Explanation: How Much Can I Make? Part 2

Here’s Part 2 of the How Much Can I Make blog post series.

What Apps and Programs You Use

Not all GPT sites or apps are the same. Depending on your equipment, certain GPT opportunities may or may not be available. For example, if you have an older smartphone running 4.4 KitKat, most phone farming apps will be unavailable. Or if you have a laptop running Windows Vista, you can’t have the most recent version of Chrome or Firefox browsers necessary to take advantage of watch & earn play lists on several GPT websites, such as Perk or instaGC.

The Hardware and Software You Use

If you’re foolish enough to buy an iPhone X to phone farm with, you’re going to be losing money. It’ll take years of phone farming to pay off the purchase of that phone. I suppose you can take that purchase as a tax deduction, but I’d consult with a tax professional before making a move like that (I know there are limits to how you deduct business expenses).

But if you spend $30 for a phone to farm with, your earnings will be less (at least initially) than using a phone you spent $5 for which can do the same thing. In some cases, the $30 phone will last longer (and therefore allow you to earn more over time) because it’s better quality, has better specs and/or runs a more advanced operating system. As you might expect, the newer the operating system on your phone, the more GPT apps will be available to run on it. At the time of this writing, Android Lollipop (5.0 or 5.1) is the minimum operating system for most GPT Android apps. Some apps will run on 4.4 KitKat, but they’re few and far between right now.

Avoiding a Ban

If you violate the terms of service of a GPT program (or you somehow get flagged by the various third party verification services that a GPT site uses), you’re subject to getting banned. Sometimes these bans are temporary, but they can be permanent and result in a closing of your account and/or forfeiture of the money (or points, tokens, or whatever your GPT program calls them).

Typical terms of service violations include making too much money in a particular time period, having too many accounts, using too many devices at once, using prohibited software or programs, giving incorrect personal information, getting flagged as “bad” by the GPT’s verification service or anything else someone might do to cheat the system.

There are things called “soft” bans which usually only last a few hours or days and may only apply to a particular area of a GPT site. For example, some Swagbucks users are banned from just the Gold Surveys section. Or instaGC users get a special kind of error when trying to play a video. These GPT users may never know the exact reason for the soft ban, but in my experience, it’s the result of giving inconsistent information on surveys or watching too many videos in a particular period of time. I’ll have a future blog post that gets into ways to avoid bans and discusses what might be going on when you get “soft banned.”

Luck

Even if you do everything right, sometimes things just don’t work properly. Ads don’t credit, surveys kick you out even though you were 99% done and were completely truthful and honest or ads get hung up or crash on your phone. There’s nothing you can do about it and it just happens. For the Perk phone farmers out there, remember those Sylvania car headlight ads from the last holiday season that not only kept freezing, but required you to restart the app? Yeah, me too, and it basically made watching Perk videos on your phone impossible. And my wife and I were running them on 7.0 Nougat and 6.0 Marshmallow Samsung phones, so it’s not like we were using some old version of Android (and no, we were using rooted phones, either).

Luck can also work in a good way. An old high school friend gave me his old iPhone, which I was able to use for GPT tasks before it became unusable due to an obsolete version of iOS. And when my son upgraded his phone from a Samsung S6 Active to an S8 Active, he gave me his old phone. Sure, it’s beat up and has a crack in the screen, but it’s got a CPU running eight cores, has 3 gigs RAM and runs Android 7.0 Nougat! As long as the battery holds up, I’ll be farming with this phone for decades!

Your Referral Network

Many of these GPT programs reward you for recruiting new members. For example, Swagbucks and EarnHoney will give you 10% of whatever your referral earns. So if you refer your coworker who then earns 100 SB per day, you’ll see an extra 10 SB in your ledger. Some programs have multiple referral tiers, such as CashMagnet, where you get 5% of what your referral earns and 5% of what your referral’s referral earns. If you’re able to get a few good referrals, you can really increase your earnings with no additional work – the ultimate in passive earnings!

Your Expenses

Unless you’re a college student living in a dorm and have a parent, friend or sibling to give you their old smartphone every few years when they upgrade, you’re going to have expenses. Electricity, Internet service and buying equipment costs money. It’s not much, but they exist. I’ll have future blog posts going into more detail about calculating and minimizing your expenses, but electricity costs at a few cents per day per device (as long as it’s a phone). Then there’s the cost of purchasing your smartphone or laptop. You can sometimes get these for free, but you can expect to pay at least $10 per device that will take a few weeks to a few months of GPT activity to pay off.

Finally, there’s your monthly bill from your ISP. For most people, this is a moot point because even if they didn’t use GPT sites and apps, they’d still be paying for Internet service anyways. But there are some phone farmers out there that have two Internet connections from two different ISP to maximize GPT earnings. In that case, the entire cost of your second ISP attributable to your GPT activities and that means if that second Internet connection isn’t netting you at least what your monthly bill is (probably between $20 and $60 per month, which is fairly significant in terms of GPT income), you’re losing money.

Taxes

Without getting into trouble or too much detail, your GPT earnings are probably taxable. If you’re the perfect little taxpayer and report your GPT earnings, they will obviously reduce your earnings. I’ll have a future blog post that goes into this in a bit more detail, but keep in mind I’m not a tax professional and you should consult with your tax expert (and not me) before making any tax decisions.

Ok, so that’s a lot to consider, but hopefully you’ll see why such a simple question results in a complex answer. And I’m sure many of you out there can think of other variables that may increase or reduce your amount of GPT earnings. So go ahead, feel free to comment!