Honeygain is an app for Android, PC, and Mac that allows you to earn money passively by selling your unused bandwidth.
You’re literally being paid to do nothing- every beer money maker’s dream.
But often times, if it sounds too good to be true- it is. Is this the case with Honeygain?
Let’s find out in this complete Honeygain review.
Details
- Type: Desktop and mobile app
- Platforms: Android, PC, Mac (no iPhone)
- Price: Free
- Registration required: Yes (email, phone, driver’s license, location, name, DOB, driver’s license/passport)
- Earning potential: $0-$300 per month
- Realistic earning average: $1-$30 per month
- Time commitment: 1 minute per day
- Estimated earnings per hour: $0.01-$1.40
- Download the app: Android, PC, Mac.
- See the official page
Pros
- Earn money passively by running a program
- Works on Android phones, PCs, and Macs
- Free to use
- $20 payout threshold
Cons
- Concerns about data collection, privacy, and how your IP and info are used
- Some issues with payout not being approved
- Lots of questionable and fake reviews posted online with referral code spam
Overall score: 5/10 (Average)
Honeygain allows you to truly earn money passively by selling your bandwidth. The earnings are fluctuating constantly and far from stable. There are some concerns regarding data collection, usage, payments, and harvesting are also questionable, but otherwise Honeygain doesn’t seem to have any drawbacks. Although this DOES use up data on your phone and electricity on your computer, any smart user should be able to mitigate these negatives and remain profitable and make a few bucks a month of beer money.
What is Honeygain?
Honeygain is an app for Windows PC, Mac, and Android (with plans for iOS) that allows you to earn money passively by selling your unused internet bandwidth.
The app boasts and advertises itself as truly passive income and many users agree that you can really “earn money doing nothing.”
While this sounds amazing for someone who doesn’t care if they earn a few cents on the side passively, it also sounds too good to be true.
Let’s dive in and review Honeygain for 2020.
How does it work?
Honeygain works by selling a portion of your available bandwidth to other uses anonymously.
The company behind the app states that your bandwidth will be used for researchers and scientific purposes, as you can see here:
While they’re not specific on WHAT exactly your bandwidth will be used for, that leaves a lot up in the air.
This vagueness would be what makes a lot of users paranoid to use the service because there’s a lot of uncertainty.
Honeygain’s network is used by businesses clients for web intelligence and content delivery
The traffic will come from approved business partners who run web intelligence, market research and content delivery services.
Honeygain shares your unused net traffic with data scientists
People are worried that you can get hacked (backdoors, malware, data harvesting, etc.)
People have actually claimed to have BEEN hacked:
People are paranoid about the people that use your bandwidth- are they doing something illegal? Are they posing as you? Who’s IP gets sent behind their activities?
After all, the service is “free” for you when you loan out your bandwidth. And we all know that nothing is free. No sir.
Is this worth the potential for a few cents or dollars each day? That’s your call.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that Honeygain uses your resources for VPNs.
After all, they’re just a tunnel of points that route through a path and your IP is just one of the data points in the tunnel. Unless you’re an endpoint. Then that’d expose your IP to whatever they’re doing in the background. Yikes.
How do you make money with Honeygain?
You just let the app run in the background while you do something else. On the PC and Mac, you just leave it in your taskbar and you can use your computer as normal.
Honeygain states that you shouldn’t notice any decrease in your connection speed or performance and that it only utilizes a free, unused portion of your bandwidth.
The same goes for Android phones. You just launch the app and it’ll show an icon in the notification bar when it’s active.
When you pull up the app, you can see how much bandwidth you sold in near real-time. The dashboard tells you how much ‘honey’ you’ve gathered, which converts to USD.
It’s just like virtual currency and has a conversion rate- almost like mining Bitcoin.
The more bandwidth you sell, the more money you’ll earn.
There are peak hours of usage and many factors determine how much you’ll earn with Honeygain:
- The time of day users are active
- Your country and location
- Your connection speed
- How many devices/accounts you have
If you hit peak hours and you’re in a popular country with a good connection, you’ll earn the most money.
Of course, there are plenty of unknown elements too:
- Who’s using your bandwidth and when are they active?
- Where are they located?
Honeygain allows you to use as many devices as you have, so you can double or triple your income. There are also no account registration limits and you can have as many as you want.
This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Why?
Because people abuse it.
People have created dozens of accounts powering dozens of devices all running Honeygain. When a lot of people do this, the supply of Honeygain bandwidth goes up.
But the demand? It stays flat.
This means more people are selling their bandwidth than users are using it. And that means fewer earnings for everyone. This is probably why Honeygain has declined in earnings so rapidly lately.
One thing I should note is that the developer does respond to most of the negative replies, but the responses are canned templates.
How much can you make with Honeygain?
Honeygain has had a ton of mixed reviews.
From what I can gather, it looks like the service used to be decent in how much you can earn. There are reports of anywhere up to $50 a month, which isn’t bad at all considering you don’t have to do anything. That’s more than you’ll earn from bank interest with a $1K savings account.
But the recent reviews suggest otherwise. Honeygain has gone downhill and the earnings have declined over time.
Why? Well, the sudden spike in the supply of bandwidth probably has to do with it.
People who were earning a few dollars per day have now dropped to just a few cents:
- People who were making $1 a day now make nothing.
- People who were making $50 a month now make a few dollars.
The minimum earnings to cash out is a fair $20. But who knows how long it’ll take you to reach it. The dashboard gives you a few details like your current honey balance, the USD equivalent, how close you are to payout, how much you earned today, and the GB usage of the last 30 days.
Until Honeygain does some to either sell more bandwidth or limit the supply of users, the earnings will continue to decrease as everyone hops on the bandwagon.
If you were to go out there right now and run it for a day, you’d likely make anywhere from 10-60 cents per day. But then again, this varies depending on many different factors.
There’s no way to “force” the system to sell more of your bandwidth.
Many people report that they start with lots of bandwidth but it decreases sharply over time. The traffic you get seems to fluctuate intermittently with no rhyme or reason.
There’s also a “content delivery” program (which people call “CD”) that. This lets you share your connection with bandwidth-demanding multimedia like videos, audio, streaming, etc.
This is difference from traditional credits which is measured by KB. Content delivery allows you to earn by duration. So the longer you’re connected, the more you’ll earn. This is currently in beta.
Is Honeygain legit?
It has a 4/5 star rating on TrustPilot with over 400 reviews. But a ton of them are just referral code spam:
The poor English grammar used throughout the bulk of the “positive” reviews is startling. I mean, I’m not perfect either (far from it).
But some of the reviews look like they’re written by a poorly-programmed AI, or bought. Is there a bunch of VPN users in other countries trying to disguise themselves in a tier 1 location? Oh, the irony.
You’ll likely start earning a few cents the first day you sign up. But the earnings will vary, it’s far from consistent. Some days you’ll earn nothing and other days you may earn more.
Of course, the more devices you have, the more you can multiply your earnings.
Some users have reported that they were in a “slump” and not earning much.
But after a few weeks, they earned a lot more with increasing bandwidth sold.
And lastly, some people reported that they didn’t get paid. They attempted to redeem their earnings and weren’t able to pass validation or something.
Some had their accounts closed also or suspended when they tried to redeem payments.
The server also seems to have problems. It fluctuates and goes online then offline randomly. This can directly affect your earnings. You can’t earn anything if the servers are down.
Not to mention the personal info they ask for:
How to earn faster with Honeygain
The functionality of the program can’t be modified by the end-user (that’s you), so you can’t do anything to control it.
You can’t sell more of your bandwidth as you don’t control this. It completely depends on how the program assigns users to utilize your available free bandwidth.
There are no options, sliders, or toggle switches for you to adjust. You can’t sell more or less. It’s a fixed amount that you don’t see. Therefore there’s not much you can do to other than to run the program 24/7.
But here are two ways to maximize your earnings.
Get referrals
Like most apps and programs that let you make real money, there’s a built-in referral system.
This is why people are spamming their codes with five-star ratings all over the ‘net (so you’ll sign up because of a positive review). Referrals will net you real cash quickly- a lot faster than selling your bandwidth.
Referrals give you a $5 payment. You also earn 10% of their of their earnings, so if you refer enough people you don’t have to do anything yourself, similar to most other referral programs. Then again, you’re not doing anything in the first place to run this in the background.
Add more devices
The other ways to simply buy more IPs, create more accounts, and add more devices. This will double or triple your income, though each device will vary. Is it safe?
Who knows. Honeygain claims that your data is only used for researchers and that it’s anonymous, but people have said that they were hacked after using it. They’re also not exactly clear about how your data is harvested, or how your bandwidth is used by others.
There’s no description about your IP address or computer details being revealed. Being that this is the main gray area of Honeygain, they should clean it up and be more discretionary about what users can expect and how their bandwidth is used.
Why are they so vague?
There’s nothing new about this technology. There are plenty of other services that allow you to sell your unused bandwidth for cash. Honeygain just happened to catch some early traction given its debut in 2019. Perhaps users who got hacked did so from other means.
Or maybe there’s an exploit Honeygain isn’t even aware of in their program. Who knows.
Is it worth it?
This depends. If you have a crappy, slow connection, Honeygain will probably impact your speed.
This will make doing other activities on your phone or computer slower, which costs you time.
Time is worth a dollar equivalent.
And depending on what yours is worth, this is how you can decide if Honeygain is worth it for you.
Let alone if you only make a few cents, the power in running your computer 24/7 or your phone’s data plan can easily set you into the negative.
Is it legal?
Honeygain is legal and according to their Terms of Service.
(Of course they’d label themselves as legal- what company would outright tell the public what they’re doing is illegal?)
But I wouldn’t trust the people who use the bandwidth sold to them.
Who knows what they could be doing with it. The company says that your data is not sold and is anonymized, but then again, data always can be exploited and hacked.
So I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket and take their word for it. Let alone the company doesn’t go in-depth to build trust from its users regarding safety, which is one of the main complaints about the app.
Is it passive?
Yes, Honeygain is 100% passive since you let the program run on its own and sell your bandwidth automatically.
This doesn’t require you to do anything other than starting it up and then leaving it alone.
This is what draws many people to the program. I mean, who else wouldn’t want “free” money for doing nothing? This also probably led to decreased earnings over time.
Overall review
Honeygain is a real way to earn a small income passively without having to put in any effort.
But don’t expect to get rich. The earnings are anything from a few cents to a few dollars every month.
Some users do upwards of $50 monthly, but these are far and few in between. The majority of users will only earn a few bucks for running the program in the background. But then again, you’re getting paid to sell your bandwidth that you’re not using.
Just watch out for data overages if you are running Honeygain on your phone or if you have a capped internet plan. Minus the reports of suspended accounts, fluctuating earnings, or sudden drops in income, Honeygain makes a truly passive way to earn a few bucks.
That is if you can get over the privacy and data harvesting portion of it. If you really trust the company or just don’t care about how/if your data is used or collected, then, by all means, give Honeygain a try.