Swagbucks Review – My Personal Results

I joined Swagbucks in the end of October 2014 and shared my first impressions in this Swagbucks Review blog post. During the months of November and December I was relatively active on that platform. If you’re asking your self: “is Swagbucks legit?” the answer is yes. Can you make a lot of money with it? The answer is… no.

I say I was relatively active with Swagbucks because I would spend an average of less than 5 minutes per day on it. This translates to about 1-2 hours per month. All this effort brought in about $35 of earnings. So a total of 3 hours for $35 which can be interpreted as $12 per hour, not too horrible.

Some would say that I should have invested more time which would result in more money but that’s not really the case and I will explain why.

How to make money with Swagbucks.

I work from home so my computer is always on. When I take a break from working (or find myself wasting time on Youtube or Reddit) I would often visit the Swagbucks page and complete some of their tasks.

Daily tasks.

Task one: use of Swagbucks button for 1SB reward. You can install a Swagbucks button in the top of your browser and simply clicking on it once a day will earn you that 1 swag buck. This takes a second. However, you can complete this task only once per day.

Task two: Daily Poll. Once a day Swagbucks will ask you a simple question, when you answer it you get 1 Swag Buck. This task also takes a second or two.

Task 3: NOSO – No Obligation Special Offers. You are presented with a few offers and you are paid for looking at them (and paid more if you join any offers). I don’t join these offers I just click on “Next-Next-Next-Next” and I am awarded 2 Swagbucks for it. This also takes a few seconds.

So these 4 tasks take only a few seconds and bring in 4 Swag Bucks. Definitely not a money maker but it doesn’t really take up any time to complete…

Swagbucks Search.

Swagbucks has its own search engine and you are randomly awarded swagbucks when you use it. Sometimes it could be 7 Swag bucks, sometimes it could be 25 Swag bucks. Sometimes you are rewarded once in a day, sometimes you are rewarded several times a day. It’s impossible to predict how much you will make with it and when you’ll be awarded. I can only estimate that if you use their search you will earn an average of 25 Swag bucks per day from it.

This could be a cool way to earn some extra swag bucks because we all search the Internet every day. The difference is that Swagbucks pays you to search unlike other search engines.

I must admit that I stopped using their search because I prefer Google search. I have specific plugins that display detailed information about search results and these plugins are only compatible with Google. However, most people (I would say 99.9%) can use Swagbucks search just like any other search engine.

Swagbucks Surveys

I’ve talked about swagbucks surveys in my previous review. Swagbucks shows quite a bit of available surveys, however you will not be qualified for most of them.

After wasting my time with these surveys I’ve developed a specific routine for them. When I login to Swagbucks I look at the Survey section and try to find those surveys that pay the most for the smallest amount of time invested. Most surveys will offer 30-40 swagbucks for 10-15 minutes of your time, I wouldn’t touch these with a ten foot pole. If you are lucky enough and you qualify for all of these surveys you’d be making 150-200 Swag bucks per hour. That translates to real world value of $2 per hour (at the very best). I value my time a lot more than that.

So I look at surveys that pay 150-300 Swagbucks for 5-10 minutes of my time. These are rare and I am disqualified from them most of the time but I do get them now and then. These surveys, if qualified, will result in $15-$20 per hour. However, such surveys are so scarce that you would be lucky to find 1 per day so you can’t really earn 15$ per hour. My point being, if I see a highly paid surveys (for a little time investment) I would click on it. Otherwise I just ignore the surveys.

Swagbucks Code

Every so often Swagbucks will give out free Swagbucks, they call them the SwagCodes. If you have installed their SwagButon it will notify you that a new code is available. Click on the button, find out what the code is and apply it to your account. This can be two, three, five, ten swagbucks and sometimes even more. This is another task that doesn’t really take time as you are notified when it’s available. Swagbcusk usually posts these codes to their Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or their blog.

From time to time Swagbucks does these “Code Extravaganza” and they may give out 20-30 Swag bucks during a day.

Swagbucks Bonuses

Swagbucks also creates daily earning goals for you. If you achieve that goal you will be rewarded extra swag bucks. Here is an example of Swagbucks goal meter:

The goal for the day was 40 Swagbucks for a bonus of 4 swagbucks. I achieved that goal and swagbucks increased my goal to 98 swagbucks. I achieved that as well and I will be rewarded a total bonus of 9 swagbucks.

If you manage to achieve your daily goals for a full week, you will get 25 bonus bucks (and of course whatever bonus bucks they reward every single day). Meet your daily goal 14 days in a row and you’ll earn an extra 100 Swagbucks. For 31 days in a row you will be awarded 300 bonus bucks. This is pretty cool but I usually don’t achieve my daily goals as I am not very active.

Other Swagbucks

There are numerous other ways to earn some extra Swagbucks for playing games, watching their Swagbucks TV and a few other things. However, I find those tasks consuming and not worth it (at least for me).

This is why I said earlier that investing more time will NOT result in more money. I spend those few minutes on the daily tasks, looking if there is a high paying survey, claiming free Swagcodes if there are any and my Swagbucks routine ends there.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article I earned 35$ for about 3 hours of “work”. If I invested 10 hours into Swagbucks I would have probably earned $50, which would translate into $5 per hour instead of $12 per hour. I don’t really mind spending 1-2 hours per month on Swagbucks because I would waste that time on Youtube anyway but any more than that? No, thanks.

Swagbucks Referral

You can also earn Swagbucks when you refer new members to the program. Shameless plug, use my Swagbucks referral link and receive 500 Swagbucks for setting up your account, it’s totally free 😉

Claiming Your Swagbucks Earnings

Swagbucks doesn’t pay you in real money but you can exchange your Swagbucks for gift cards. Face value of 1 swag buck is $0.01 (1 penny). Once you reach 500 Swag bucks you can exchange them for $5 gift card. I have been exchanging my swagbucks to Amazon gift cards. Here are my 7 claimed Amazon gift cards:

I could wait till I accumulate $50 worth of credit and exchange it for a gift card on Amazon, Paypal, iTunes etc, but I prefer to cash out every time I reach $5-$10. I have read a few stories of people complaining that they had a lot of Swagbucks in their account and all of the sudden their account was shut down, all the earnings disappeared. I don’t have both sides of the story and I really don’t know if those users did something against Swagbucks’ rule or if Swagbucks closed their accounts for “no reason”. Because of such stories I prefer to cash out whenever I reach the minimum threshold.

Update: Please note that my account is still active in 2020, 6 years after I officially opened it. Swagbucks never shut it down or “stole” my earnings. This makes me think that people who had their accounts terminated probably tried to game the system and were caught by SB. Just an idea 😉

Yes, swagbucks is legit, swagbucks is safe however it won’t make you rich. You can earn a few extra dollars from it but that’s pretty much it.

Anything to add? Don’t be shy, use the comment box below!

– Alex