App Review: WalkEarn
I know that walking offers so many amazing benefits for my physical and mental health—and that alone makes it worth lacing up my walking shoes every day. But if I can add some financial benefits on top of that, I’m all for it! That’s why I’m always up for trying new paid-to-walk apps, which promise to pay you for walking.
At the beginning of the summer, I decided to give Walk Earn a try. The idea is like most paid-to-walk apps: you earn points for your steps, and you can eventually cash them out for something (in this case, cash deposited into your PayPal account). But I soon found that Walk Earn doesn’t seem all that connected to your step count.
Instead of step-based, Walk Earn appears to be more ad-based. In order to open the app, you need to watch an ad. There are then three different options for collecting coins: one based on steps, one that’s a once-daily option and one that gives you an option to claim coins after keeping the app open for a certain amount of time. The once-daily option offers the highest coin value: anywhere up to 50. When you click on it, you’re offered a chance to double your coins (hint: you’re going to have to watch an ad either way, so you might as well). The timed option allows you to collect up to two coins every minute (after watching an ad, of course), though you’re limited to just a few of these per day. And the step-based option allows you to collect two to four coins after every 2,000 steps you’ve walked (but you have to log in each time—so that means two ads). There are some other ways to earn coins, too—by playing games or earning spins on the prize wheel.
So let’s do a little math here. Once you log in, you can get up to 100 coins just for logging in (though I don’t know if I’ve gotten the full 100 many times). If you walk 10,000 steps per day, you can maybe earn another 20 (but only if you log in every 2,000 steps). And then you can get another six coins by keeping the app open. In other words: very little here depends on your step count.
Despite figuring out this little glitch right from the start, I kept going anyway—logging in daily (and sometimes more than once daily) to collect my coins. In a little under two months, I earned enough coins to cash out for $2 to my PayPal account. A couple of weeks later, I finally got an email asking to confirm my PayPal address—and it took a couple more weeks to get my payout, with a fee taken out of the total.
So, in the end, I’d say that this paid-to-walk experiment didn’t go all that well. From the constant ads to the questionable connection to your step count to the lengthy process to (reduced) payout, I didn’t find it to be a keeper.
Pros:
– A number of different ways to earn points—steps, spins, etc.
– Payout is slow—but at least it does pay
Cons:
– Not much is actually connected to the steps you take
– Everything is ad-based—from opening the app to collecting points
– Not a high payout
– Payout takes weeks to receive
