Imagine sitting back, doing nothing, and earning a little extra money each month. With Honeygain, this is possible, but what is Honeygain, and is it legitimate? With any passive income opportunity, it’s always important to first figure out whether it’s a scam, then determine whether what you have to do, or share in this case, is worth the money.
What Is Honeygain?
If you have extra bandwidth each month, Honeygain wants to pay you for it. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The company pays users to share their Internet connection with other companies for various reasons, which I’ll discuss later on.
Honeygain has a proxy network that allows businesses to connect to users. For each gigabyte you share, you get paid. The idea is to make use of your connection when it’s idle, such as when you’re at work, out shopping, or away on vacation.
If you have a limited plan but only use a few gigabytes out of 20, 30, or more, sell the rest. All you have to do is sign up, set up your account (hours and data available), and start earning. Naturally, you do need a high-speed Internet plan in order to use the service.
There are various ways to earn, such as bonuses for providing extra services through your network. These aren’t required, but can increase your passive earning potential.
How Does Honeygain Work?
Honeygain is an app that you download for Windows, macOS, Linux, or Android. Support for iOS isn’t yet available. You can use the app on multiple devices to allow clients access to different IP addresses.
You have full control over when your devices are accessed and how much data is available to be used. You don’t have to worry about going over your data plan.
Honeygain’s clients are businesses worldwide that need to access the Internet from different IP addresses for marketing, SEO, crowdsourcing, to bypass location restrictions, and to get around censorship issues. There are a surprising amount of use cases, and Honeygain states that the company approves each individual use case for every client to keep users safer.
When a business chooses to access your connection, they have full access to your IP address and idle network connection. They can’t, however, access data on your device. While using Honeygain, the service has access to your email address, payment details (in order to pay you), device details (OS, model, IP address, location, charge state), and general network details.
A common misconception is that you get paid just for signing up and choosing what and when to share. This isn’t how Honeygain works. You only get paid if a business uses your connection. If no one connects, you don’t get paid.
While Honeygain works worldwide, payments are restricted to PayPal and Bitcoin. This means if your country doesn’t support PayPal, you can only be paid via Bitcoin.
What Are the Use Cases for Honeygain?
While all this might answer the question “What is Honeygain,” it doesn’t quite explain how or why businesses would even need your Internet connection. Usually, it’s all about research. According to Honeygain’s site, “The Honeygain network is used by researchers from e-commerce, advertising, and web intelligence companies.”
That still doesn’t fully describe the use cases, though. Some of the top reasons companies want access to IP addresses around the world include:
- Fight counterfeits – Everyone’s seen cheap knockoffs of expensive brands. However, if those knockoffs are using the brand name falsely, it can ruin the brand’s reputation. The amount of data necessary to scour the Internet for counterfeits is massive, which is why companies crowdsource to those willing to share their connections.
- Compare prices – Prices vary in different locations, especially when it comes to travel. Many travel agents and companies compare prices to find the best possible price for their clients by accessing sites using different IP addresses. For instance, they may search for pricing based on a different city or even different country.
- Handle SEO monitoring – Optimizing websites and ad campaigns is critical for businesses to reach their audience. However, search results are often personalized based on location. By accessing search results from various locations, companies are better able to tweak their SEO strategies to perform better worldwide and in specific markets.
- Prevent ad fraud – Hundreds of millions are spent on digital ads yearly, and that number just keeps growing. It’s only natural that businesses want to make sure their ads are being displayed when and where they’re supposed to be. Honeygain’s proxy network allows companies to easily verify ad placement.
- Perform market research – Performing market research to analyze the competition, trends, brand performance data, and more is yet another bandwidth-intensive task that companies much prefer to crowdsource. Plus, they’re able to bypass any geo-based restrictions.
- Content delivery – While this can also include market research, companies also utilize content delivery networks to gather data, protect intellectual property, and aggregate data for their own customers/audience. This can mean crawling through petabytes of data on a regular basis.
How Do You Earn with Honeygain?
There are several different ways to earn on Honeygain. All of them are similar and involve sharing your connection. However, some are only for a certain subset of users.
1. General Connection Sharing
This is the simplest and most popular method. New users usually get a signup bonus, so you get paid just for getting started. This is fairly common among passive income sites/companies.
Honeygain pays users $1 per 10 GB of data. You earn credits, which you then turn in to gain a payout. The minimum payout is $20, which equals 20,000 credits. Your dashboard will show you a running total of what you’ve earned.
Honeygain’s homepage includes a slider to estimate how much you may earn per month. Remember, this is an estimate. Your final earnings are based on actual data usage.
2. Referrals
If you recently got a referral invite from a friend, this might be why you’re wondering what Honeygain is. Like most side-income earning sites, you can refer others. If they use your link, you get a one-time $5 bonus per referral and a lifetime 10 percent commission on their earnings.
3. Content Delivery
Since content delivery uses so much more data, companies are willing to pay more for the service. You don’t have to enable content delivery, but if you do, you’ll earn six credits per hour that your connection is active. According to Honeygain’s estimator tool, four hours earns you $1. It’s also only available in certain countries.
4. Lucky Pot
Earning via Lucky Pot is all about chance. It’s a daily sweepstakes where you can earn up to $10 per day. As long as you’re an active user, you’ll see an icon on your dashboard to try your luck. You have nothing to lose, and even if you don’t win big, you may still win a small amount of credits, which add up.
5. Swarmbytes
If you’re a large-scale user that has access to over 10 IP addresses, you can participate in Swarmbytes. This requires a separate application, and you’ll need to set up a server in order to manage everything.
Overall Earnings
The maximum that general users can earn per month is $67 (without Lucky Pot). This requires businesses to use 20 GB of data per day and provide 24/7 content delivery service.
Is Honeygain Legitimate?
Yes, Honeygain is legitimate. It does share your connection and only shares the amount that you allow. It also pays its users and provides a detailed help section and customer support. The company is also upfront about the information collected and why it’s collected, such as your location.
On the other hand, Honeygain doesn’t disclose any clients, which is reasonable. This means you’re left to wonder exactly what types of businesses are using your IP address(es). However, Honeygain does state that the company constantly monitors how businesses are using the service. Also, businesses and use cases must be approved before beginning.
What Else Should You Know?
You’re only allowed to connect up to 10 devices at a time and only two devices per IP address. For most users, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Also, you must stay active on the platform. If you’re inactive for more than six months, your credits expire and your account may be deleted.
You can’t use a VPN while using Honeygain, as this changes your location data. You must use a residential IP address. Also, there’s a chance that your IP may be blocked by certain sites as a VPN. This is especially true on sites that don’t allow VPN usage.
Finally, you may also get asked to solve more annoying CAPTCHAs, especially on search engines. This is because the amount of traffic going through your connection may make you seem like a bot versus a human.
What Are the Overall Pros and Cons?
As with any passive income source, there are going to be pros and cons. The main Honeygain pros and cons include:
Pros:
- Easy to install and set up
- Detailed help and easy access to customer support
- Legitimate way to earn a little extra income
- Full control over how much data you share
Cons:
- Takes a while to get to the $20 minimum payout
- Uses data quickly
- Can drain batteries fast, so keep devices plugged in
Are There Any Honeygain Alternatives?
If you’re new to sharing your Internet connection for passive income, you’re probably wondering if there are any Honeygain alternatives to try. Actually, there are two main alternatives: PacketStream and IPRoyal.
PacketStream pays $0.10 per GB, while IPRoyal pays $0.20 per GB. Both work similarly, though the earning potential is definitely higher with IPRoyal. Since you never know when a business may connect to your network, you can actually sign up for all three to maximize your earning potential.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve been wondering what Honeygain is, now you know. It’s not going to replace your day job, but if you have unlimited data or large limited plans you don’t use, sharing your connection could give you a little extra money each month. If you’ve tried Honeygain, let us know in the comments what you think of it so far.
If this doesn’t seem right for you, try using different ways to save money online so you keep more money in your wallet.
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Crystal Crowder –
Staff Writer
Crystal Crowder has spent over 15 years working in the tech industry, first as an IT technician and then as a writer. She works to help teach others how to get the most from their devices, systems, and apps. She stays on top of the latest trends and is always finding solutions to common tech problems.
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