With gas prices on the rise, you might be looking for relief at the pump. Rather than sift through long lists of gas stations that do cash back in your area, why not try an app that does it daily for you?
I’m talking about an app called Upside.
When you first sign up for a free account, you can get an extra cash bonus, plus the cash back that local gas stations will offer. (You have to use a referral code to get the extra bonus, feel free to use “FAAPK”, which is our buddy Andy’s secret code).
You still have questions; let me answer them for you [Click to Skip Ahead]:
What’s great about Upside is how you’re not locked-in to a single gas station. At any time you could shop different gas stations, and the amount of cash back available will shift depending on how much they want your business at that time.
So what’s the catch?
Well the key is that there are multiple gas stations on the app, and they are all competing against each other for your business.
Gas stations do that in general, and will play with pricing to try and attract attention.
In the case of Upside, a gas station can choose how much cash back they will offer on any day—which can depend on how much gas prices are in the area, and how much other gas stations might be offering for cash back.
To put yourself in the shoes of a gas station, they’re willing to give users of Upside that cash back because in their mind that’s the price of admission to attract a customer. Upside most likely gets a small cut, and you (the user) obviously get your share too. It’s a win-win-win.
I’ve found that Upside will tend to give me more cash back when gas prices are higher in general versus when they were more subdued like through most of 2020.
Whether that’s true for your area or not probably depends, but I’ve made a decent amount of money from this simple app even though I took a break from using it in 2020 (being lazy)…
It’s not the kind of money that will make you a millionaire, but it is pretty much free money for very little effort.
Just how much effort does using this app need?
Once you’ve downloaded the app, finding cash back at a gas station is as simple as opening the app and comparing prices and offers.
The gas stations in your area will update their prices and offers, and it’s up to you to determine what’s most important to you—convenience, low price, cash back, or some combination of all.
The offers display on a map which you can easily scroll around on, based on your location.
- Once you select an offer, press a button to “claim it”.
- Then, you can press “directions”, with the option to use Apple or Google Maps
- At the gas station, either:
- Check-in and pay with your card
- Grab a receipt, take a picture, and upload it to the app
After that, you’re done.
Wait a couple of days for the offer to be confirmed, and then you’ll have the earnings in your account.
Getting access to your money is easy too. You can link a bank account and have it transferred directly there, or you can opt for one of their gift cards, which includes stores like (at the time of writing this):
- Nike
- Domino’s
- Kohl’s
- Amazon
From what I see, it looks like Upside is expanding their cash back offers to include groceries and restaurants.
They haven’t included places I generally go to yet, but it could be another interesting place for simple and convenient cash back in the future. At least now there seems to be a good number of hole-in-the-wall restaurants, with as much as 42% cash back, based on a short list in my location today.
How much can you make?
Here’s the fun part.
That’s $67.55 of lifetime earnings in case you can’t see the screenshot, and all without dropping a sweat on my part.
You can see I really haven’t used this app regularly in much of 2021, and hardly at all in 2020. I was a religious user in 2019 when I first got the app, as I got drawn into the game of it.
Looking back, I kinda wish I wasn’t as lazy, as I probably could’ve had much higher earnings to boast of ever since.
Another cool feature of Upside, which adds another layer of earnings potential, is their referral program. Here’s how much I’ve earned from that:
Now, that might not be realistic for you because I “cheated” by getting Andy’s referrals from his review post on GetUpside. But that shouldn’t take away from the potential in your case, if you want to choose to become an Upside evangelist to help others get cash back at gas stations.
Basically, each time a referral of yours buys gas, you get 1 cent per gallon. If they refer somebody, you get paid on them too (though I haven’t had that happen for me yet).
What’s really cool…
Each time you get a new referral you also get that $0.15 per gallon one-time bonus on your next fill-up, which really adds up and helped greatly for my lifetime earnings. Again if you want that $0.15 per gallon bonus for signing up with Upside, use Andy’s offer code FAAPK, and you’ll both get the bonus.
Seeing $0.10 to $0.20 trickle in every once in a while from referrals reminds me of dividends on small investments, and is fun when you think of the compounding behind it.
Like I said, this isn’t life changing money, but it does add a nice sense that you’re getting something out of those expensive trips to the gas station. And if you have a really long time horizon, you could put these earnings into great dividend stocks, which could compound into a serious amount over the long term.
While you’re at it, why not learn about how compounding interest makes wealth building possible?
It’s what turns little amounts of money into great amounts, and it’s how countless people have built wealth over time, and will continue to do so.
