Spare5 App Review: Earn Less Than Minimum Wage In Your Spare Time

Find yourself bored on this holiday break? Spare5 is a new entrant in the world of “earn money in your spare time”. You sign up and do short tasks on either their smartphone app or desktop web browser. They pay cash via PayPal weekly or donate to a charity of your choice.

What kind of tasks? The problem they are solving is that certain things are very hard for machines to do, but are easy for humans to do. Examples are assessing the tone of a conversation or separating elements of a photos. You’re basically creating an “answer sheet” to help compare against and train machine learning algorithms. (Help train the robots that will take over the world!) Some tasks were mildly amusing, while others were quite tedious.

How much money do they pay per task? As far as I can tell, very little. The tasks that I was offered ranged from zero to $0.10 per task. Most were around a penny each. It took me roughly an hour to reach the minimum payout of $1. I know that they want you to prove yourself before offering higher-value tasks, but from my experience it will take a while to even reach $5 an hour on average.

Is Spare5 legit and do they actually pay out? Yes, they paid me via PayPal. Here’s a screenshot:

Bottom line. Like most “earn money in your spare time” options like paid surveys or mystery shopping, the per-hour wage is low. I doubt the average user makes even close to minimum wage. Honestly, if you are a motivated person I would invest your time into improving your skill set so you can eventually make $25, $50, or $100 a hour.

That said, I think this app is going to be successful. Machine learning is growing, and they’ll need to test it against real human intelligence. While I won’t be a regular user, there will be more than enough people who are willing to do the work. Of course, I also fail to see why people spend hours playing games on their phones. If you just want something to cure boredom, I suppose getting paid $1 an hour is better than paying someone else $1 for a virtual axe or something.

This is far from a glowing recommendation, but if you do sign up there is a referral bonus that offers new users a 10% bonus on up to $100 in earnings in your first 180 days with a my referral link. That’s an extra $1 for every $10 in earnings. Thanks if you use my link, I will get $2 for every $10 you earn with Spare5 (up to $20).