Ibotta Review

Budgets tend to get a little tight during and immediately after the holiday season. Income gets dumped into gifts, change clangs into buckets for charity, and the essentials get stretched a little thinner than usual while you slowly refill your coffers. There is no time when coupons, rebates, and savings are more welcome. Ibotta offers shoppers a new way to save some cash for buying what they normally would in select stores, assuming it's featured on the app's virtual shelves.

Once you create an account and sign in, you'll be presented with a series of real-life products. The list is supposedly customized for your interests and needs based on previous purchases or what you mark liked and disliked, but it never changes that much. Even items marked as disliked hung around in the items list. After picking a product, you are given ways to earn money by learning about products and then buying them in person.

The opportunities range from reading product facts (usually just a tagline) to how-to articles that explain things like how often to apply lip balm (daily, for the record) or social sharing prompts. Usually, the savings won't add up to more than $2 per product and all of the tasks feel like little more than an attempt to sell you a product you're already interested in buying, but it's pretty quick, easy, and painless to do.

To receive your reward for completing the tasks, simply scan the receipt proving you bought the item. The purchase has to be made an approved location, which includes mostly sizable chain stores across the country, and once you snap a picture of your receipt, just wait for your savings to be returned via PayPal or donate the earnings to schools or charity. It never took more than a few hours for the deposit to occur in my testing. Ibotta's formula works well for these smaller sums you'll accumulate with potential regularity, though perhaps we'll see this model used for mail-in rebates or similar money-back offers down the line.

The bottom line. Ibotta won't put much back in your pocket, but it's well worth a couple of taps to save a couple of bucks. If you're already buying the products it offers, it's hard to lose.

Review Synopsis

Product: 

Ibotta 1.1.1

Company: 

Ibotta, Inc.

Contact: 

http://www.ibotta.com

Price: 

Free

Requirements: 

iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 5.0 or later

Positives: 

Quick payout of earned cash. Easy way to save a little money on everyday items. Good variety of retailers that should be accessible in most communities.

Negatives: 

Variety of items is lacking. Liking or disliking items seems to have little effect on selection.

Score: 

4 Great

Source: http://www.maclife.com/article/reviews/ibotta_review

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