My phone buzzed in the Walmart parking lot last week with a little cartoon trophy and the words "One year of scanning!" I sat in the car and laughed, because I'd been meaning to run these numbers for a month and an app beat me to the reminder.
Last May I started using two grocery apps. One is a receipt-scanning app: you take a picture of any receipt, from any store, and collect points that turn into gift cards. The other is a cash-back app where you pick offers before you shop, like 50 cents back on a certain cereal, then scan your receipt to get paid. I'm not naming either one. There are several of each kind, and they all work about the same way.
I told myself I'd scan every receipt for twelve months, then decide whether it was worth keeping. The twelve months are up.
What they actually paid
| Receipt-scanning app | Cash-back app | Both | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Receipts scanned | 196 | 61 | |
| Earned | $17.50 | $28.85 | $46.35 |
| Cashed out so far | $17.50 | $24.10 | $41.60 |
| Time spent, roughly | 3 hours | 5.5 hours | 8.5 hours |
So, $46.35 for the year. That's about $3.86 a month. We spend roughly $7,200 a year on groceries, so the apps paid back a little under two-thirds of one percent.
The receipt-scanning app paid out in two gift cards. The cash-back app makes you reach $20 before you can withdraw anything, so I cashed out $24.10 in February, and $4.75 is still sitting in there.
Where the time went
Scanning takes about a minute a receipt if the picture comes out the first time, which it doesn't always. At 196 receipts, that's a little over three hours for the year. Most of them were groceries, but gas, Dollar General and the occasional Friday pizza from Casey's all counted.
The cash-back app takes more. Before every grocery trip, I scrolled through the offers and tapped the ones that matched my list. That's about five minutes a trip for around 55 trips, plus scanning the 61 receipts that had a match. Call it five and a half hours.
All together, about eight and a half hours for $46.35, which works out to roughly $5.45 an hour. That's under a third of what I make at the pharmacy.
The catch with offers
The cash-back app had a habit I didn't catch for months. Almost every offer is for a name brand. Last fall I went back through my receipts and found six times I bought the name brand to get the cash back when I'd normally buy store brand. One was a box of cereal at $4.48 with 50 cents back, sitting right next to the store brand at $2.24. I "earned" 50 cents and spent $1.74 more than I needed to.
Across those six slips, I spent about $7.80 more than I would have, which takes the cash-back app's real number from $28.85 down to about $21.
The receipt-scanning app never had that problem. It pays the same few points no matter what's on the receipt, so it never changed what went in the cart.
Am I keeping it up?
Half of it. I'm keeping the receipt-scanning app. A minute per receipt while I'm sitting in the car is easy, and it doesn't touch my list. $17.50 a year isn't much, but it's for something I'm already holding in my hand.
I deleted the cash-back app last week. After the name-brand slips, it netted about $21 for five and a half hours, and I'd rather have the time. Someone who buys name brands anyway would probably come out better than I did.
One more thing I thought about: these apps aren't paying for nothing. They're paying for a year of what we buy, where and when. I'm okay with that trade for what we got. Other people might not be, and that's fair.
As for the money, every gift card got spent on groceries, and I put the same amount in cash into the jar on the counter. So the $41.60 we've cashed out is sitting in Tyler's grandma's pickle jar as quarters and $5 bills, waiting for the next count.
