Zoombucks: Is It Legit and Worth Taking Surveys On?

No, using Zoombucks isn’t worth it for most people. The signup bonus is meager, and the hourly rate is also quite poor.

Zoombucks does have one saving grace: it will pay you very quickly. We managed to redeem $1 in PayPal credit after spending just over an hour on the site, and the money reached us by the end of that same day, so the platform’s payouts are pretty speedy, even if they’re not particularly large.

How much can you realistically earn?

We tested Zoombucks for almost 4½ hours. Here’s what we earned on the site:

• Hourly rate: $0.37
• Average time to redeem rewards ($1): Just over 1 hour*
• Time to get paid: Up to 4 business days

*We’ve calculated the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards including the $0.45 signup bonus.

If Zoombucks is to be believed, many of their members earn as much as 20,000 points per day (equivalent to $20). 1 However, it took us over an hour to earn $1, and this was including the $0.45 signup bonus, so we don’t find this claim believable.

Zoombucks is just one of many platforms that will pay you to take surveys and complete other small tasks. Here are our reviews of some of the others you might want to investigate:

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

Zoombucks gives you points for completing surveys and other tasks on the site. You can then redeem these points as rewards.

How much are points worth on Zoombucks?

On Zoombucks, 1 point is worth 0.1 cents ($0.001), so 1,000 points are worth $1.

How much do you need to earn to get paid?

You’ll probably only need to earn $1 to get paid on Zoombucks. Zoombucks led us to believe that $2 was the minimum redemption threshold (during a tour of the site’s features that we took after we signed up). However, we managed to redeem via PayPal with just $1 (1,000 points).

How long does it take to get paid?

Zoombucks gives conflicting information about withdrawal times.

Some help pages say that gift cards take 1–3 days to reach you. 2 The blurb for the Zoombucks app on Google Play says that Zoombucks pays within 24–48 hours, and the FAQ section on the Zoombucks site says that some rewards take up to 4 business days to arrive.

When we withdrew money via PayPal, Zoombucks told us that the payment would take 2–3 business days to come through. However, we got our money faster than expected (within a day).

If our experience is anything to go by, it seems like you might get your Zoombucks payment very fast. Nonetheless, you’re still probably best off allowing a few days of leeway in case some payment methods take longer—or if you’re just not as lucky as we were.

Is there a limit on how much you can earn?

Zoombucks doesn’t specify any particular limit on how much you can earn from their site.

To get a better idea of the maximum amounts that users earn in practice, we viewed the Zoombucks leaderboard. As you might expect, this shows rankings for Zoombucks users who have earned the most points.

We checked the leaderboard several times. The largest point balances we saw were around 347,000 points (equivalent to about $347) earned in a day, and about 930,000 (equivalent to about $930) earned in a month.

Given our experience (we earned much less), these scores are hard for us to believe. They establish a possible upper bound on what you can make on Zoombucks, but we wouldn’t recommend counting on earning anything close to that.

There are a few different ways to earn money on Zoombucks:

• Sign up
• Take surveys
• Sign up for offers
• Watch videos

Sign up

When you sign up for Zoombucks, you have to provide an email address and password (or you can use your Google or Facebook account to sign up).

You then have to provide some of your personal information, including your:

• Name
• Gender
• Birthday
• Address

After you provide your personal details, Zoombucks will propose other tasks you can do to earn more rewards. The most important one involves answering questions in the “About Me” section; you have to complete this step before you can access all of Zoombucks’ surveys.

You can also verify your email address and take the “How Does It Work Tour,” which gives you a guide to the basic features of the site.

Our experience

Signing up for Zoombucks took us less than 20 minutes. However, we were confused by the signup rewards. Zoombucks promised us a $1 bonus after we joined the site, but we only got 20 points (equivalent to 2 cents) after we completed the first stage of signup.

As mentioned, there were more points available for the tasks that Zoombucks suggested we do next, but the rewards for these tasks added up to 430 points (equivalent to 43 cents) rather than 1,000 points (which would be equivalent to $1), meaning that the whole signup process was worth only 45 cents in total.

Nonetheless, we completed all of these tasks, which included:

• Confirming our email address: This took about a minute, and we earned 20 points (2 cents).
• Taking the “How Does It Work Tour”: This also took about a minute, and we earned 10 points (1 cent).
• Completing questions in the “About Me” section: This took us 12 minutes and paid us 400 points ($0.40).

Take surveys

The most obvious way to earn money on Zoombucks is by taking surveys.

As we’ve already mentioned, you should start by taking the “About Me” survey that Zoombucks makes you do to unlock all of its other surveys. You’ll also need to provide and verify your phone number.

You should then see a selection of surveys with information about how much they pay (although no info about how long they’ll take).

Zoombucks also has third-party survey partners that they include on their site to give you even more earning opportunities. These are in the “Survey Partners” section under the “Earn” tab.

Our experience

After signing up, confirming our email, completing the aforementioned “About Me” section, and taking a tour of the Zoombucks site, we took our first survey.

In total, we attempted 10 surveys from the “Exclusive Surveys” section of Zoombucks’ survey page (under the “Earn” tab); we also explored another section called “Survey Partners” further down the page.

Of the 10 surveys we took in the “Exclusive Surveys” section of Zoombucks:

• We completed two (and earned the rewards promised).
• Three disqualified us and gave us no rewards.
• Four disqualified us but gave us points for trying (6–7 points, equivalent to 0.6–0.7 cents).
• One gave us an error message and refused to load.

In the “Survey Partners” section of Zoombucks’ Earn tab, we tried surveys from a provider called TheoremReach. We earned a bit from doing this, but we weren’t overly impressed with how much.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you need to complete a “profiler” before you can access the other TheoremReach surveys. This only takes a minute, but it doesn’t give you any points, which is a bit of a disappointment.

After we completed the TheoremReach profiler, we attempted several surveys. However, it took us 12 attempts before we could earn any rewards, as surveys kept disqualifying us or giving us error messages. After about half an hour, we eventually succeeded in completing a survey and earned 285 points—worth about 29 cents.

Sign up for offers

Another way to earn rewards on Zoombucks is by signing up for offers and completing tasks. There are various types available, such as quizzes and puzzles, mobile games and apps (which give you points when you download and use them), and other services you can subscribe to for rewards—plus sometimes also samples and other freebies.

These offers are under the “Earn” tab, where you can find a “Featured Offers” section; Zoombucks says this section is for offers they’ve “hand-picked.” You can click on the offers directly to earn rewards (at least in theory).

Alternatively, there’s an “Offer Walls” section, with links that take you to the sites of various Zoombucks partners who provide their own selections of offers.

As well as the types of offers we already mentioned, the “Offer Walls” section includes video platforms (e.g., PixelPoint TV and loot.tv) that allow you to earn points by watching videos. We’ll go into more detail about these in the next section.

Our experience

We tried to enroll in various offers on Zoombucks with limited success.

We found the following offers in the “Offers” and “Featured Offers” sections of Zoombucks (under the “Earn” tab). Sadly, none of them gave us any rewards.

• Blossom Plant Care: This offer promised us 144 points (equivalent to 14.4 cents) for downloading and using a plant care app. However, we couldn’t get the offer to work (as we kept getting a notice saying “invalid click” when we tried to use the code or link provided).
• Videoleap: This offer promised us 158 points (15.8 cents) for opening and using the Videoleap AI video editor app. We dutifully complied, but the link took us to a blank page.
• Lumos: This offer promised us 67 points (6.7 cents) if we signed up for the Lumos VPN service. However, when we tried to complete the offer, we got a message saying it was unavailable.
• Crypto.com: This offer promised us 928 points (about 92.8 cents) if we downloaded the Crypto.com app and used it for a few minutes. We did this, but we didn’t see any points added to our account in the following days, so the offer seems to have failed, although there was no indication of why.

We also visited the Offer Walls to investigate a couple of third-party offer providers called Adscend and Torox.

On the Adscend media wall, we tried out the following offers:

• Fun Color Test: This offer promised us 100.8 points (equivalent to about 10.1 cents) for taking a quiz and scoring 100%. However, when we clicked on the offer, we got a message saying “Sorry, this offer is not available for your device.”
• Pandora: This offer promised us 234 points (23.4 cents) for downloading a music and podcast app, but when we tried the offer, we got a message saying that it had been discontinued.
• Root: This offer tempted us with 351.6 points (almost 35.2 cents) for installing and opening a car insurance app. We installed and opened the app, but we didn’t see any points added to our account in the subsequent week or so.
• BlockPuzzle: This offer promised 51 points (5.1 cents) for installing and launching a Tetris-like game called Block Puzzle. We did as instructed and were delighted to finally get the points promised.

On the Torox wall, we tried these offers:

• savewith.COUPONS: This offer promised us 13 points (1.3 cents) for following seemingly easy instructions (clicking a few buttons to receive a coupon). However, we found that the instructions were, in fact, impossible to follow, as the buttons or links we needed to click on were absent.
• Persil at Walmart: This offer promised us 57 points (5.7 cents) for registering and completing a quiz. However, when we clicked through, we got a message saying that the offer had hit a daily cap for the day, and we should try again the next day.
• Publix: This offer also promised us 57 points (about 5.7 cents) for registering and completing a quiz. The link directed us to a seemingly unrelated webpage, and we couldn’t work out how to complete the offer or get rewards.
• It’s Easy When You Save: This offer promised us 13 points (about 1.3 cents) for clicking on links from a list. We obliged and earned 13 points, as promised.

Overall, we found signing up for offers and completing tasks in Zoombucks an inefficient way to earn points; too many of the offers fail for it to be worth the time and effort you have to invest.

Watch videos

A few rewards and survey sites allow you to earn points by watching videos. The deal is usually that you have to sign up for a third-party video platform, which you accumulate points on.

When you’re ready, you can then transfer your points across to the other rewards site you’re using (Zoombucks, in this case). Notably, the points exchange rate isn’t usually one-to-one, so you might not get as many points as you think you’re going to.

The upside of this method is that you can just leave the videos running in the background, which means you can earn points without putting in much active effort.

Our experience

We’ve used this feature when testing other platforms, but we didn’t use it much during our Zoombucks test. When we clicked on PixelPoint TV on the Offer Wall, we were taken to a channel called LmaoDen. It turned out we’d already used this channel in the past when testing another site.

If you use a lot of rewards sites, you may also have existing accounts on video platforms like LmaoDen. You can link these up to Zoombucks (along with your other survey sites), then choose where you want to transfer your points.

Unfortunately, we had problems getting the video platforms to work properly, as they kept freezing our tester’s computer. This got so frustrating that we switched our focus to other earning strategies. You might have better luck getting videos to work on your devices, but our experience wasn’t a positive one.

Here are a couple more tips to help you reap more rewards on Zoombucks. We didn’t test out all of these features, but Zoombucks recommends them as a way to maximize your earning.

Graduate through levels

Zoombucks has four levels you can graduate through to earn points bonuses. The first is called “Starter,” which is followed by “Bronze,” “Silver,” and “Gold” levels.

The screenshot below shows the various requirements for each level and the benefits they give you.

Use the leaderboard

Many sites like Zoombucks have leaderboards for the users who earn the most rewards, and offer additional rewards for users who rank highly. Zoombucks has a leaderboard, but we couldn’t find any information about rewards for Zoombucks users who make it onto the list. As far as we can tell, you get no rewards for doing so.

That said, you can still use the leaderboard to get ideas about ways to maximize your earnings, since the Zoombucks users with the highest rankings will presumably have the best earning strategies, and you can steal their ideas. 3

To see what the highest earning Zoombucks users have been doing, go to the “Leaderboard” tab, then click on “See activity” next to the names of users with the best scores.

Refer friends

One less obvious way to earn points on Zoombucks is by referring other people to use the site. Zoombucks encourages you to invite as many friends as you can.

You can invite people to join Zoombucks by sending them a referral link that Zoombucks gives you (or by sharing this link on social media). In return, Zoombucks will give you free rewards.

There’s conflicting information on the Zoombucks website about how much you’ll get from referrals.

On one Zoombucks help page, it says that you’ll get a commission equivalent to 7% of the points your referrals earn, minus what they get for answering demographic questions and inviting their own referrals, as well as “any manual points added to the account.” (We’re not clear on what this means.) 5

However, when we tested Zoombucks, we saw an invite code at the bottom of the page that promised us 10% of whatever our referrals earned. It’s unclear whether the 7% or 10% figure is correct.

There are several ways to claim your rewards on Zoombucks:

• Gift cards
• Prepaid cards
• PayPal
• Charity donations

Gift cards

You can redeem your Zoombucks rewards in the form of a gift card, with many different retailers to choose from.

Some of the retailers we saw on offer included:

• Amazon
• eBay
• Walmart
• Uber Eats
• Subway
• Taco Bell
• Sephora
• Adidas
• H&M
• Airbnb

The denominations available will depend on the card you get. For example, the Amazon card that Zoombucks offers is available in the denominations shown below.

Other cards have a minimum redemption value of $10–$15, so you’ll have to work a bit harder to earn these.

Prepaid cards

Zoombucks also allows you to redeem your rewards as a virtual prepaid Visa card. You only need $1 to redeem via this method, as shown in the screenshot below.

PayPal

PayPal is another payment option you can get on Zoombucks. There are denominations from $1 to $100 available.

The first time you redeem via PayPal on Zoombucks, you’ll probably need to connect your PayPal account to your Zoombucks account.

We used PayPal to redeem $1 of our rewards. Zoombucks said that our reward would take 2–3 business days to reach us; happily, as we’ve already mentioned, we received our payment on the same day.

Charity donations

Finally, if you’re feeling generous, you can also redeem your Zoombucks rewards as a charitable donation.

However, your options are a bit limited here. When we checked, we only saw one charity that we could donate your points to—SeriousFun Children’s Network. It’s possible the list may rotate and other charities may open up on occasion.