I’ve always done a lot of walking, but recently bought a Garmin Fenix 3 and now I’m hooked on activity tracking. While Garmin Connect allows me to partake in challenges with people who do similar stepcounts to me, it’s Bounts that lets me earn money from Activity Tracking.
Bounts lets you trade points (known as “bounts”) for vouchers from loads of well known stores, like Sainsbury’s, Amazon, Argos, Pizza Express, Next, M&S, Curry’s, River Island, John Lewis Group, Morrisons etc. A £5 voucher costs 1,389 bounts.
So how do you earn bounts? Well different devices and different activities allow you to claims points. My only activity is walking, so in my case a free membership pays 5 bounts for 7,000 steps, 5 bounts for a 20 minute walk (you need an approved GPS enabled device for this reward). So that’s a maximum of 10 bounts per day. Not many you say, so here’s how to pump things up. Join up with my referral code subscribe54721 and you’ll get 100 bounts (don’t sign up via the Facebook link or it won’t work). Let Bounts tweet via a Twitter account you own and get 5 bounts per day. There’s also Reward Wheel which you get free spins on. Don’t expect to win much on this, though I did win 1,000 bounts just a week after I joined. This was follow soon afterwards with 50 bounts, but otherwise if I have won it’s usually just 5 bounts.
But if you’re into activity you can become a premium+ member (£14.99/year or £1.49/month) and earn 20 bounts for each 7,000 steps up to 60 bounts (3 x 7,000 steps) and 20 bounts per 20 min walk up to 60 bounts (3 x 20 min walk – must be at least 1 hour between walks and at least 4kmph average speed). So with the Twitter bounts that’s 125 bouts per day, which quickly adds up to 1,000 bounts in 8 days. You get loads more spins on the Reward Wheel too. All in all you could earn a £5 voucher every 11 days or around £160 a year. Of course it may be harder to keep up the regime in the winter, which is where monthly premium+ membership may be a good idea.
If you don’t have an activity tracker you get get started by using a smartphone. There’s also an app on Android and ios. Cycling, running and other activities can be tracked via apps like Strava, Runkeeper and Swimtag. You can check out the list here.
Just to get a reality check, 1000 steps is about 0.5 miles, so you need to be walking a little over 10 miles a day to get to this level, but if you’re like me and own a Border Collie, it’s really not that difficult. My plan is to make it pay for the Fenix 3, but in reality I will be doing well if I get a new pair of walking boots each year from it. That’s if they don’t go bust and I lose my £14.99 first. I’ll certainly be claiming back my first £15 asap.
A very late update to this:
I claimed my £15 back plus another £20, but Bounts stopped making any items available for purchase, so my 10,000 points I had accrued with a great deal of effort (probably about £50’s worth) was made valueless. Bounts started getting nasty, claiming all these bad people were trying to make money off them. Of course they were. Premium members were paying for the privilege and being pulled in by Bounts’ claim to “Earn up to £200 a year by just exercising”. All paid premium membership was effectively cancelled with no refund (I had about 9 months remaining).
They then changed the whole model, so that you used a few points (generally 25) to enter a draw, rarely for anything you wanted. As there are just a few draws each month, if you do any activity you accrue points way faster than you can ever use, so there is no incentive to exercise at all, which was supposedly the whole point of Bounts.
In short, this site/scheme is now completely redundant. RIP Bounts.