Zap Surveys Review: Is It Legit and Worth Trying?

No, unfortunately, Zap Surveys isn’t worth it.

We discovered several serious issues with the site. Most importantly, the bulk of the rewards we earned when we used the desktop version of the site didn’t even arrive in our account, and when we contacted customer service, we never heard back.

The end result was that it took us an inordinately long time to earn just a few dollars, and we completed work that we never got paid for. This makes it impossible for us to recommend the site.

How much can you realistically earn?

We tested this app for about 17 hours. Here’s what we earned:

• Hourly rate: $0.39*
• Average time to redeem rewards ($10): More than 17 hours (not yet reached)
• Time to get paid: 1 business day**
• Poll completion rate: 9%***

*Our calculations of the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards include the $2 you get for signing up (when you complete the Welcome Survey). Pending rewards aren’t included.

**This is what Zap claims on their site; despite a full 17 hours of testing, we never earned enough to cash out, so we weren’t able to test this. 

***This rate includes only successful polls for which rewards were added to our balance.

Zap’s claims vs. our experience

Here’s a detailed look at Zap Surveys’ claims about how much you can earn and how they compare with our findings:

The hourly rate we calculated for our Zap Surveys earnings was greatly reduced by the huge loss we suffered after they failed to pay us for certain surveys (i.e., ones we completed on the desktop version of the site).

Zap Surveys never addressed this issue. To date, they have not replied to our messages; we waited for over a week before giving up.

There’s no guarantee other users won’t experience similar problems, so we’ve used our net profits (minus the missing rewards) to calculate the hourly rate you can expect to earn from the site.

Other pros and cons to consider

Try Zap Surveys Today

Alternatives to Zap Surveys

Zap Surveys 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:

• Branded Surveys
• Forthright
• InboxDollars
• InstaGC
• LifePoints
• MyPoints
• Opinion Outpost
• Prime Opinion
• Swagbucks
• Toluna Influencers
• ySense

Zap Surveys rewards are counted in dollars (not in points, like on some survey sites). This makes it easier to monitor your earnings—or lack thereof.

How much do you need to earn to get paid?

Initially, you’ll need at least $10 in rewards to redeem anything from Zap Surveys.

This is quite a high minimum threshold for payouts given Zap’s relatively low signup bonus and hourly rate. We’ve encountered sites that required us to earn $10+ to cash out before, but the better ones also couple this with higher pay, making it possible to cash out more quickly than you can on Zap Surveys.

For context, you can read our review of InboxDollars (linked above), a site that also has a relatively high withdrawal threshold but compensates by paying more.

How long does it take to get paid?

Zap Surveys gives somewhat contradictory information about how long it will take to receive your rewards once you cash out.

On one page of its FAQs, it says that most rewards will be sent within a business day. 1 On another, it says that PayPal payments take 1–2 business days (not including weekends or holidays). 2

This isn’t a particularly significant discrepancy, although we recommend not counting on Zap Surveys if you need money urgently. Expect to wait a day or two before it arrives.

Is there a limit on how much you can earn?

There’s no hard limit on how much you can earn on Zap Surveys. You’re only limited by the number of surveys you complete.

We did run out of surveys once, but we usually had enough to keep us earning for a couple of hours at a time.

Zap Surveys is a relatively simple site. It gives you three ways to earn money:

• Sign up (and complete the Welcome Survey)
• Take more surveys
• Invite friends

Sign up

To sign up for Zap Surveys, you have to enter an email address and password; alternatively, you can sign up with your Apple, Google, or Facebook account.

You also have to take a “Welcome Survey,” which unlocks the Profile Survey and the Bonus Tab. Zap Surveys says that the Welcome Survey takes just about 1 minute and pays $2.

The registration process is theoretically simple, but our tester had problems signing up, which we’ll describe in detail below.

Our experience

Our tester couldn’t sign up with her email address and password; she received an error message when she tried. She eventually got into the site by using her Google account.

It took us about three minutes to sign up for Zap Surveys and complete the Welcome Survey. We earned $2 for our trouble. To the site’s credit, that’s a respectable signup bonus.

Take surveys

As we’ve already mentioned, when you sign in to Zap Surveys for the first time, you’ll be prompted to take their Welcome Survey.

Afterward, you’ll also have a Profile Survey to complete. You’ll answer questions about yourself to give Zap Surveys a clearer idea of who you are.

Many rewards sites have similar questionnaires. These help them suggest suitable surveys for you to complete. Profile surveys don’t always yield rewards, but the Zap Surveys one does—a generous $0.50 for 12 easy questions.

Here are the other types of surveys available on the site:

• Daily Surveys: These pay you for your opinion on a wide variety of topics, ranging from snacks to banking. You can also get bonuses for doing them.
• High-Value Surveys: As you might expect, these are longer surveys that pay more.
• Best Match Surveys: These surveys are tailored to your demographics, so you’re more likely to qualify for them.
• Interest Surveys: Zap Surveys allows you to select your interests (e.g., cars, fashion, finance, etc.) and will send you surveys that relate to them. You can update your interests later if you get bored with a topic or want to add a new one to your list.
• Location-Based Surveys: Zap Surveys says that these are “higher paying and more relevant to you based on your location.” 3 To take them, you have to turn on notifications and allow location tracking on your phone, then visit restaurants and stores. Zap Surveys will send you surveys asking about your experience at the locations you visited.
• Short Surveys: These take just a few minutes to complete. They usually pay less than longer surveys.

Each survey features a label indicating what it will cover. Examples include:

• Entertainment
• Food
• Home
• Children
• Sociology
• Technology
• Cars
• Gambling

You aren’t guaranteed to qualify for every survey that Zap Surveys displays; consequently, surveys may also feature labels like “Great/Good/Fair profile match” to indicate how likely you are to qualify for them. Some may just be labeled “New survey.”

Notably, Zap Surveys sometimes gives you rewards when you click into a survey and find out that you don’t qualify. Not all survey sites do this, so it’s nice when it happens. However, given that we lost several hours’ worth of rewards—including a lot of our consolation rewards for failed surveys—we still weren’t impressed.

Our experience

Our Profile Survey got stuck for a short period when we tried to access it, so it took longer than expected. That said, we still only spent about 3 minutes on it, and, as promised, we earned $0.50 for completing it.

After this, we started to have major problems.

We spent about 12½ hours testing Zap’s desktop site and found that none of the rewards Zap Surveys said we’d earned were appearing on our balance.

Some sites take a few hours or even days to credit users’ rewards to their accounts, so this didn’t seem too unusual at first. However, when we tried taking surveys on the mobile app, the rewards were added to our account balance immediately, which made us suspicious.

We contacted Zap Surveys’ customer service twice to establish what happened to our rewards. We waited over a week (10 days) for a response before giving up.

We still haven’t received any of the rewards our tester should have earned on the desktop version of the site.

Survey roundup: All told, not counting the Welcome Survey and Profile Survey, we completed 64 surveys on Zap. Here’s what happened:

• 6 were successful and gave us rewards.
• 9 failed (e.g., disqualified us or gave us an error message) but gave us $0.02 for trying.
• 19 said they were successful, but the rewards didn’t appear on our balance.
• 20 were unsuccessful and said they had given us $0.02 for trying, but these rewards also didn’t appear on our balance.
• 9 failed and gave us no rewards.
• 1 didn’t make it clear whether the survey had worked or not. It didn’t give us rewards.

Invite friends

You can earn rewards on Zap Surveys by inviting your friends to join the site. Zap will give you a link you can use to invite people, and you’ll get a bonus equivalent to a percentage of your referrals’ “qualified earnings,” which mainly consist of earnings from completed surveys. 4

For the first 10 people you invite, you’ll get a bonus equivalent to 10% of their earnings from completed surveys. After that, your bonus will drop to 5%.

Our experience

We didn’t invite any friends to join Zap Surveys, so we didn’t test this feature.

There are a few features on Zap Surveys that can help you improve your earnings.

However, Zap’s bonus system can be confusing. For example, you can get multiple bonuses for a single achievement. This makes it hard to keep track of which bonus is which.

We also couldn’t find all of the bonus features on the desktop site that we saw on the mobile app.

Our overall experience with Zap’s bonus programs

Since we lost rewards that we should have earned on the desktop version of Zap Surveys, we also lost their corresponding bonuses. Even on the mobile app, we found that some of the bonus rewards that Zap promised us didn’t materialize.

This meant we had a bad experience with what might otherwise have been solid bonus programs.

Daily Cash

This feature promises you cash every day for two different tasks:

• The Daily Check-in: This gives you a few cents just for logging in and clicking on a button like the one shown in the screenshot.
• Daily Survey: This is a survey that Zap Surveys suggests to you each day. It gives you a bonus when you complete it.

Our experience

Strangely, although most of our survey rewards didn’t reach our account, we received all of the points we earned from the Daily Check-in, even when we were using the desktop version of the site. We clicked on Daily Cash every time we logged in and earned 1–3 cents each time.

We also tried to get bonuses for taking the Daily Survey. However, the survey usually either disqualified us or gave us an error message, so we got only a couple of cents or nothing at all.

We managed to actually complete the Daily Survey on just one occasion. We should have received a bonus of $0.19 (in addition to the regular payment of $0.40 for completing the survey). However, we didn’t receive the bonus.

Earn Zapper’s Rewards

The Zapper’s Rewards tab gives you ways to earn bonus rewards.

• Daily Surveys: This gives you extra rewards for completing a set number of surveys in a day.
• Logins in a row: This gives you extra rewards for logging in multiple days in a row and clicking on “Claim.” (The number of days you’ll need to log in depends on the whims of Zap Surveys.)
• Survey Boosts: This feature gives you extra rewards for earning a certain amount from surveys.

Our experience

Here are a few examples of the bonus offers we saw (some of which we completed):

• Daily Surveys: We received an offer to earn a $0.25 bonus if we successfully completed two Daily Surveys. However, we never achieved this goal; as mentioned, one of the Daily Surveys we completed on the desktop version of the site wasn’t counted toward our progress, so only one went on record.
• Logins in a row: On one occasion, we logged in two days in a row and got a $0.05 reward simply for clicking “Claim.” Confusingly, we got a second bonus in another category (the Zap Goals category described in the next section) for the same achievement.
• Survey Boost: We got an offer to earn either a flat $0.25 or a 50% survey boost for two hours (i.e., 50% extra rewards for all surveys completed for the next two hours) if we earned $1 from surveys. We chose the 50% survey boost and then successfully completed three surveys, but we didn’t get the promised bonus rewards.

Overall, although we had a few successes, we struck out on enough bonuses to form an overall negative impression of this set of features.

Achieve Zap Goals

We couldn’t find this feature on the desktop version of the site. However, on the mobile app, it’s available on the page you see when you click the green button labeled “Zap” (at the bottom of the screen).

There are two types of Zap Goals:

1. Assorted goals (such as logging in multiple days in a row or increasing your earnings by a certain amount) that you can use to get bonus rewards, plus a type of credit that’s aptly called “Zap.”
2. A target for the Zap credit you get by completing the first type of Zap Goals, described above. When you collect a certain amount of Zap, you get a cash reward.

Our experience

We were given the following Zap Goals:

• Goal #1: We got our first Zap Goals bonus of $0.03 and 10 Zap credits for logging in and clicking on “Claim” two days in a row. As we’ve already mentioned, we got two bonuses for this achievement, since we got another bonus in the Zapper’s Rewards category. This was welcome, but confusing.
• Goal #2: After our double login triumph, the next goal was to increase our balance by $0.50 to earn $0.05 and 15 Zap credits. We also succeeded in doing this, giving us 25 Zap credits in total.
• Goal #3: This goal offered us a $0.05 bonus and 5 Zap credits for increasing our balance by a further $0.30. We did not reach this goal.

Zap Surveys promised us a sizable $10 bonus for collecting 500 Zap credits. However, since we only managed to collect 25 credits, we didn’t get very far with this.

Level up in the Zap Elite Rewards Program

Zap Surveys’ Elite Rewards Program allows you to get bonuses for graduating through the following tiers:

We couldn’t find specifics about how the survey boost works. We assume it’s similar to bonuses we’ve seen on other sites; these usually give you add-ons to the rewards you earn from successful surveys, but not to rewards you earn from bonuses or referrals.

Our experience

We managed to reach the Silver tier on the Zap Surveys Elite Rewards Program. However, we didn’t see the corresponding 5% bonus reflected in our account history.

It’s possible that the bonus rewards are still pending—Zap Surveys doesn’t clearly state whether bonus rewards have a waiting period (or, if so, how long it is). Given our overall impression of the site, we aren’t holding our breath.

There are several ways to claim your rewards on Zap Surveys:

• PayPal
• Mastercard
• Gift cards

PayPal

PayPal is one of the most flexible ways to redeem your rewards on sites like Zap Surveys. You may need to link your PayPal account to your Zap account (by logging in to your PayPal) to use this withdrawal method. You may also need to verify your email address and possibly your home address.

Mastercard

You can also redeem your Zap rewards in the form of a virtual prepaid Mastercard card. Virtual prepaid cards are good for shopping online, although you can add them to your mobile wallet or a digital payment service to use in physical stores that accept contactless payments.

Gift cards

The gift card options on Zap Surveys are unusually limited, with just a few retailers on offer. What’s more, we couldn’t see all of them on the desktop version of the site—only on the mobile app.

Amazon gift cards were available as a redemption option on the Zap Surveys desktop site as well as on the mobile app.