End of an era - no more money for running

Roughly 3 years ago I wrote a small post on the RunKeeper blog about how one can earn real money with running. More than a year later, I wrote another follow-up post on this blog, when I reached a serious milestone, and checked out $480 for running and eating healthy stuff. I mainly used 3 apps to achieve this, and now I'm sad to report, that all of them seems to be over.

In this short post, I'll not detail, how these apps worked. If You are unfamiliar with them, take a short detour to any of the aforementioned posts. So let's go in the same order as I originally did:

Achievemint

To be honest, this one is still going strong as far as I can tell. However, the sad story behind this is, that when I started collecting my points, I have asked whether they are planning to expand or stay a US only program. I was told, that they are planning to expand. a year or so later I maxed out the app with 10000 points = $100. However, I was informed that I still need a US address if I want to get the money, and I can't even provide one of my friends. So in the end, this was just a waste of time for me, but go for it, while it still works if You are in the US.

(Gym)PACT

Gympact, later branded as PACT was a neat way to earn money, my biggest sum came from that source for sure. I never did the Food pact, but I was very active with the Veggie and Gym pacts. Let's dissect them individually. The Gym pact was the original one. The sync with RunKeeper worked just fine. However, sometimes an activity was not counted for a faulty reason. In this case You had to write to the support, who usually dealt with the problem promptly. It was however very cumbersome to do so in the app. I don't know who designed the UI of that app, but the worst things I can remember with PACT are all related to the application itself. Veggie pacts were nice, but in many cases it was rather stochastic, what is accepted by the community and what isn't. Again, You could submit an issue, and it was usually fairly judged, but that took plenty of time and effort. Also, for some reason, the app was not working without an internet connection, so when I was abroad, and the restaurant had no wifi, I was screwed. I ended up taking photos of my food, and then reshooting them from my notebook screen when I got to a WiFi. Again, cumbersome workaround. Meanwhile the rewards were getting smaller and smaller. To be honest I was surprised it stayed high for that long. In the end, around this January I decided that PACT takes more meaningless time from me, than the motivation it provides, and the money become negligible. So I deleted my account and withdrew all my money I still had. Pretty recently a friend of mine forwarded me a mail from PACT, that it will shut down on the 7th of July. So it seems, that their business model was not sustainable. Anyhow, I owe a big thanks to the PACT team, they provided a lot of motivation in the beginning, and I really earned some good money with them. Not to mention their amazing support. I hope, that all of them  will find a similarly cool project now.

FitCrown

FitCrown operated on a much smaller scale then all the others, but it was fun, and some challanges were seriously challenging. I really liked going there, but after a while, the place became a desert, so I just withdrew everything I had, and left.  Now if You go to their site, You can see, that once in a while there still are some challenges, once a year or so, not each month as in the beginning. 

Verdict 

Is this all bad or good? To be honest, I don't know. Maybe new and better ways will emerge from these experiences. Maybe not. I know, that Pact and FitCrown helped me a lot, and I'm happy I started running while they were still around. 

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