Project Payday is a website I often get asked about. It’s a really popular “system” for making money online, so sometimes people search my website to see if I’ve ever reviewed or talked about it. It is not something I feel comfortable recommending, but it’s also not really a scam.
If you sign up and become a member, you can learn how to make money with incentivized freebie websites. These are sites that are filled with free offers and trials for various services like Netflix, GameFly, Blockbuster, FreeCreditReport, etc. Their website is pretty shady-looking and it’s got the typical testimonials and clever wording that you’ll find with many other online money-making systems that try to draw you in.
About Incentivized Freebie Websites
An example of an incentivized freebie site is ZipNadaZilch. They have websites set up with nothing but free and free trial offers. They are an affiliate for the companies with the offers, so every time anyone signs up for offers, they get a nice commission. They share some of that commission with you when you get even more referrals for them.
If you register and complete a certain number of the offers on ZipNadaZilch or any similar site, you can then get a referral link for the site and earn money when people you refer complete those same offers. You can get paid in cash or expensive electronics like iPads, Xboxes, etc. depending on the number of people you refer and whether or not they complete enough offers to meet the credit requirements for that site.
Example — if you refer one person and they fill out enough offers to equal one credit on the freebie site, you might get a $20 payment. Or if they fill out enough to get three credits on the freebie site (which would usually mean filling out more than just a few simple offers), you might get over $100. Each freebie site has a different payout for referrals and a different number of credits your referrals have to get in order to count as a referral so you can request your free gift.
But how do you convince people to sign up to those sites under your referral link and start filling out offers? One way people do this is by promising to share some of their reward with people who sign up (freebie trading). And, in a nutshell, this is what Project Payday is in the business of teaching people to do.
Is the Project Payday system free?
To become a full member, you have to either sign up for a freebie offer through their site (for which they will get a commission), or you have to pay $34.95.
If you are truly interested in freebie trading, there are ways to get the info that Project Payday provides without becoming a member there. There are freebie trading forums all over the internet where there aren’t any membership fees involved.
Project Payday Affiliates and Sneaky Marketing
I also want to mention that Project Payday does have an affiliate program where their members can earn a kickback by getting other people registered. I have nothing against affiliate programs as I’m an affiliate for several companies myself, but I also think if you’re going to be an affiliate, you need to be honest.
Unfortunately, I’ve come across some fake work from home ads online recently that were designed to generate leads for Project Payday. These were set up to look like actual work from home jobs — appointment setting, customer service, etc. Whoever put them up went as far as to create websites for these fake companies to make them look as real as possible. But, if you followed through with everything for your so-called “job,” you would end up being asked to register for Project Payday.
I don’t know if Project Payday encourages this type of marketing or if it was just the work of one sneaky affiliate, but I seriously frown on misleading marketing tactics like that, and it makes Project Payday look even more scammy than it already does.
Freebie Trading Drawbacks
There is almost always some sort of headache involved in anything you do online to make money, and nothing is as easy as it may seem at first. Freebie trading is no exception. Here are some of the problems with making money this way:
Many of the offers are not completely free. You might have to pay a little to get credit for certain offers. If an offer is free, you may still be required to give up your credit card information for an authorization.
You have to remember to cancel if you don’t want to end up getting billed for the trials you’ve signed up for. This will involve keeping good records and noting various dates. And the more stuff you sign up for, the more stuff you’re going to have to remember to cancel. If you’ve ever tried to call and cancel something you signed up for, you know what a pain this can be.
Sometimes you will get billed even if you canceled. Once these places have your credit card or debit card info, you just can’t be sure they won’t charge you anyway. And then getting that money back can be a real headache. That’s a risk you have to be OK with taking.
If you refer someone to an incentivized freebie site and they fill out a bunch of offers and either forget to cancel their trials or end up getting billed, they may decide to blame you since you’re the one who turned them on to it all in the first place.
Getting a lot of spam emails and phone calls is inevitable once you start filling out offers online.
You may have to put a lot of energy into getting referrals. There are freebie trading forums you can use to make doing this a lot easier, but it will still require effort, and people are suspicious by nature. This entire industry seems a little shady anyway, and that will make it harder to do.
Even though many people try to say you can get paid today if you start, that’s not always the case because lots of offers — particularly the ones that are worth more money — take more than a day to credit. And sometimes there are problems and things won’t credit at all.
Freebie Trading Perks
The main reason people get involved in this is because it’s a quick way to earn money. If you become someone’s referral and you fill out the required number of offers you need to fill out to “go green” for a certain site, they will usually pay you a percentage of what they get within several days. I know there are some people who are making a substantial side income through incentivized freebie websites.
First Hand Experience
Although I have experimented with freebie trading in the past, I don’t have first hand experience with Project Payday specifically. But, a writer at I’ve Tried That shared her experience with the site in detail here. I’d recommending reading that, specifically the part about the “$68 headache” before registering at Project Payday or getting started in freebie trading.
As for my first-hand experience, I didn’t sign up through Project Payday, but I did experiment a little with this stuff a few years back. I “went green” on one site and the person who referred me did pay me for doing so. I cancelled the trials I signed up for and, thankfully, I did not get billed. But I was a little too scared to continue with it out of fear at one point that might happen to me. It took about four full days for me to get one cent of the roughly $48 I made for filling out offers due to waiting for various offers to credit and a few that I had to submit support tickets for because they weren’t crediting at all.
Ultimately, I just decided it was a fairly risky way to earn money and I didn’t want to try to refer people constantly to sign up and fill out offers, especially since they would be putting themselves at risk of getting billed for something they may not be able to afford. I was also afraid to leave any money sitting in my Paypal account for a month after that out of fear one of these companies would bill me for something after reading all the stories where that happened to others.
I don’t have a problem with earning a little something for filling out offers, especially if it’s for something I may get some use out of. I’m a member at sites like Swagbucks and Inbox Dollars where that’s one of the ways you can earn rewards. But I didn’t want to make a business out of referring others to sign up for all kinds of stuff they don’t want, promising to share some of my commission with them if they do.
Bottom Line
This is not an illegal way to earn money, although it isn’t without some risk. I have read some horror stories online where people end up getting billed for stuff they actually cancelled, and that’s something you should be mindful of if you start filling out offers for things you know you can’t really afford.
Hopefully, I’ve provided enough info here to explain Project Payday (and freebie trading in general) and help you decide if it’s something you should bother with.
If you want to share your own experience with their site or the freebie trading industry in general, feel free to comment below.