No matter your financial situation, some extra help is always appreciated. Saving even a bit on groceries, fashion products, tech gadgets, books, or anything else might not be easy. It does require you to make some compromises and cut on luxuries or necessities, except when you have some free gift cards.

Gift cards are a great way to budget and save money by spending the specified amounts instead of your hard-earned cash. It’s even better at this task when you can get gift cards without spending any of your money at all. That’s exactly what gift card surveys aim to help you with.

What are Gift Card Surveys?

Gift card surveys are a paid survey type that rewards participants with free gift cards of their choosing. Nowadays, almost all of them are also made exclusively online. Gone are the days when someone would question participants in person. That’s why the gift cards you receive are also digital and delivered straight to your email.

Companies are willing to give away these gift cards because your opinions are valuable. Pooling people about their current or potential products, brand image, market trends, or other matters is difficult. No one wants to waste their time answering questionnaires for free. That’s why various rewards, including gift cards, are frequently offered.

Compared to other reward options, gift card surveys have a few distinct advantages. First of all, they do not carry any fees or taxes. Bank PayPal transfers, for example, will require you to create specific accounts and cover the transfer costs. Gift cards are products that are already paid for. All you need to do is redeem them.

Gift card surveys also deliver the rewards instantaneously, as it’s simply a code you’ll need to insert into the vendor’s website. Of course, this means that each gift card is limited in application, and you must think ahead about which gift card will be most useful for you. Good gift card survey platforms have a large selection of vouchers to choose from.

Amazon, Google Play Store, Xbox, Starbucks, Costco, Walmart, and many other options are available. The best strategy I found was to choose gift card surveys depending on where you want to save. One Sephora gift card survey, for example, can earn me a couple of dollars worth of fashion products.

How Much Can You Earn?

No paid survey platforms will make you rich or help you quit your daytime job. Any platform that tells otherwise is, more likely than not, a scam. However, you can earn significant additional income, which can improve your financial situation.

Your earnings depend on the platform you choose and the demographical category you fall into. Decently paid survey platforms pay at least $1 per survey, and most questionnaires take up to 30 minutes to complete. This gives you a $2 per hour rate, but you shouldn’t expect to keep it constant for a whole day every day.

How many surveys you get per day depends on your demographics. Rumor has it that high-earning males in Western countries are the demographic most needed as respondents. If you are one of them, you will likely get more questionnaires. However, many platforms report up to two surveys per day to most participants.

Questionnaire allocation based on surveys also depends on the platforms you choose to use. It’s highly recommended to use multiple at the same time as the number of surveys fluctuates, and you’d be able to collect more of them. Some have more contracts with companies in specific fields.

For example, platforms like MedSurvey look for participants in medical surveys. The pay there is quite good, but qualifying for surveys is difficult. Below is a short list of a few platforms that are universally appreciated for their profitability.

Top Three Platforms For Gift Card Surveys

Pawns.app 

With a $5 payout threshold and an average of $1 per twenty-minute survey, the Pawns.app is one of the best-paid survey sites today. They work globally, supporting well over a hundred different countries, not just the most popular ones. The payout options are a bit more limited, but gift cards are accepted in most of the supported countries.

A standout feature of the Pawns platform is its highly profitable bandwidth-sharing program. It allows anyone to earn money for their unused internet bandwidth. All you need to do is install their app and keep it running to earn money passively online.

YouGov

YouGov is one of the best-reviewed and longest-functioning paid survey sites online. It’s primarily based in the United Kingdom and serves questions for participants there. Most of the surveys are about consumer preferences, politics, brands, and other public topics.

The payment is accumulated in points, where one survey is worth around 50 points. To cash out the minimal $50, you need 50000 points. It will take some time to accumulate this amount, but YouGov can guarantee that you’ll get one or two surveys each day. In practice, cashing out that $50 takes two months.

Survey Junkie 

Survey Junkie brags about having more than twenty million active users and enough questionnaires to keep them all busy. It’s a platform owned by an influential insights platform – DISQO, which is a sign they can deliver on their promises. It also has one of the highest Trustpilot scores of all survey platforms.

Earnings on Survey Junkie are based on a point system, and you can exchange them for gift cards, bank transfers, and other rewards. Worth noting that traditional questionnaires aren’t the only earning method on Survey Junkie. You can also test products and participate in phone surveys and online focus groups.

Conclusion

Online gift card surveys are nothing like the old-school ones you’d do in person. Your earnings will be rather modest, but it’s much less intrusive, and you can complete questionnaires on your own terms. On top of that, gift card rewards are almost instantaneous. There’s no reason not to try gift card surveys.