Featured in this article: Honeygain, PacketStream, IPRoyal
In my quest to find obscure ways to earn extra money I’ve stumbled upon a few apps that promise to pay for unused internet bandwidth. Essentially once these apps are installed they run indefinitely in the background, using your internet connection for services like a proxy/VPN or content delivery. These sorts of apps will often pay a fixed rate for every byte of data they use – Often around $0.10-$0.20/GB
In this post I’ll go over 3 of the easiest apps I’ve been renting my bandwidth to. There are loads more apps like this, but I’ve found these 3 are the ones that pay the most, are the simplest to setup, and don’t require any advanced configuration (such as messing about with firewalls or forwarding ports on your router)
#1. Honeygain ($0.10/GB + extras, $20 minimum payout)
Honeygain is the app I’ve been using the longest. It’s super easy to setup, works on Windows, macOS, Android and Linux (through docker), and pays to a PayPal account or Bitcoin address. The $20 minimum payout is certainly the highest out of all the apps on this list, but hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to get there.
There are multiple ways to earn towards your balance. Of course there’s the regular bandwidth rate of $0.10 per GB, and I’ve noticed Honeygain tends to use anywhere from 1-2GB per device on the average day. There’s also the CDN program, which pays an additional cent for every hour your device is online – up to an extra $0.24/day, if you’re eligible. And recently they added the Honey Jar, which is basically just a daily check-in bonus of between $0.01-$0.10 in my experience.
I’ve been paid multiple times to both my PayPal account and Bitcoin wallets, in total over $150 in the last year or so since I’ve been using it. Click here to visit the site.
#2. PacketStream ($0.10/GB, $5 minimum payout)
PacketStream is very similar to Honeygain, it has the same bandwidth rate and also pays out to PayPal (no Bitcoin, unfortunately) but in general I’ve noticed it uses a little less bandwidth – around 300-600MB per device per day, although sometimes there would be spikes of up to 10GB. This does mean earnings will be a little slower overall, but combined with the lower minimum I don’t think it’s such a big deal. Plus you can install PacketStream on multiple devices to increase your earnings – supported platforms are Windows, Mac and Linux (also through docker)
My first few payments from PacketStream got mysteriously caught up – I’d request a payout, get an email confirming my request, then nothing. After a few weeks I’d email their support team explaining the situation and then my payment would finally be processed. They explained that sometimes automatic payments would fail, so I had to ask someone to process my payout manually. Thankfully I haven’t had that happen for a few months, so it seems like the issue is fixed.
Other than that my experiences have been pretty good, so I’ve kept it running for quite a while now. You can try it out here for yourself.
#3. IPRoyal Pawns ($0.20/GB, $1 minimum payout)
This is the most recent of the bandwidth selling apps I’ve tried. It seems to have been around for a few months since late 2020, and I’ve been using it for about a few weeks as of writing this post. The company behind the program, IPRoyal, seems to be a residential proxy seller with a history going back at least a few years, so as far as I can tell it seems to be legit. I’ve requested 3 payouts so far, all of which went through quickly and with no PayPal fees.
So far they only support Windows and Mac, although I did notice the Mac version only appeared a few days ago, so it seems to be in active development. In general I’m earning about $0.25 a day, which is pretty decent for doing nothing. Learn more about IPRoyal here.
That’s it for my 3 favorite bandwidth selling apps – there are a few more that I’m using right now, but they’re a little harder to setup and are mostly experimental crypto projects. I might post about some of those in the future, and I’ll keep you updated if anything changes with these apps!
