The new ‘it’ thing these days isn’t Groupon sites (that is so mid 2000’s), but the ‘it’ thing these days are cash back coupon sites! These are Checkout 51, Caddle, Flipp App Canada, Save.ca, Great Canadian Rebates, Rakuten Canada, and the PC Optimum Points program.
The technology of uploading your receipts and having the provider scan it and confirm your purchase and give you cash back is pretty amazing. I like working towards the minimum payout and receiving that nice big fat cheque in the mail (even if it’s just $20 and change). Here is a list of websites and Cash Back Apps in Canada that will save you money when you install them on your phone or when you shop online through the shopping portals.
It’s not really a huge, ultimate list, but these are a good start 🙂
Here are some of my favourite cash back and coupon apps in Canada from a Canadian personal finance blog opinion so you can save money fast:
Table of Contents
Checkout 51 (One of my Favourite Cash Back Apps in Canada)
Checkout 51 is my favourite cash back app in Canada to use because it is so easy. I am a lazy couponer and the best form of couponing would be to just upload my receipt when I get home from the grocery store. The products listed on Checkout 51 each week don’t sway me to buy something in particular. I actually just scan my receipts after my purchase to see what I can get for cash back.
I think it’s one of the easier ways to earn passive income in Canada.
This post may contain affiliate links. Please see genymoney.ca’s disclaimer for more information.
So far, I am on my way to the third $20+ cheque (so I’ve received $40+ in payout so far) since starting this a little over a year ago. They mailed the cheque very quickly, I got it within a week.
What kind of coupons for products are available on Checkout 51?
We don’t buy a lot of groceries that are brand name, and tend to stick to the perimeter of the grocery store. However, there are certain items that we buy frequently that ultimately can’t be found at your local mom and pop grocery store. These items are laundry detergent, Pampers diapers, bathroom toilet cleaner, liquid dish detergent, and hand soap. Almost every week, there is usually an offer for one of these items (or each of these items). Sometimes they have coupons for ‘non-name brand’ type things, such as milk or bananas.
Checkout 51 loads a new list of offers every Thursday and you have to submit your receipt before the week’s offers are up (e.g. you can’t submit a receipt for this week’s offers when you purchased something 2 weeks ago).
Then after you submit your receipt, Checkout 51 sends you an email to let you know they are processing your receipt. Within 48 hours, you will know whether your receipt was approved or not. Once the receipt is approved you will get a credit to your account. Let’s say you bought bananas and was approved for $0.25. The $0.25 will be in your account and once you submit enough receipts with approved offers and hit the magic $20.00 they will send you a cheque for $20.00.
Read my Checkout 51 Review for more information about how they make money and how you can make easy money too.
I’ve downloaded it and have had it for just over a year and my payout (by cheque, mailed to my home) has been $46.85. The cheque comes very promptly. I actually like going through my grocery receipts to check out if there’s anything I can claim with Checkout 51.
This is what the email you get looks like when your Checkout 51 coupons have been approved.
In the past few months, Checkout 51 even started paying you $0.30 or so for watching advertisements. I don’t mind clicking on those for a quick $0.30 and to be honest I don’t watch it, I just rest my phone somewhere and go do something else.
If it can get you to the payout threshold of $20.00, why not?
Caddle
Caddle is similar to Checkout 51. They were featured on Dragons Den- you can check out their pitch here to the Dragons.
You can download Caddle here for iOS or Android and use the referral code of BE5YANP538. You can input the referral code by click the Account section and click on the “Redeem Code” button. Then, you just need complete one qualifying offer and you’ll get $1.00 added to your account.
Alternately, you can sign up here through this link to get $1.00, the qualifying offer can be doing a short survey for $0.05 (they are so short sometimes it’s literally seconds to complete).
Similar to Checkout 51, they upload new offers every Thursday. From what I see their offers are not as good as Checkout 51’s and not as numerous, but on the brighter side they have many more offers to fill out surveys here and there to earn $1.00 or $0.05 for each survey.
After a quick few minutes of doing surveys while brushing my teeth (I like to multitask), my balance is $6.00. Lol. Though it might be a while to get to $20 because there aren’t that many offers unlike Checkout 51.
Again, similar to Checkout 51, Caddle’s minimum payout is $20 and when you reach that Caddle will send you a cheque.
You can also refer friends to Caddle and for each friend you refer, you get $1.00 and they also get $1.00.
Here’s my Caddle review– see whether I think it’s worth it to download- I think it is, the surveys are easy and you can upload receipts for cash back (like for Sobeys, Safeway, Loblaws and Costco). Here are some other free apps that pay you to scan your receipts.
Flipp App Canada
I use the Flipp App Canada very often probably every few days. Although it’s not a cash back site, it has coupons available for you. The most important aspect of the Flipp app in Canada is the ability to search for targeted grocery items that I need to to acquire for our household.
It’s part of my grocery buying algorithm strategy.
For example, if you’re looking for Red Bull or eggs (like at Rexall and their Be Well Program). It shows you the deals available and you can sort which one is the best deal, or if you are looking for a particular flyer, you can search for the flyer, for example, No Frills.
You can also circle items that you want to take note of. As you can see from this 2018 Flipp App Canada flyer of No Frills, we have some grocery inflation, bacon is rarely $2.97 anymore and we can’t get 18 eggs for $2.88.
Nonetheless, Flipp app in Canada is probably one of my favourite tools to help our family save money on groceries.
Zweet
Zweet is similar to Checkout 51 and Caddle. However, the Cash Back app in Canada Zweet shut down in the summer of 2018.
Save.ca
Save.ca is similar to the Flipp app in that it shows flyers. However, it is different in that it has a coupon option where you can click the coupons available and have it sent to your email and then you can print them from home. They are smartsource.ca coupons, which are great coupons courtesy of P&G products. Save.ca seems to be an Ontario based app as you need a Torstar account (Toronto Star account) to access it. I always can’t remember my Smartsource.ca password (they make you put in a special character, a capital letter, a number and it just gets too confusing to remember them all correctly) so an app is useful to have.
Here are some of the coupons available on Save.ca.
PC Optimum Points Program
If you shop at any Loblaws stores you should think seriously about signing up for this free PC Optimum Points Loyalty Program.
I loved the Shoppers Optimum Program and I was admittedly very trepidatious of the PC Points and Shoppers Optimum merger. But I am pleased with the program so far. Sometimes the app is glitchy (and then I’ll just have to wait until it “unglitches”), but on the whole, it is very responsive and I love that I don’t have to load my offers anymore manually. They just appear on the PC Optimum app on my phone.
When I buy something with my PC Financial World Elite Mastercard, the points show up on my app right away and I can double check that my points were entered correctly.
You can check out my PC Optimum Review of my experience so far. So far, I have been very pleased with it. There have been regular 20x the points events at Shoppers Drug Mart and also some extra redemption days. I lost count of how much money we have redeemed because it’s been a lot. Just the other day, we only paid $1.40 for $140+ worth of groceries. It’s fantastic. It is especially good paired with the PC Financial World Elite Mastercard.
Here are 6 ways to optimize your PC Optimum points.
Rakuten Canada (Formerly Ebates.ca)
I used to be wary of Rakuten Canada because I thought the cashback didn’t amount to much, but now I love it. I’m converted! To earn money through Rakuten Canada all you have to do is sign in and then look for your online retailer and shop through the Rakuten Canada portal. Then you get cash back in a few days (it says on the Rakuten Canada website).
This is one of my favourite cash back apps in Canada because it is easy money. The cheque was over $60 from a purchase of Stanley Cup Finals hockey tickets! If you do online shopping (uh, who doesn’t?) you can get cashback on your purchases.
You can get 2.5% cash back from Sephora, up to 3% cash back from Best Buy, and even up to 8% cash back from Expedia for travel… a lot of retailers are on Rakuten Canada. Sometimes they have double cash back too.
Rakuten Canada mails their cheques quarterly.
The best thing is that the amount you need to cash out a Rakuten “big fat” cheque is very low, it is only $5.01!
So basically you can get your cash during the next quarter if you sign up and make a purchase through Rakuten. This is nice for those like me who tend to like instant gratification when it comes to cash back.
Also, if you refer TWO friends (you get $5 for each friend you refer if they spend more than $25 within a certain time period- 90 days) you get a bonus of $35!
Receive $5 in free cash from Rakuten when you sign up here, it’s free to sign up!
Heads up: The $5 bonus is deposited into your Rakuten Canada account when you make your first purchase of $25 or more within 30 days of signing up.
Here’s my review of Rakuten Canada.
Great Canadian Rebates
Great Canadian Rebates is like the ‘original’ cash back Canadian website. It is the granddaddy of all the Canadian cash back sites.
Great Canadian Rebates is so old that they could really benefit from a site redesign. Their site looks like it’s from the early 2000’s 😉 (in fact, it was created in 2003 so I’m not far off).
They’ve got some good stuff though. You can get a $2.50 credit when you sign up (but also need to agree to receive a weekly email from them). They have a lot of the retailers that Rakuten Canada has, and they have some good credit card bonuses, like a $70 to $100 cash back when you sign up for a credit card.
Similar to Rakuten Canada, you have to log in and then click onwards to get to the retailer you intend to buy at. Great Canadian Rebates is a shopping portal.
Great Canadian Rebates also has a referral program where you receive 15% of all the cash back from your referrals.
Cash Back and Coupon Apps in Canada Recap
To recap, some fo the best cash back and coupon apps in Canada include:
- Checkout 51
- Caddle
- Great canadian Rebates
- Rakuten Canada
- Flipp app Canada
- PC Optimum Points Program
- Save.ca
All of these are useful to help you save money in Canada on groceries.
Which are some of your favourite websites or Cash Back Apps in Canada?
GYM is a 30 something millennial interested in achieving financial freedom through disciplined saving, dividend and ETF investing, and living a minimalist lifestyle. Before you go, check out my recommendations page of financial tools I use to save and invest money. Don’t forget to subscribe for blog updates, a free dividend yield spreadsheet, and the free Young Money Bootcamp eCourse.
I’ve been using PC Optimum for about 3 years and find that I get free groceries at Loblaws about every 3 to 4 months by using all my points I’ve accumulated over that period of time (a savings of between $750 and $1,000 per year which is pretty significant). I check the Loblaws “offers” each Thursday to see if anything I need is included. It is a limited list but they do target previous purchases I’ve made to “hook” me and you can save up to 4 offers for the next week if you don’t want to use them this week. I plan purchases at Shoppers to get the 20X points where possible. It’s also worthwhile checking their weekly flyers that can show additional in store points for items you might need to buy. You also get PC Optimum points at ESSO.
@VLW- yes! We do pretty much the same thing. I always shop at Shoppers on the 20x day. It’s pretty much every weekend from what I’ve noticed. Yes collecting PC Optimum at Esso is easy you just input your phone number attached to the PC Optimum account.