One night in March I sat on the couch, opened my phone, and counted fourteen apps that promised to save me money. Fourteen. Some I hadn't opened since Rosie was a baby. One of them sent me a notification every single day at 7:15 a.m. telling me I had "bonus points waiting." I deleted nine of them before Mike finished his show.
What's left on my phone now is four. I'm not going to name brands, partly because the terms on these things change every few months and partly because I don't want anyone downloading something just because I said so. Instead I'll tell you what each type does for us, what it actually earns, and the rules I used to decide what stayed.
My three rules for keeping an app
- It has to pay me for things I was already buying. If an offer makes me buy a brand of yogurt we don't eat, it isn't saving me money. It's advertising with extra steps.
- It has to take less than five minutes a week. I'm not playing slot-machine games or taking twenty-minute surveys for eleven cents.
- The payout has to be reachable. A couple of the ones I deleted had a $25 minimum to cash out, and after a year I was sitting at $14.60. Money I can't touch doesn't count.
The four that made the cut
1. The grocery store's own app
This is the one that earns the most, and it isn't really a "cash-back app" at all. Our Kroger app lets me load digital coupons to my loyalty card and tracks fuel points. On Sunday nights I spend about five minutes clipping coupons for things already on my list. Then I fill the minivan when fuel points are stacked up. Some months that's 30 or 40 cents off a gallon, which matters when we're putting about $260 a month into two vehicles.
2. A receipt-scanning app
You take a picture of any receipt, from any store, and get a few points. It's pennies per receipt, but it takes six seconds and I'm standing in the parking lot anyway. The points turn into gift cards. This one lives on my phone purely because it's so low-effort. It's also where the kids learned that receipts are "worth something," so now they bring me receipts from Grandma's purse. I'm not sure that's a win.
3. A grocery rebate app
This type has specific offers, like 50 cents back on a certain brand of flour or a dollar back on any bag of apples. You check off the offers and then scan your receipt. It's hit or miss for us because a lot of the offers are for name brands and I shop mostly at Aldi. But once or twice a month there's something useful, like "any brand" milk or produce, and it adds up slowly.
4. An online shopping cash-back site
For the handful of things we buy online, like school shoes, a birthday present, or a replacement vacuum filter, I go through a cash-back portal first. It gives back a few percent. I don't shop online much, so this one is small, but a single school-shoe order for three kids paid out over six dollars.
What they actually earned
I got curious and added it up for last year. Here's roughly how it broke down:
| Type | Time per week | Earned last year |
|---|---|---|
| Store app (coupons + fuel points) | 5 minutes | about $140 in savings |
| Receipt scanning | 1 minute | $22 in gift cards |
| Grocery rebates | 2 minutes | $31 |
| Online cash-back | almost none | $19 |
| Total | about 10 minutes | about $212 |
That $212 is not going to change our lives. It covered most of the kids' school supply shopping last summer, though, and I'll take that for ten minutes a week.
What I got rid of, and why
The deleted nine fell into a few groups. There were game-style apps that paid you in "coins" for playing, which were really just a way to get me to stare at ads. There were survey apps where I'd get screened out halfway through and earn nothing. There were two nearly identical rebate apps with the same offers, so I kept one. And there was one that wanted access to my email inbox to "find savings," which I was never comfortable with in the first place.
A word on privacy: these apps are free because they're collecting data about what you buy. I've made peace with that for the store app and one or two others, but it's worth deciding on purpose instead of just tapping "allow" on everything.
The one thing I'd tell a friend
The biggest danger with cash-back apps isn't wasted time. It's the little nudge to buy something because it's "a dollar back." I've caught myself standing in the cereal aisle about to buy a $5.49 box we don't eat to get $1 back, which is the opposite of saving. Keep your list, shop your list, and let the apps catch whatever falls in the bucket. That's the only way I've found where they actually come out ahead.
