, their word for disqualification), the counter doesn’t move. You get 1 LP for your trouble, and that’s about it.
Every 100 LP is worth $1, so one LP is a cent and the full bonus is 20 cents. To earn the same amount from disqualifications, you’d have to get kicked out of 20 surveys! And spread over the 3 surveys you finished, the bonus doesn’t even add 7 cents per survey.
On the homepage, the bonus looks easy to get. But its job is to keep you on the site as long as possible, giving the companies SurveyLama works with as many responses as possible. It adds too little to your earnings to be worth factoring in.
If you were going to finish 3 surveys on a busy day anyway, you take the 20 points and move on. But spending hours on end trying to get the third one, with disqualifications coming one after another and the counter not budging, is a lot of work for 20 cents. There’s no way to know ahead of time how many disqualifications you’ll hit before you get there.
How do you get paid?
On SurveyLama, you earn points called LP, and 100 LP equals exactly $1 (I mentioned this above, too). The withdrawal confirmation buttons only become active once your balance reaches 2,000 LP, which is $20, and that threshold is the same for cash and gift cards.
Until you reach the threshold, you can’t withdraw anything. You can’t take out a single dollar as a test to check that the payment actually comes through, and you can’t cash out bits of what you’ve earned along the way. You need all 2,000 points from surveys before the first cent shows up in your account. How many surveys is that? It depends on how much each one pays, and you won’t know that ahead of time.
To me, $20 seems like a lot for a first withdrawal. I’ve also written on the blog about sites with lower thresholds, like Earnopolis, Timebucks, Attapoll, and Firefaucet.
Once you reach the threshold, you can pick from three categories. The one the page highlights is cash: PayPal International and a virtual Visa card. When you cash out, SurveyLama asks for your real first and last name, and it has to match the name on your verified PayPal account exactly. If it doesn’t, the payment won’t go through or will get stuck. If your PayPal account has two first names and you only enter one here, your 2,000 points just sit there! Copy the name directly from PayPal instead of typing it from memory.
The gift cards are from LEGO and Primark (so it’s either building bricks or clothes, and that’s it). You can also donate your points to Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, or Save the Children. The $20 threshold applies to cash and gift cards. Whether donations work with less than that, you’ll have to check in your account.
How much does SurveyLama pay?
Surveys on SurveyLama pay in points, called LP, and 100 points are worth one dollar. In the survey list I came across one that pays 24 LP and takes about a minute, and another that pays 38 LP and takes 4 minutes, so 24 and 38 cents. Per minute, the short one works out about two and a half times better (24 points versus roughly 9.5), even though it looks like the smaller offer on screen.
Right now, at the end of 2026, the homepage promises up to 20 euros per survey (or the equivalent in your currency) and up to 300 euros a month working from home. That 20 euros is dozens of times what the better of those surveys paid. The whole promise rests on that “up to”.
You have no way of knowing what you’ll make per hour, because surveys don’t keep coming for as long as you’re on the site. SurveyLama hands them out based on your shopper profile and where you live, and you only get the ones that match you that day, however much you’d like to work. Nobody guarantees you’ll ever have enough. If you count the 300 in dollars, that’s 30,000 LP, or roughly 790 surveys at 38 LP in a single month. Who gets that many? And who finishes all of them?
Because many of the ones that do show up end in disqualification. You spend 3-5 minutes on the questions at the start, where the site checks whether you’re who it’s looking for, and only then find out you’re not a match. For those minutes you get 1 LP as compensation.
One cent. The full one-minute survey paid 24!
The daily bonus depends on finished surveys too. You get 20 LP, exactly 20 cents, once you complete 3 surveys in the same day (disqualifications don’t count, since you didn’t finish those surveys). Finish 2 and get disqualified on the third? You get no bonus at all, not even part of it.
The minimum withdrawal is 2,000 LP, or 20 dollars. That takes about 53 completed surveys at 38 LP, or about 84 at 24 LP, not counting disqualifications along the way. The points trickle in from occasional visits to the site, and it takes a long time to reach the threshold.
What you end up with is a bit of pocket money, not something that could replace a part-time job. The 300 euros on the homepage is the best case they could put in an ad, and the average person sees far less in their account. Between the high withdrawal threshold and the frequent disqualifications, you’ll always be putting in a lot of time for the points you get.
Nobody can tell you ahead of time how quickly you’ll reach 2,000 LP, not even me. It depends on how many surveys come up for your profile and for the country you live in.
How do you ask for help?
When you have a problem on SurveyLama, there are two places to look: the help section and a message box right on the page.
The articles there are basic. They’re for someone who has just opened an account, not a library of technical explanations. They explain how to activate your account, how to answer the profile questions, how many points a survey is worth, and how to redeem points for gift cards or cash. In other words, the first steps and how points work, and that’s about it. They’re available in whichever language you choose for the site, and there are more than 40 language and region options to pick from (English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and plenty more). Over 40 languages for articles this simple?
The message box is titled “What can we do for you?” I typed my question into the text field, hit “SEND”, and my message turned into a ticket, which is a support request they reply to later. There’s no chat where you can talk to someone right away.
For a simple account question, a ticket is fine. But if you have trouble with a survey from one of the partner companies (the survey is theirs, not SurveyLama’s), that’s where everything stalls. Who do you even ask?
For anything to do with your account or points, check the articles first, because that’s exactly what they cover. If the problem is with a partner survey, put it in a ticket with as much detail as you can, and be patient.
SurveyLama on Trustpilot
Reviews of SurveyLama are spread across three sites, and the counts alone show how different they are. Trustpilot has about 33,000, with a rating of 4.2 out of 5. PissedConsumer has 13, averaging 2 stars, mostly about payments and the way the company communicates with people. PanelPlace has 12, written by people from all over the world. I divided 33,000 by 13 and got over 2,500. Those 13 unhappy voices are easy to miss in the Trustpilot crowd.
That crowd mostly tells the same story. SurveyLama is trustworthy and it pays, via PayPal or Amazon gift cards, even if the money is sometimes slow to show up (reviews keep saying they pay “eventually”). People also praise the site’s clean, uncluttered look and the bonus you get on any day you complete 3 surveys. Blogs that get paid for referrals say the same thing, but I trust them less, since, well, they have a stake in it.
But I’d put a small asterisk next to that 4.2. SurveyLama itself asks its members to leave a review. How much of that rating comes from people who would have written one anyway, and how much from people who were asked to? Would it be lower if they didn’t ask? You can’t tell that from what’s on the screen. What I could check was whether 5-star reviews came in bursts, posted back to back and following the same template, which is the usual sign that someone is inflating the rating. They didn’t.
In February 2024, SurveyLama had a major data breach. And yet its Trustpilot rating didn’t drop much afterward! For anyone who cares about their data (and I care a lot about mine), it’s still a serious trust issue. The breach is listed on haveibeenpwned.com, where you can check your email address if you have a SurveyLama account.
Complaints pile up on complaint sites, and the same ones keep coming up. What people write about most is the $20 withdrawal threshold, which is harder to reach than on the top sites, and disqualifications: getting kicked out of a survey halfway through, after you’ve already answered some of the questions and put time into them. PissedConsumer and Sikayetvar also mention blocked accounts, plus support messages that never got a reply. On Sikayetvar, it’s precisely the messages about pending payments that get ignored.
Red flags you should never ignore
SurveyLama can end up keeping the money you build up there. Several people on sikayetvar.com say their accounts were deactivated for “fraud” right after they requested a withdrawal, and they never got the money.
The $20 threshold means a longer wait before you get paid. Each survey adds to your balance, and the automated fraud-detection system has all that time to close your account. I have no way of knowing what criteria it uses to flag fraud. Cash out as soon as you hit the threshold!
User data has already been exposed once. The February 2024 breach you read about above leaked this data from 4.4 million accounts:
- email address
- name
- date of birth, which, unlike a password, you can’t change
- IP address
- phone number
- password, which the company reset after the incident
The breach is listed on haveibeenpwned.com, and both securityweek.com and bleepingcomputer.com have written about it. If you stop using the site, your data doesn’t disappear on its own. The privacy policy says automatic deletion of inactive accounts after 3 years, and of security logs after 12 months, is “planned, but not yet implemented” (GDPR, the EU’s data protection law, requires them not to keep data they no longer need). For your account here, pick a password you don’t use anywhere else.
Who can use SurveyLama?
You won’t find a list of accepted countries anywhere in SurveyLama’s rules. The site has separate regional versions, more than 40 of them, and you pick one from the footer at the bottom of the page, where the language and region settings are. If your country is listed there and the sign-up form opens for your IP address, you can make an account. So anyone living in Romania has just one thing to check before filling anything out: whether Romania shows up in that footer list.
The age requirement is simpler. You need to be at least 18 to sign up on your own, and if you’re younger, the law doesn’t allow you to have an account on the site. The account is free.
On the first form I entered my email and a password, and this is where I ran into a strict rule: between 6 and 20 characters, with at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, and one number. I get the minimum. The 20-character maximum I don’t really get, because a longer password is usually harder to guess, not easier.
Then the site took me to “General Information,” which asks for:
- first and last name
- gender, with the options “Male” and “Feminine” (a slightly odd pairing, “Feminine” rather than “Female,” but oh well)
- exact date of birth: day, month, and year
- full address, including street, city, and postal code
- PayPal email address
A full address and an exact date of birth are quite a lot for a survey site to ask for. The PayPal email gets tied to your profile for future withdrawals, and if you have more than one, enter the one for the account you actually want the money sent to.
The last step is confirming your email. You’ll see “Almost done” on the screen, they send a message to your inbox, and the surveys stay hidden until you click “Confirm my email address.”
Confirming also comes with your first points: 20 LamaPoints (LP), worth $0.20, since 100 LP equals $1 on their site. Filling out your profile adds another 10 LP, and you watch them show up in your balance one after another, as if you’d already racked something up. With 30 LP, or $0.30, you’re off to a quick start. But going by their numbers, the minimum withdrawal is $20, or 2,000 points, and after the bonus you’re still 1,970 points short. The bonus is 1.5% of that amount. How many surveys does it take to cover the rest?
The whole sign-up takes about 5 minutes, and no one asks for your phone number or a photo of your ID card. That’s at sign-up, anyway. Whether they ask for them later, when you try to cash out for the first time, remains to be seen.
Can you use it on your phone?
To get on SurveyLama from your phone, all you need is the browser you already have, Chrome or Safari. There’s nothing else to install, because the site doesn’t have an official app for either iOS or Android, and there’s nothing from them in the app stores.
You can still come across an app there with the SurveyLama name on it. It’s not from the people who run the site. Who put it there, then? And what do they do with the email and password you give them when you log in? I wouldn’t even give them my email!
I went straight to their official site in Chrome and logged into my account. The account page (they call it the dashboard, I just call it the account page) rearranges itself and shrinks to fit the phone screen. The main account links, the points history, and their partners’ survey pages all open in the same browser window, and you don’t have to drag the page from side to side. Nothing runs off the screen.
Your balance and how much you’ve collected so far show up just as clearly on the small screen as everything else, and you don’t have to pinch to zoom in on anything.
Is SurveyLama legit?
SurveyLama works as a second survey site to keep alongside a main one, and only if you have the patience for a fairly high payout threshold. It’s not a bad site. But it isn’t one of the best survey sites either.
And it does pay. The company is French, the site is available in many countries, and anyone who reaches the threshold gets their money. So many people confirm this on Trustpilot, one after another, that it would be unfair of me to call it a scam.
But surveys are the only way to earn on the site, and they don’t pay very much. The site says you can earn up to 20 euros per survey (or $10 in some countries). Two of the $10 ones would cover the entire $20 threshold. I haven’t gotten a single one yet, in euros or dollars.
Since the rewards are small, it takes a lot of surveys to reach $20, and that long stretch is exactly where their anti-fraud filters can catch you. These filters are very aggressive, and there are credible complaints from people who reached the threshold, requested a payout, and found their accounts blocked. Is that risk worth it for surveys that pay so little?
Then there are the ads. Almost everything you do in your account comes with an AdSense ad beside it (the banners the site makes money from too), as if every click costs you a look at an ad. On low-paying surveys, the ads eat up extra time, and none of it ends up in your balance.
If you do sign up anyway, pick a brand-new password you haven’t used anywhere else! The site had a data breach in 2024, and a reused password puts your accounts on other sites at risk too.
Do you already have a SurveyLama account? I’d love to hear in the comments how much you’ve earned so far and whether you’ve been paid!