Expense Rewards App: Make Money by Linking your Bank and Cards + $5 Referral Bonus

7/11/18: Their website now states: “The First Reward Program Has Ended! Don’t Worry, We will come back soon!”

Expense Rewards App Review

Expense Rewards is an app which allows us to earn points by linking your bank and credit cards. You’ll earn 5 points – worth 5 cents – for each purchase you do with your bank and cards. If you typically do 200 transactions per month, you’ll end up with $120 from the app over the course of the year.

They make money by using/selling the anonymous data to track consumer patterns which is valuable in many industries.

How to Join

Expense Rewards works only by way of the Android app. An iOS app is not yet available, and there is no desktop program.

When joining, be sure use with a referral link or a referral code to get the $5 $1 signup bonus. You can use a referral link to the Google Play store which should track the download to the referrer and trigger the referral bonus. Or enter in the referral code during signup. It’s worth entering the referral code during signup regardless since the link might not be entirely reliable.

Here’s a link to the Android App containing my referral code: GSGU3O

Note: the signup bonus is only valid when linking a bank account; linking a credit card is not enough for this bonus. If you’d rather not link your main bank, maybe find an old bank that doesn’t have significant balances to link. Support tells me that the bank needs to have 5 transactions on it to qualify. It took a few hours until the $5 referral bonus showed up for me.

You can also refer friends and earn $5 per referral. Feel free to leave your own referrals in the comments on this dedicated page. 

How Much are Points Worth?

Each point is worth 1 cent toward the gift card of your choice, including top brands like Amazon, Target, and Home Depot. Especially nice about the rewards program is that the minimum redemption amount is a low $2 for some gift card brands like Amazon and Target. Other gift cards have a higher minimum.

Full list of gift card redemption options: Amazon, CVS, Domino’s, Gamestop, Groupon, Macy’s, Nike, Old Navy, Petco, Sephora, Starbucks, Target, Home Depot.

The gift card is instantly available in-app at the time of redemption and also comes to your email. I was able to cash out $6 pretty soon after signing up mostly from the signup bonus. The app also back-credits you for 30 days for prior purchases.

Privacy and Security

Security is my biggest concern with the app. They write: “Your information is protected with 256-bit encryption and never stored on your phone,” but I can’t find information as to which provider is used to ensure security. I feel more comfortable with an app such as Drop who uses the same backend as Mint and other major companies. It’s possible Expense Rewards uses the same, but that remains to be verified. I’m slightly encouraged by the fact that this app seems to be by the same owners as the Panel app (seems to be a survey app) which appears to have been around longer.

Read more about Expense Rewards legal information here. 

As far as Privacy goes, I’ll let them do the explaining:

Expense Management and Reward Panel Inc. will use this information and data to create reports, dashboards and data aggregation. Every information listed above may be used to create derivative products to share with our customers. The information shared with our customers will always be anonymous, the data collected will not be linkable or directly associable to you. Although we will collect personal information to manage and verify users, personal data such as your name, email address, the phone number will not be shared with anyone which is not the Company or any parent, subsidiary or affiliate entity for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Policy.

If you decide you no longer want to use Expense Rewards, you can revoke the permissions to collect information by sending an email to [email protected] requesting us to unsubscribe them from our services and/or unregister their bank and credit card accounts from our services.

Final Thoughts

There are lots of these data mining business models out there, might as well take advantage of them while we can. Should be easy to earn $5-$10 in Amazon gift cards fairly quickly by linking a few accounts, and it’s possible to earn more by linking all accounts. Privacy and security are always a concern with these kinds of data mining apps; do what you’re comfortable with.

We’ll add this one to our complete list of card-link rewards programs. As far as we know, this would stack with other card-link programs, so you can double or triple dip by having a card linked to Expense Rewards, Drop, dining programs and more.