Freebies And Credit Cards

Two smaller add-ons, worth maybe 20% on top of what the routine already earns. Both are for later. If the daily habit is not solid yet, skip this and come back to it.

Freebies Beyond The Daily Bonus

Most sites hand out more than the daily bonus: promo codes, social media giveaways, email offers, the occasional apology credit. Individually they are small. Collected consistently they are the difference between the routine and the routine plus a fifth.

Community links. Codes and giveaways circulate faster in the churning communities than through the sites' own channels, and somebody has usually already checked whether a code works.

Alternate entry. Sweepstakes rules require a free way in, which is why you can request coins without buying anything. At most sites that means posting a request by mail. At a few it can be done online, which is the version worth using: one operator takes $5 requests online across four of its sites, with no envelope and no stamp.

Credit Cards

If you're buying coins at all, the card you buy with is worth 10 minutes of thought.

Chargebacks. This is the real reason, and it's reason enough on its own. If a site closes your account with a balance inside it and support goes quiet, a chargeback is your only route to that money. A debit card or a bank transfer leaves you nothing to fall back on. It's rare, and cheap to insure against.

Cashback and sign-up bonuses. Coin purchases usually code as ordinary retail rather than gambling, so whatever cashback your card pays, you get, on spending you were doing anyway. If you expect to put a few hundred dollars through sales over a couple of months, that spending can also go toward a new card's minimum spend — usually worth more than a year of cashback, though some issuers exclude these purchases or treat them as cash advances, so read the terms first.

On 0% intro offers. An interest-free window makes it tempting to float purchases until the redemptions arrive. Redemptions can take weeks; one missed payment, or the intro period simply ending, turns a 30% sale into a loss. The rule is simple: if you can't pay the statement in full when it arrives, the purchase was too big.