Apps that pay you to exercise, compared honestly

"Get paid to exercise" covers two completely different products, and most comparison articles mix them up. Sorting them out is the first useful thing anybody can tell you, because the two are good at opposite things.

What are the two kinds?

Step-reward apps watch your movement and convert it into a small amount of value. You put nothing in. Sweatcoin, WeWard, CashWalk and similar apps sit here. The reward is modest by design, because the app is being funded by advertising, offers and partner deals rather than by anything you contribute.

Commitment apps ask you to put money behind a goal and give it back — usually with more on top — when you hit it. HealthyWage, StepBet and DietBet, StickK, Oath, Cadoo and Pledro sit here. Nobody is paying you to move. You are paying yourself to follow through, with the money of the people who did not.

The first kind rewards movement you were doing anyway. The second creates movement that would not otherwise happen. Neither is better; they answer different questions.

How much do step-reward apps actually pay?

Less than the headlines suggest, and the honest UK reviews say so plainly.

• Sweatcoin converts roughly a thousand outdoor steps into one Sweatcoin, with a daily ceiling on the free tier. Reviews put a committed daily walker somewhere in the low tens of pounds of usable value per year, and in-app offers are typically worth more than converting to cash.
• WeWard pays in a mix of cash, gift cards and charity donations, with a minimum before you can withdraw. A typical eight-to-ten-thousand-step walker takes several months to reach it.
• CashWalk and similar apps trade in vouchers rather than cash.

There is also a detail that matters if you train indoors: several of these apps only count outdoor, GPS-confirmed steps, so treadmill and gym work is invisible to them.

Treat a step-reward app as a small bonus on steps you were already taking. It is not income, and no honest comparison should present it as one.

How do commitment apps work?

They vary more than they look.

• HealthyWage is built around weight loss. You commit an amount per month against a target and a timeframe, and a calculator quotes what you would receive for hitting it, using a formula that weighs your starting point, the size of the goal and the time you give yourself.
• StepBet, DietBet and RunBet run fixed-length games with a set buy-in, personalised step or weight targets, and everybody who hits their targets sharing what is left behind by those who did not.
• StickK is the purest version of the idea: a commitment contract, usually with a referee, where failing sends your money to a cause — sometimes deliberately one you dislike, on the theory that the threat works harder that way.
• Oath puts money behind weekly gym attendance and confirms it with a location check-in.
• Cadoo runs games across walking, running, cycling and bodyweight exercises, verifying some of them through your camera and others through fitness-tracker data.

Two things separate them in practice, and they are the two worth asking about: what counts as proof, and who gets the money at the end.

Where does Pledro differ?

Four ways, and each is a deliberate design decision rather than a feature.

Everything is verified from a wearable, and nothing else is accepted. There is no photograph of a scale, no honesty box, no manual log, no referee. Distance, duration and heart rate are read from the device server-side, hand-entered activity is rejected outright, and implausible data is held for a person to look at rather than paid automatically. An activity that has not passed verification does not exist as far as your challenge is concerned.

Everyone who completes is paid the same. There is no first place. No ranked reward mode is offered on Pledro at all, so finishing your 10km on Saturday morning pays exactly what finishing it on Sunday night pays. Completing is the whole win condition.

Our share is capped at 10% of everything entered, and it can be nothing. It comes only out of the entries left behind by people who did not complete, it can never exceed a tenth of the fund in any circumstance, and when everybody completes it is zero. That is set out in full, with the arithmetic, in the fee guide.

There is a free tier that is not a trial. Grind Coins are free, cannot be bought and are not money, and the entire beta runs on them. They carry exactly the same verification as everything else: the barrier to entry is lower, the barrier to proof is identical.

Pledro is also UK-built — Nottingham — priced in pounds, and written for UK rules rather than adapted to them.

Which one should you use?

If your question is "can I get something back for the walking I already do?", a step-reward app is the honest answer, as long as you go in expecting pounds a year rather than pounds a week.

If your question is "how do I actually do the thing I keep saying I will do?", that is what a commitment app is for, and the thing to compare is not the headline reward but the proof standard. An app where completion is self-reported is an app where your reward is shared with people who may not have done the work.

Five things to check before you commit money to any of them

1. What counts as proof. Device data, a photograph, or your word?
2. Who gets the money if you do not complete. Other entrants, a charity, or the platform?
3. What the platform takes, whether it is a fixed percentage or capped, and whether it is disclosed at all.
4. Whether there is a free way to learn the loop before any of your money is involved.
5. Where the company is and which rules apply to it. Terms, age limits and consumer protections are not the same everywhere.

Pledro answers all five on this site, on purpose. Real-money entries are not live yet — 18+, UK, pending authorisation — and until they are, the entire product runs on free Grind Coins.

18+ for real-money entries · UK · Your limits, your rules