Turn Your Receipts into Cash with Fetch

Tl;dr: Scanning a receipt every day could net you around $20 by the end of the year with Fetch. 

In the universe of loyalty and spending rewards, there are highly lucrative cases like earning double points on all your spending with a Capital One Venture X or accumulating tons of miles, points, and coffee rewards on Starbucks runs. Fetch is not one of these. It’s not terribly lucrative, and not terribly lazy. What it is, though, is easy, weirdly addictive, and a fairly painless way to snag a free movie ticket or two each year. 

How does it work?

When you get a receipt with any purchase, simply scan it with your phone’s camera within the Fetch app and you’ll earn points–typically 25, but potentially more with certain targeted merchants. 

Is it worth it? How much can you earn?

In 2023, scanning one receipt most days (but far from every day), I earned 16,000 points and Shawn–who started a little earlier in the year than I did–earned 23,000. You can redeem 11,500 of these points for a $10 AMC gift card, or 12,500 for an Amazon gift card. So by scanning semi-regularly throughout the year, we earned about $30-40 worth of gift cards by the end of the year, just in time for the holidays.

This year, however, a daily “bonus spin” feature for extra points seems to have been removed, meaning we would probably need to scan more receipts to earn that much this year.

Now, that seems like an awful lot of effort for a relatively little payoff. And that was my opinion at first. But as the year went on, I found that it was nice to have something to do with all those useless paper receipts you tend to accumulate in your day-to-day, and that there’s something oddly satisfying about scanning receipts. As long as I didn’t kill a tree by asking for a printed receipt when I could have gotten a digital one, the whole process was harmless and painless, and ~$10-20 is a pretty solid return on that effort.

Conclusion

If you don’t know what to do with all those paper receipts and want to snag a few extra dollars worth of rewards next year, consider signing up for Fetch.