August 12, 2024
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Experts in this article:
Anastasia is a Software QA Tester with 3+ years of hands-on experience performing different types of testing not limited to...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
LifePoints is a site where you can answer surveys about all sorts of brands and products to earn rewards in the form of gift cards and Venmo and PayPal credit.
LifePoints has been operating for almost 80 years and is used by 5,000,000 people, but is it a good option for making money?
Our professional tester gave us the scoop.
You might want to try out LifePoints if you enjoy taking surveys and have already maxed out your earnings on its higher-paying competitors.
That said, there are many better ways to earn money than through survey sites. You should consider other popular side hustle ideas if you want a faster way to boost your income.
We tested LifePoints for about 3¼ hours. Here’s what we found.
*Our calculations of the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards include the signup bonus of approximately 14 cents. Any pending rewards are excluded.
$1.95 per hour isn’t the best rate, but it’s better than some other survey sites we’ve tried.
LifePoints provides estimates of how much you can earn through their site. We investigated their claims and found the following: 1
| What LifePoints says | What we found |
|---|---|
| You can make at least $3 every day. | At the hourly rate of $1.95, you can probably get close to $3 a day if you spend around 1.5 hours on LifePoints. |
| Casual users earn $25 to $100 in PayPal credit or gift cards every month. | If you spend an hour on the site around 3 times a week, you can probably earn over $25, so this estimate is reasonable for casual users. |
| It’s possible to make $1,500+ a year with paid surveys. | It would be possible to make $1,500+ a year on LifePoints, but you’d probably have to commit to doing more than 2 hours of surveys a day. |
Our findings matched LifePoints’ claims fairly closely, which was a pleasant surprise (many survey-taking websites significantly exaggerate how much you can earn).
LifePoints isn’t the only game in town. If you’re interested in learning about other platforms that will pay you to take surveys and complete other small tasks, check out our reviews of:
On LifePoints, you collect points (which are called “LifePoints” or “LPs”) to earn rewards.
Briefly, one LP is worth 0.87–0.91 cents.
That said, the LifePoints system for points redemption is a bit tricky. The exact value of a point depends on your redemption method.
If you redeem via gift cards: 110 LPs are equivalent to $1. This means each LP is worth about 0.91 cents.
If you redeem via PayPal or Venmo: The exchange rate is less favorable. You can get $5 in PayPal or Venmo credit for 575 LPs; this means 115 LPs are equivalent to $1, or each LP is worth about 0.87 cents.
To redeem your LifePoints, you need at least $5 worth of rewards.
LifePoints says that it can take up to 10 days to receive your digital gift card or PayPal cash payment, but that the average PayPal payment takes 5 days. 1
No, there’s no limit to the number of LifePoints surveys you can complete in a day, and consequently no hard limit on what you can earn. 1 We didn’t run out of surveys at any point while we were testing the platform.
Of course, given LifePoints’ relatively low hourly rate, earning more than a few dollars per day on the platform isn’t practical.
You can earn rewards through LifePoints in the following ways:
When you sign up for LifePoints, you have to provide the following information:
You also have to create a password. You’ll then get 10 free LPs for signing up (worth about 9 cents).
After this, you have to click on a link that says “Let’s find surveys” to complete an initial questionnaire known as a “profile survey.” This type of survey, which you’ll also find on LifePoints’ competitors, is designed to help the platform select more surveys that will be suitable for you.
In this case, you have to complete five questions, worth another 5 LPs, to get access to more LifePoints surveys.
We had no problems signing up for LifePoints. It took us just a couple of minutes, and we got our 10 LPs (worth about 9 cents) at the end as promised.
We then received another 5 LPs for completing our profile, so we received 15 LPs in total for signing up—equivalent to about 13–14 cents.
This is one of the worst signup bonuses we’ve seen. By contrast, InboxDollars offers $5, and another popular survey site, Swagbucks, offers $2.50.
Unlike many of its competitors, which also feature other small tasks and games that you can do to earn rewards, LifePoints is almost entirely dedicated to surveys.
LifePoints doesn’t separate its surveys into different categories (e.g., shorter vs. longer surveys, or surveys on different topics).
However, if you click on “More about you” on the LifePoints dashboard, you can complete more “profile survey” questions. As we’ve mentioned, these are designed to help the platform select surveys that will be relevant to you. LifePoints gives you 1 LP for each question you answer.
Notably, LifePoints sometimes gives you 2 LPs when you’re disqualified for a survey. Not all survey sites give you consolation points for failed surveys, so this is one advantage of using LifePoints.
We managed to earn 101 LPs by answering “More about you” questions. On one of our attempts, the app crashed, and we wasted 4 minutes without getting any points. However, in general, this type of survey provided a fairly reliable way to earn rewards.
Of the 26 other surveys we completed:
Although the surveys that rejected us usually wasted only a couple of minutes of our time, our success rate for completed surveys was just about 23% on LifePoints, which is quite low compared with some other rewards sites we’ve tried.
Best survey experience: $5.45 per hour
The best survey we took gave us 50 LPs for 5 minutes’ work, which would have been equivalent to a rate of more than $5.45 per hour if it was sustainable. Unfortunately, this rate wasn’t matched by the other surveys we took.
Worst survey experience: $0 per hour (disqualified with no points)
The worst survey we took was one that we spent a couple of minutes on. After we answered several questions, we received a message saying that the survey was “full” and we got no points at all for our efforts.
These are polls consisting of one question you can answer very quickly. You only get 1 LP for them (worth about 0.9 cents), but they’re easy enough that they’re worth doing.
However, LifePoints’ Quick Polls seem to crop up randomly, unlike on other sites, where you can usually do them every day or several times a week at a regular intervals.
We were presented with Quick Polls very occasionally. We got 1 LP (worth about 0.9 cents) as promised for completing each one, but we learned to treat this as a small, infrequent bonus, not a reliable source of rewards.
LifePoints allows members to enter weekly giveaways that offer chances to win free cash and prizes. LifePoints says that the prizes for these giveaways vary but that they can reach $50 worth of rewards. 1
You can find these draws and giveaways in the community tab on both the website and the app.
We didn’t get to try out this feature. When we looked for opportunities to enter, we saw a quiz and some puzzles and simple games (e.g., guessing the outcome of a virtual coin flip). However, we had missed the deadline to participate.
During the nine days we spent testing, we didn’t see any current opportunities to enter prize draws or giveaways, so this feature doesn’t seem to be available very often.
We found the following options for points redemption on LifePoints.
One way to redeem your LifePoints rewards is as a charity donation. One advantage of this option is that you can sometimes redeem smaller amounts of $1 or $3 (for 110 LPs and 330 LPs, respectively), as well as larger ones of $5 or $10 (for 550 LPs and 1100 LPs, respectively).
We saw several charity donation options:
It’s possible to receive your LifePoints rewards as PayPal credit. According to LifePoints, this is one of their more popular redemption options.
You need to link your PayPal account with your LifePoints account to redeem rewards in this way.
The minimum redemption amount is $5 (which costs 575 LPs), but you can also redeem larger amounts at a time.
LifePoints says that PayPal rewards can take up to five days to reach your account. We redeemed our points via PayPal, and it took about four days to receive our payment.
You need to link your Venmo account with your LifePoints account to redeem rewards as Venmo credit. In most respects, this works the same way as the platform’s PayPal redemption option.
As with PayPal, the minimum redemption amount is $5 (which costs 575 LPs), with larger amounts also available, and rewards can take up to five days to reach your account.
It’s possible to cash in your LPs for gift cards for various retailers. We saw 11 options, which wasn’t as many as we expected (several other survey websites feature significantly more).
However, there were still plenty of popular retailers to choose from, including:
Note that different retailers have different thresholds for redemption, but the minimum amount is usually $5 or $10 (with $5 cards usually priced at 550 LPs and $10 cards at 1,100 LPs).
November 22, 2024
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