Welcome back! If you missed my last Money Talks review, be sure to check out my Ibotta experience. I really hoped I would be able to get this review to you sooner, but InboxDollars has a waiting period for your first deposit. I wanted to be 100% certain that this app pays before I start telling everyone how great it is.

You probably clicked through because, like me, you are always looking for ways to earn a little cash online. I’ll be trying a number of sites and apps, so be sure to sign up for blog updates. Today, I’m reviewing InboxDollars.

First things first, there are so many things to do on this site. Paid surveys and offers give you money directly. TV, games, paid emails, and searches paid you by filling up your Scratch & Win bar. You can cash that in at any point to take your chances for a big money prize up to $100, but you’ll most likely have spent all your time filling the bar for a few cents.

Your paid emails are most efficient at filling up the first tier of your Scratch & Win meter. Effort to payoff on this, you’re best to leave your actual emails alone and access them from the site’s message box. Open one, then scratch your card for the change. It takes way too many paid emails to get to the next tier for maybe two cents more.

Some surveys are very rewarding, but if you don’t qualify for the group they’re trying to survey, you get sent off with a consolation prize (1 spin on the wheel to earn scratch & win progress). I would guess that I probably qualified for about 10% of the surveys I initiated. Sometimes it’s best to attempt the low paying surveys, because you will not be wasting your time for pennies getting turned down for the big surveys.

In order to cash out, you have to earn at least $30. It doesn’t seem like it will be that hard at first, because they give you $10 just for signing up. They wave offers in your face and promise a referral bonus for getting your friends to sign up. If you don’t have friends who will sign up, it can be tedious filling that bar. Surveys feel like a huge waste of time, videos that you could leave playing to fill your bar now have a daily cap, and the games are designed to be unbeatable after a few minutes. And if you value your adblock security, don’t even think about playing from your PC.

Yeah, no thank you!

So you’re asking “Does it actually pay after all that?”

Well, yes! Once you’ve reached the requisite $30, you have the option to accept gift cards or have the balance deposited to your Paypal account. I chose Paypal. They gave me an offer stating if I could earn just a few more dollars, I could waive the processing fee. The processing fee is actually not much, so it’s not even worth your time at this point to grind for a couple bucks.

The first time they make a deposit, it will take two weeks to process and you “must remain active” until your deposit is made. I take this to mean you still have to engage with surveys and paid emails, thus waving a few more earned dollars in your face so you’ll stick with the program rather than cashing out and leaving.

They made good. I received my Paypal deposit on the date promised and sent it straight to my bank. Since that day, I’ve only signed on to grab a few screenshots for you. You can see above I’ve earned another $5.63 in the two weeks I waited. Actually, that’s not true either. I’ve earned 63 cents in two weeks, because they tossed me a $5 incentive to stick around after my first cash-out. Sorry, I have much better things to do with my time than grind for less than a nickel a day.

I’ve put in the work so you don’t have to. If you’re looking to earn cash online, unless you can turn this into a multi-level scheme and cash in on referrals, skip InboxDollars.