This website claims to give you free gift cards for your online activities. But can you really make money with the InstaGC website?
As you likely know, I spend a lot of time reviewing online survey sites, apps that claim to be able to help me to earn extra money, and other related online money-making opportunities.
Why? Because I believe that some of these sites could prove to be valuable side hustles. I’m all about the side hustle. I mean, let’s be real here… we would all love to be able to earn a bit of extra cash. It makes life easier, it allows us to enjoy more things, it give us better options for making choices about a vast number of different things, etc.
Making more money can also have an impact on your level of stress. If bills have been getting you down, making some extra cash and getting them paid down can release you from a lot of pressure.
Making Money With The InstaGC Website
But what about this website? Does InstaGC.com look like it has what it takes to be a real, quality side-hustle?
That’s what I wanted to find out. I heard about this site from a friend. They hadn’t tried it though, so I was going into this pretty blind. I had no idea if this site was going to prove to be profitable at all.
Here is a screenshot of the lower part of the landing screen. This at least gives you an idea of how InstaGC operates.
As you can see, this site claims to give you points for doing things like completing surveys, watching videos, shopping online, and searching the web.
But exactly how does it do this? And do you earn enough points to make it worth your time? Is the site time-consuming to use?
A lot of these types of websites claim to give you free money… and in truth, some of them do. But often, the amount of time that you need to spend on them simply does not add up to being worth-while for the amount of money that they actually pay out.
And that, my friends, is why very few people make good cash on survey websites.
But would InstaGC prove to be different? Let’s see what happens.
Taking A Closer Look At InstaGC.com
We can see from the lower part of the home screen that this website allows you to redeem your points for gift cards. Gift cards are not cash, but they are pretty close—and I will often accept this as fine.
In other words, I have come to a place where I do not write websites off for not paying out strictly in cash. I mean, gift cards pretty much equal cash, so this part of the process was fine for me.
They say that they offer more than 360 different gift card options. These are delivered digitally, awarded instantaneously, can be used in-store or online, and can even be gifted to friends, or whatever you want to do with them.
According to the official website, over 1,032,600 gift cards have already been redeemed through InstaGC.com… so that has to count for something, right?
But, at this point, I couldn’t learn anything else without signing up, so that’s what I did.
Signing Up For InstaGC.com
Signing up was, initially, very easy. But then, I came to this page where the site said that it was verifying that my adblock was disabled… and said that if I wasn’t redirected in less than 10 second, to disable it and try again.
Well, I didn’t know this site from Adam… so the odds of me disabling any adblock I might have up were very slim. So I was happy when it eventually loaded and I gained access to the site.
Once I was inside, I realized that I had gained access to what appeared to be the ‘main hub’ of the InstaGC website. There were various different tabs along the top of the page, along with a lot of other information located throughout. Here is a screenshot of it.
The main tabs were pretty self-explanatory. The categories, however, were interesting. You could view ‘All,’ or you could view the following…
- Apps
- Calls
- Clicks
- Shopping
- Tasks
- Trials
- Videos
Any of these categories could give you the opportunity to earn some points, so this was pretty cool. I had seen many, many other survey sites that operated this way though (like Swagbucks and QuickThoughts), so I was a little bit skeptical that this site would allow me the opportunity to earn enough money for the amount of time it would take to make it worthwhile.
But… I’m also always down for exploring a little bit, so I decided to give it a try. Here is what I discovered.
Attempting To Earn Some Points On InstaGC.com
I decided that I wanted to try to earn some points by watching a video… so I went to the ‘videos’ category.
There were several different opportunities here, including EngageMe.tv, InstaGC, encrave, hyprMX, and more. I decided to just go with InstaGC, since this was the site I was trying out anyway.
So I clicked on this button, and was taken to a screen that included this little tidbit of InstaGC goodness. Take a look at this…
Ok, so for December, payouts doubled! Awesome… I would now earn a STAGGERING 1 point for every 10 videos!!! Yes!!!
If you sensed some sarcasm, you were 100% correct. I was insulted at this point, to think that this site would not think that my time would be worth more than this… but I had already gone this far. Maybe the videos were only 1 second each, and would all play quickly?
I clicked on the ‘show below’ button on playlist 1.
Now, granted, my internet was not the best, but the videos never loaded. I tried twice, and waited for quite a while, and they just didn’t load. At all. So it turned out that this was not even an option for me at this point.
Note: My internet was acting a bit glitchy. But just as an experiment, I attempted to load a YouTube video as well, just to see if my internet was so bad that it would not load videos. And I had no trouble loading a YouTube video, at all… so while my internet might not have been optimal, it was not so terrible that I could not even load a video.
I messed around with it a bit more, and eventually got a video to play. It was 52 seconds long. So, at this rate, it looks like I would need to watch about 10 minutes of video (probably 15 minutes altogether when you count loading screens and what-not) before I would earn 1 point. But how much were points worth? That is what I needed to figure out next.
How Much Are Points Worth In InstaGC?
I went to the Redeem tab to see how much the different gift card options would cost me in points… and was pretty amazed (not in a good way) by what I found. Yes, there are a ton of options available here… and I was happy to find that.
But when I clicked on the Amazon.com gift card option, I was taken to a page that told me that I could get a $1 Amazon gift card for 100 points.
Wow. Just wow. By my hasty calculations, that comes out to about $1 every… very, very many hours.
Sites and apps that pay you for watching videos don’t tend to pay well at the best of times (other examples include AppTrailers and Perk TV). Even then, InstaGC felt especially unappealing.
At this point, I was not even interested in seeing what else this site had to offer. This felt like a joke to me. I felt like I had completely wasted my time. Oh well, at least now I knew.
My Personal Feelings About InstaGC.com
This site seems pretty popular, and I am sure that you could earn some points on it and manage to do so more efficiently than I was able to. I am sure that practice makes perfect… to some kind of a degree, anyway, and that may include this website.
But do I feel like this is the site that you should be practicing on? No. I’m sorry, but I don’t see much side-hustle value in InstaGC.com.
The site itself wasn’t bad. It just seems like the amount of money you get for your time is very small; Too small to make it worth my time.
If I am going to be investing time into a side-hustle, I need to know that there is going to be at least some sort of payout. Or, I need to know that there is at least a very good chance of it, and that it will be more than worth my time. I just felt that InstaGC did not give me this assurance.
Our Final Thoughts about The InstaGC.com Website
Should you sign up and use it to make some extra money?
The InstaGC Website Review
To be completely honest, doing online surveys will never earn more than minimum wage. In fact, most people rarely earn more than $1-$3 per hour, if they are lucky enough to get a payout.
If you want to legit make money online you need to invest time into building a website. Earn passive income through affiliate links & advertising revenue. Rather than spend an hour trying to answer boring questions, build a real web property that you can earn monthly income from.
What’s up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!