I tried fitness app Sweatcoin for a week - here’s how it went

It’s a free fitness app that promises to ‘pay you’ to walk. So how does it work? And will it actually motivate you to get off the couch? I tried Sweatcoin for a week to find out.

What is Sweatcoin?

Sweatcoin is an exercise app that tracks your steps and pays you in ‘Sweatcoins’- a type of quasi-cryptocurrency – each time you walk 1,000 steps. Unfortunately, you can’t actually cash out Sweatcoins to your bank account. Instead, Sweatcoins can be put towards goods, services and experiences from partnering companies via an in-app marketplace.

Offers in this marketplace change frequently. Sweatcoin Guide says that its offers can include discounts for everything from clothing, food and exercise equipment through to iPhones, televisions and even PayPal and Amazon credits. The site warns that popular offers can sell out quickly, so it you want to snag something good, it’s wise to check the marketplace often.

You can trade Sweatcoins with other users, and if you’re feeling more altruistic,  you can donate them to charitable campaigns. According to Sweatcoin’s website, the app is an official partner of Save The Children, and has worked with charities including Cancer Research UK, the African Wildlife Foundation and Conservation International.

Initially, Sweatcoin only tallied your outdoor steps. This meant that any indoor steps you took – say at the gym, at work, or if you had to climb down 22 flights of stairs during an office fire drill like I did – would not count. This changed with an update of the app, however, and now your indoor steps count towards your total.

How does Sweatcoin actually work?

Sweatcoin is available on the App Store and Google Play Store and can be used via a smartphone or Apple Watch. After downloading the app, you are prompted to enter your name, phone number, email and, crucially, to allow the app to access to your GPS location. With your data potentially at stake, some commentators have raised privacy concerns. In response, Sweatcoin promises 100% data privacy and says on its website that it would never sell user data.

Once set up, Sweatcoin uses your device’s accelerometer and GPS location to track your steps. The app currently gives you 0.95 Sweatcoins for every 1,000 outdoor steps you take (it automatically docks a 5% commission on each Sweatcoin earned).

Is Sweatcoin worth downloading?

After using Sweatcoin for a week, these were my main takeaways:

1. Sweatcoins don’t come easy

It was harder than I expected to earn Sweatcoins. During my week-long trial, when Sweatcoin was only tracking outdoor steps, I racked up around 10,500 of these, and this translated to what I thought was a pretty measly 10 Sweatcoins. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, I am a bit of a couch potato and spend most of the day indoors. If you’re more of an active person, you’ll probably fare better than I did.

At this Sweatcoin rate, if I wanted to buy the iPhone XS that was on offer in the marketplace, I would have needed to earn a whopping 20,000 coins. At the snail’s pace I was going at, that would have taken me almost 38 and a half years to accumulate.

My lack of physical activity was not the only reason it was hard for me to amass Sweatcoins. Sweatcoin admitted that its verification algorithm was flawed, only counting about 65% of a users’ total steps on average. (A recent update says that Sweatcoin now converts around 90% of a user’s steps into Sweatcoins).

The app also limits how many Sweatcoins you can earn. For example, the free version of the app only allows you to notch up five coins each day. To earn more, you need to upgrade to a higher membership level.

2. It can be a drain on your phone’s battery

Sweatcoin tells you to keep the app running in the background at all times so it can accurately track your steps. As I soon found out, this can come at the expense of your device’s battery power.

Sweatcoin says it has made efforts to solve this problem and recommends that users experiencing issues turn on their phone’s “battery saver” mode. While I found doing this did help, there was one downside – I kept forgetting to open the app when I went walking outside, and so annoyingly not all of my steps were counted.

3. Motivation can turn to obsession

Sweatcoin taps into our obsession with quantifying various aspects of our lives, particularly in relation to health. Using Sweatcoin, I did feel more incentivised to get outside and get active. On more than one occasion, I took the long way home to try to boost my Sweatcoin steps and earnings.

And it seems I’m not alone. A 2015 study of 200 women who wore a Fitbit found that activity trackers had a profound impact on participant’s decision-making. The study revealed that 95% of participants increased the amount of weekly exercise they did, 91% took a longer route to boost their step count, and 56% hiked their walking speed to try and hit their targets quicker.

While all this quantification can provide motivation, there can also be downsides. The same study found that 79% of participants felt under pressure to reach their daily targets, 59% felt like the Fitbit was controlling their everyday routines, and 30% said that wearing the device made them feel guilty.

So does this mean you should ditch your fitness tracker altogether? Personally, I’m not so sure. As someone who definitely needs to do more physical exercise, any kind of motivation I can get is invaluable. And while I doubt I’ll ever do enough walking to get that new phone or TV, there’s no harm in trying.

Update: This article was originally written by Finance Journalist Tamika Seeto in 2019 and was updated by  updated in June 2023 by Senior Finance Journalist Alasdair Duncan, to reflect more recent updates, fixes and developments to the Sweatcoin app. Main image source: Just Life/Shutterstock.com.