April 11, 2024
Editorial Guidelines
Experts in this article:
Sophia is a software QA Tester and web developer with experience testing multiple survey and task apps. She has two years of...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
ySense is an online rewards website where you can make extra money with paid online surveys, cash offers, and other quick tasks.
It’s a global platform with users in many countries around the world. But is it worth signing up for?
We sent our professional tester to find out.
ySense pays a low hourly rate compared to other, similar platforms, so it probably isn’t worth it unless you’re having problems signing up for other rewards sites.
That said, one notable advantage of ySense is that it works in many different countries, so you might want to try it if you need a site you can use while traveling abroad. You can find a non-exhaustive list of the countries they operate in on one of ySense’s help pages.
ySense claims to be “one of the most lucrative affiliate programs.” However, they don’t provide a concrete estimate of how much you can earn on their platform, and the number of factors that affect your earnings (e.g., how often you log in, how many referrals you have, and how many tasks you and your referrals complete) make this hard to anticipate. 1
We tested ySense for about 19 hours. Here’s what we found:
*Our calculations of the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards include the signup bonus of $0.05. Pending rewards aren’t included.
Our tester’s findings suggest that casual users can usually expect to earn just a couple of dollars a week or around $10 per month. This isn’t much, and many other platforms will give you better rewards.
Note that the hourly rate we calculated for ySense ($0.83) did not include two high-paying surveys, which gave us $20 and $5. That’s because ySense said that these rewards would take 45–60 days to arrive, and we felt that most people wouldn’t want to wait this long to enjoy the fruits of their side hustle.
Get ySense for iOS Get ySense for Android
ySense 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:
ySense rewards are counted in dollars (not in points, like on some survey sites). This is a plus, as it makes it easier to tell how much you’ve earned.
Initially, you’ll need to earn $15 or more to get paid on ySense. When we first checked the options for cashing out, everything was in denominations of $15 or more.
However, when we checked back after redeeming our first rewards, there were lower denominations available—some as low as $3. This means you’ll be able to redeem rewards more quickly after your first payout.
ySense says that, in general, payouts take up to 10 business days to process, although they can take even longer.
For new account holders (who signed up less than 30 days prior), ySense warns that there may be extra delays. The wording on their website isn’t very clear, but it seems like cashouts by new account holders could take up to 15 business days from the date you submit the request. 2
No, there’s no hard limit on how much you can earn from ySense. They say that users have “unlimited earnings potential.” 3
However, there are limits on how often you can take advantage of certain offers. For example, one offer we signed up for said that it could only be redeemed once per month and up to six times in total.
In practice, although there’s no hard cap on your earnings, there are limits to how much you can realistically expect to make on the ySense platform (especially if you spend just a couple hours per day using it, like most users will).
Here are the ways you can earn money with ySense:
To sign up for ySense, you have to provide your email and real name, and you have to create a password and username for your account. ySense will send you an email with a link to activate it.
You then have to complete a “Survey Profile,” which is required to unlock ySense’s other surveys. To do this, you’ll answer questions about your date of birth, education level, job, household, and more.
It took us a couple of minutes to sign up for ySense and then about 5 minutes to complete the Survey Profile. We earned a measly $0.05 for our efforts—a very low payout when compared with the signup bonuses from ySense’s competitors.
Once you’ve completed the aforementioned Survey Profile, you’ll be able to take surveys under the main “Surveys” tab. The first ones you’ll see are the normal surveys offered by ySense.
You’ll see different sections for surveys from other market research firms partnering with ySense:
These don’t seem to differ much from the normal ySense surveys. In particular, ySense’s partners’ surveys still count toward the bonus program that ySense offers (which we’ll go into more detail about in a later section) in the same way that normal ySense surveys do.
Under the partner surveys, you should see a section for “Daily Survey Routers.” Survey routers allocate questions according to the answers you’ve given so far, so they’re supposed to provide you with surveys that are better tailored to your lifestyle or interests.
Finally, under the Daily Survey Routers, you’ll find more Survey Profile questions. These are supposed to help ySense recommend the best surveys for you, which should mean that you’re less likely to get disqualified from them (although there’s no way to test whether this works in practice). Survey Profile questions pay 2 cents per 10 questions you answer.
You can find additional surveys in the “Offers” tab on ySense. This tab has pages with selections of offers, referred to as “OfferWalls,” from several other companies (e.g., RevU, Wannads, and Hang My Ads), some of which feature surveys.
We dedicated about 13 minutes to completing Survey Profile questions on ySense (in addition to the initial Survey Profile that we completed while signing up), and we earned $0.10 for our efforts.
After this, we attempted another 92 surveys. These included normal ySense surveys, CPX Surveys, Bitlabs Surveys, Pollfish Surveys, and a Daily Survey Router.
Here’s what happened:
We also tried to take surveys on the “Wannads” section of the “Offers” tab. We spent about 15 minutes trying to earn rewards from this feature; we clicked on one of the survey links available and answered a number of questions, but we gave up after a couple of failures, as shown below.
All told, our survey-taking experience on ySense was pretty poor, with the number of failures far exceeding the number of successes. All of this wasted time significantly dragged down our hourly rate.
Best survey experience: $4.65–$12.50 per hour
We’ve already mentioned the best survey we took on ySense. We earned $5 for it, and it took us 24 minutes, meaning that we earned an effective hourly rate of $12.50. However, ySense said that we had to wait 45 days for these rewards to be credited to our account, a very long waiting period.
Another high-paying survey we completed took us 1 hour and 54 minutes and promised us a $20 reward; this means we earned an hourly rate of $10.53. However, we were told we’d have to wait even longer for this reward, which ySense said would be credited after 60 days.
Of the surveys that have already paid us, the best earner was a Bitlab Survey that awarded us $0.62 for 8 minutes’ work, equivalent to an hourly rate of $4.65.
Worst survey experience: $0 per hour (error messages or disqualifications with no rewards)
Of the surveys we took, there were many that we wasted a lot of time on (5–10+ minutes) without receiving any rewards. The worst was one we spent 23 minutes on, only to be disqualified.
ySense has Daily Polls you can answer to get small but easy rewards. Daily Polls consist of one multiple-choice question you can answer to earn 1 cent.
You can only complete the Daily Poll on the desktop version of the site. It’s not available in the app.
We answered the Daily Poll several times and received a $0.01 reward each time, as promised.
ySense features many offers that you can use to earn rewards. These include signing up to receive email offers, subscribing to services, taking quizzes, and more. Some of the offers (especially the high-paying ones) may require you to spend money; however, there are also many freebies.
ySense has a selection of its own offers, and there are also other companies with their own “OfferWalls” (i.e., a selection of offers) on ySense. These companies include:
Note that many of the offers on ySense won’t pay out your rewards immediately. You may have to wait up to a week (or even more) to get paid.
We tried out several offers on ySense in an attempt to earn rewards:
We didn’t explore all of the OfferWalls for the other companies on ySense, but we were unimpressed by the ones we did investigate. Many offers didn’t work for us; others sent us bouncing from one OfferWall to another.
Here’s what happened with some of the deals we tried on Lootably, none of which gave us any rewards:
We also tried out several raffles on the Wannads OfferWall. We earned absolutely nothing for any of these.
All told, trying to complete offers from ySense’s partners was a frustrating experience and not a very good way to earn rewards. We recommend focusing on other sections of the site (although, as you’re probably gathering, these come with their own problems, too).
ySense doesn’t have a “Games” tab like we’ve seen on similar sites. However, there are many games available under the “Offers” tab.
We didn’t see any games you could play without installing a new app onto your mobile device, which is a black mark against ySense if you want to get rewarded without cluttering up your phone or if you simply prefer using your desktop to earn rewards.
We found many games among the offers from “MyChips” (one of ySense’s partners).
Our tester played a game called “Sweet Fruit Tasty Match Puzzle.” This promised 3 cents for reaching level 30, but our tester only reached level 2 after 12 minutes of playing. It would take almost 6 hours to earn 3 cents at this rate—not worth it unless you were already very keen to play the game.
The ySense blog sometimes features competitions that let you win prizes. It’s not clear whether these are usually awarded as ySense credit or separately (e.g., as a check or as credit you can redeem via RevU).
Contests aren’t the most reliable way to earn rewards on ySense, as they happen only sporadically. All the same, it’s worth checking the blog now and then to see whether there’s anything similar to the competitions our tester found.
Our tester checked the ySense blog and found two competitions.
One was to win a “share” of $3,500 (with the exact size of the reward being unclear) by completing offers with RevU, one of the companies that features offers on ySense. There was also mention of a three-day reward-boost offer giving you triple rewards for every RevU task you complete. Unfortunately, this competition had expired the week before, so we couldn’t enter.
The other competition our tester found was to win a share of $2,500 by completing RevU offers. This offer had expired more than three months prior, so it was another dead end.
You can get rewards for referring your friends to ySense if they fulfill certain conditions.
If they sign up using a referral link you send them and they then “become active,” you’ll get $0.10 or $0.30. However, ySense doesn’t specify exactly what “active” means, only that there are certain conditions involved, which include “performing 3 distinct actions on 3 distinct (different) days.”
Once your referrals earn their first $5 (excluding commissions and bonuses), you’ll also earn an extra $2 bonus. For every “approved” survey, offer, and task your referrals complete, you’ll also earn a 20% cut of their earnings; however, ySense also doesn’t specify what “approved” means, so it’s unclear how much you can actually expect.
There are also extra commissions available if you refer more than 100 people.
We referred someone, but we didn’t receive a referral bonus for it. Our referral completed the Profile Survey and signed into the site a few times to check it out, which evidently wasn’t enough to meet ySense’s conditions.
ySense has extra features to help you make more money:
My Bonuses are cashback offers that boost your earning potential. You can find them under “More” on the desktop version of the site (we couldn’t find them in the app).
They’re not always available, but it’s worth checking whether you have any offers. If you do, click on “Activate” to make sure you can use them later.
We checked My Bonuses a few times, but we never had any offers available.
ySense has a browser extension or “Addon.” Its purpose is to give members earlier access to surveys and tasks. 4 It shows your earnings for the past two days, along with your total earnings; it also shows the number of surveys available to you.
We installed the ySense browser Addon and ran it several times while we were testing. Doing this gave us a tiny bit of help with earning bonuses (which we’ll go into more detail about in the next section on ySense’s Daily Checklist bonus program).
The ySense Daily Checklist is a to-do list you can use to get bonus rewards for completing certain tasks each day.
To complete the Daily Checklist you can do either of the following:
For each day that you complete your Daily Checklist, you’ll get a bonus of 12%–16% added to your account balance at the end of that day.
This table shows you exactly how much you can earn for completing the Daily Checklist and getting other extra bonuses by running the ySense browser extension and achieving streaks (where you complete the Daily Checklist on three consecutive days).
| Bonus type | Bonus amount |
|---|---|
| Daily Checklist Bonus | 12.0% |
| ySense Addon Extra Bonus* | 2.0% |
| Activity Extra Bonus** | 2.0% |
| Maximum total bonus | 16.0% |
* ySense Addon Extra Bonus: You get this bonus if you complete the Daily Checklist and run the ySense Addon (i.e., the browser extension) for at least one hour in a given day. Note that you must enable survey notifications under “Options” to get this bonus.
** Activity Extra Bonus: You get this bonus by completing the Daily Checklist three days in a row. Once you reach the three-day milestone, you’ll get this extra bonus on the third day for that day’s earnings. You’ll then continue to get the bonus every other day thereafter if you complete the checklist without any breaks.
Once you’ve completed a three-day streak (i.e., had three days in a row where you’ve completed the Daily Checklist), the Activity Extra Bonus mentioned above will reset if you fail to complete the Daily Checklist on a given day.
To illustrate this, ySense’s site provides the following example (each column represents a day): 5
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checklist completed on this day? | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Activity bonus awarded? | X | X | ✓ | ✓ | X | X | X | ✓ |
One thing we liked about ySense bonuses is that you get them immediately and automatically. On other sites we’ve tested, the bonus programs make you wait till the following month to claim the extra rewards, and you have to remember to do this manually before a specific deadline (or lose out if you forget). ySense’s simple bonus system is one of the few advantages of the site.
The bonuses you can earn on ySense are unlimited; they depend only on your activity.
We earned a few Checklist Bonuses. Most of these were for completing two or more surveys in a day, which qualified us for the normal 12% Checklist Bonus.
On several occasions, we also received an extra 2% for running the ySense browser extension, and we once got a 16% bonus (12% + 2% + 2%) for achieving a three-day streak on top of that.
Taking surveys is the most straightforward way to get the Checklist Bonus, although you may have to spend a lot of time trying to qualify for at least two (since you won’t qualify for every survey you enter).
Getting the Checklist Bonus for offers is more hit-and-miss since these often pay out belatedly. We only got one Checklist Bonus for completing offers, and this was on a day when we received rewards for offers we’d completed on a previous day.
Because of this system, you can only be sure your offers will qualify you for the Checklist Bonus if they yield immediate rewards.
There are a couple of different methods for claiming your rewards on ySense:
You can redeem your ySense rewards as a gift card. There are dozens of retailers to choose from, including:
We also saw a few airline gift cards on ySense, which we thought was an interesting way to redeem rewards. However, all of the denominations we saw were quite high, so you’ll need to do a lot of work to get these:
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough rewards for any of these options, so we opted to cash out our earnings in the form of an Amazon gift card.
We saw several electronic payment options on ySense. You can use these services for shopping online where they’re accepted, or you can add them to your mobile wallet or digital payment services to use in physical stores that accept contactless payments.
The electronic cashout options are:
Note that there may be fees associated with these services, which will vary depending on the service and on how you want to spend or withdraw the money.
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