Pinchme free samples site review and earning guide. Is Pinchme legit, can you get free samples, can you earn extra money or is it a waste of time?
Pinchme is a free sample site that also lets you earn coins that can be exchanged for other products.
In a nutshell, it is a weird blend of free samples, product testing, and offerwall offers. But does this combination work in reality and is Pinchme worth your time?
Read on to find out more in our full in-depth review of Pinchme, including a detailed earning guide.
Pinchme is an odd combination of free sample site and product testing test and even throws in a touch of offerwall offers into the mix.
At its core, it allows you to apply daily for free samples to be delivered to you free of charge. The samples or products are typically small food items, cosmetics or beauty products.
While it pushes this concept of free samples, really what you’re expected to do is product testing. So, after using the “free sample”, you will be asked to leave reviews online in order to get accepted to more free samples in the future.
This sounds relatively straightforward but Pinchme is set up in a rather confusing way and it can be easy to accidentally lose money on offers or get yourself flooded with spam. We’ll look at how to avoid this and make the most out of Pinchme in our full review and guide below.
Don’t worry, Pinchme is a completely legit free sample/product testing site. However, it does dance on the edge of being spammy and tricking you into signing up for free trials that you will be charged for after the initial trials, or signing yourself up to all sorts of spammy mailing lists.
If you stick to just the free sample/product testing side of Pinchme you will be fine but you will need to say “no” to these offers many, many times every time you apply for a sample.
So, while Pinchme is legit, and not a scam it can get a little spammy with the offers and free trials it heavy-handedly pushes onto you.
Pinchme has several ways to earn. For free samples and product testing, you “earn” the free product, and for completing offers you get coins which can then be exchanged for even more products. While this seems simple enough, Pinchme bundles this up in a rather complicated setup.
Despite their simple 4 step diagram of how Pinchme is meant to work, there are a lot more steps in between. Mostly answering questions about yourself and telling them that you don’t want to sign up for a free offer X about 1,000 times, adding free samples to your shopping cart, waiting to be selected, and much more.
Let’s look at how it works in reality.
Signing up to Pinchme is actually very, very easy. They’ll ask for the usual information that you’d expect, plus your mailing address. They of course need this to be able to ship your free samples/products out to you. So, make sure you don’t add a fake address here!
You’ll need to verify your email address which is just another click, and then you’ve signed up and can access the free samples.
To sign-up directly to Pinchme, just click the button below!
Free samples are the core offering of Pinchme and live inside the “SAMPLEme” section of the site. However, it is more accurate to call this product testing rather than samples because you are expected to use and review the product online.
Make sure you visit the ABOUTme section of the site and fill in your details. Your responses here will determine which samples you’re eligible for, so think about your responses carefully.
Once you’ve filled out your profile, you’d be forgiven to think that getting these free samples is easy and that you just need to request the sample. But, unfortunately, you’d be wrong. The actual process goes like this:
This was the first unusual step that struck me on Pinchme. We actually have to add the free samples to our Pinchme box, which is basically just your shopping cart.
After you’ve added the sample to your box, you have to checkout. I really don’t understand the approach of making users checkout for free items but this is the next step:
Now, Pinchme will ask you to answer pages and pages of unrelated surveys. These will have nothing to do with the samples that you added to the basket. It will ask you for demographic information (which they already have from your profile), ask what products you use, what you will test, etc. On survey sites you’d be paid for your time for providing such info, but not here in the Pinchme checkout process.
Several pages of surveys later, you may think you’re home free but you’re not. Now you’ll be asked more questions that are related to the free samples that you requested:
My assumption is that if you answer “No” to any of these questions, you won’t be selected to get the free sample. But, you won’t find whether or not you’ll get the sample until some time after you finish this elaborate process.
Phew! Now those surveys are out of the way, surely we’re done? Nope! Get ready to have 10 free trial offers thrown at you, that you need to manually choose not to take, one by one:
We’ve finally reached the end and are told that our order is complete. But wait, Pinchme thinks that it hasn’t taken up enough of your time and tries to cram yet another offer down your throat:
But that’s it, right? Nope! How about an influencer study where you have the chance to earn $5 (not guaranteed) by playing a game for a week? Or of course, you could just head over to Swagbucks, sign up, and be paid guaranteed cash for playing mobile games.
Wow, we’ve really earned that free sample huh? Well unfortunately even though we went through that entire process, as you can see above we will only be contacted via email if we are a fit for the sample.
Was that worth it? That’s for you to decide. Personally, I’d rather go for more established, less spammy alternatives for product testing like Home Tester Club.
Opportunity
If you are chosen to receive a free sample, you will be expected to review it which is usual with product testing sites. You simply give your impressions of the product inside the RATEme section of the site. There is also the expectation that you review the product elsewhere but there doesn’t seem to be any real enforcement of that.
Aside from free samples, Pinchme also allows you to earn coins in the “WALLETme” section. These coins can then be exchanged for other products. The first way to earn these coins is via actions. This includes following Pinchme on social media and also referring friends to join.
We’ll look into how much coins are actually worth in our section below on how to get paid from Pinchme.
Ah, offers again! At least if we go to them manually, we get “paid” in coins for completing them. This section is full of sign-ups, starting free trials (that you’ll need to cancel) among other things. It is a form of offerwall, but much more geared towards sign-ups and purchases than anything else.
There is a decent selection though and plenty of ways to earn more coins:
To give some idea of what you need to do, to earn these coins, Super Speciosa would require you to spend $9.99 on the product and then $5 for shipping. This would get us 2,000 coins which we could exchange for 2 packs of 4xAA batteries for example. We’ll into calculations for what points are worth in more detail later on.
Pinchme also offers free digital samples in their REWARDme section, although we don’t personally seem to get many active samples in our dashboard. Here you’ll see yet another selection of free trials for online services, that if you forget to cancel you’ll end up getting charged for.
Pinchme also has a referral program where you can earn 40 coins for referring a friend. As referral programs go, this is a very poor offering. Remember that we mentioned that it costs 1,000 coins to get a pack of 4 AA batteries? That means that you’d need to refer 25 users to earn 4 batteries. Definitely not my idea of a profitable venture.
Pinchme is only available to people living in the USA. It states clearly on sign-up that they only ship to the 48 contiguous states of America, and do not ship samples to Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Canada, or internationally.
Remember that you will not be paid for testing products for Pinchme. Your earnings will be the products themselves. Similarly, if you try to earn coins via completing offers, your payment will be in the form of products that you claim with coins.
So, what sort of free products can you get with Pinchme?
Free samples will typically be foodstuffs, cosmetics, and beauty products. You can get a good idea of what products are available by checking out their past samples section:
For example, you could get the following free samples:
As mentioned, you earn coins in a variety of ways on Pinchme, which can then be redeemed for various products. These products change over time but unfortunately are quite generic. By that I mean that you can redeem for “Exfoliating and rejuvenating Foot Mask” but there is no indication of any brand. This isn’t great as you can’t gauge the quality of what you’ll get.
Let’s look at some examples:
If we look at the batteries, 4AA batteries sell for around $5. So with this conversion of $5/1000 coins, it works out as $0.005 per coin, meaning that 2 coins are worth 1 cent.
If we look at the Fire Tablet, assuming a price of $115, then $115/15,000 works out as $0.007, so between 1 and 2 cents for 2 coins.
Unfortunately, Pinchme does not have a mobile app. The site itself is mobile-friendly though, meaning that it is designed with a mobile device in mind. You’ll be just as comfortable using the site in your browser as you would in an app.
We don’t believe that an app would add any additional benefit for an opportunity like Pinchme.
Pinchme is an OK free sample site. I really can’t say that it is any better than that. If you live in the USA, you can use the site to request free samples, which plenty of people do receive. But, you will need to put an unfair amount of time into requesting a sample.
The site is geared up to throw free trial sign-ups, paid offers, and other quite spammy feeling links constantly in your face. This is clearly how Pinchme makes money. There’s nothing wrong with offers but the sheer amount and the aggressive nature at which they’re pushed on you leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
The coin system, again fueled by offers is skewed to make it very difficult to redeem anything of any real value. Similarly, the referral system offers very low “payouts”. For instance, if you want to redeem a measly 4AA batteries, you’d need to get 25 people to sign up with your referral link. Not really a fair trade.
If you stick to just the free samples, the site is passable and will give you some free stuff. Whether the time you spend applying for this free stuff is worth the products you get is another question though and down to your own personal judgment. In our opinion though, it really isn’t worth the time or effort.
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Read MoreIn our opinion, requesting free samples/products is borderline worth it. You need to spend too much time requesting free samples and that time could be better spent actually earning money in hundreds of different ways online. If you’re eager to grab the free products they offer, then, by all means, give it a try. You will get some free products, so if that is what you’re looking for then it will be worth it for you.
The offers on the other hand are absolutely not worth it. To redeem anything of any value or worth you would need to complete tons of free trial and paid offers. You will almost certainly spend more on offers via purchases or forgetting to cancel free trials than you earn in the products you redeem.
There’s always more to ask, so even though we’ve laid out the full Pinchme review and guide above, we’ve packed some extra information into our FAQ.
Yes Pinchme does work. If you apply for enough free samples you will almost certainly have a few sent to you free of charge. It does however take a lot of effort to apply for each free sample.
Pinchme state that it typically takes 4-6 weeks for the items to be shipped and to arrive at your home. That is of course if you are accepted to receive that particular free sample.
No, Pinchme is not available in Canada. It is a USA only site that will only ship to the 48 contiguous states of America.
Getting free stuff is great, but while Pinchme offers a large range of free samples, the value of these samples is typically quite low. In addition, you have to put a lot of effort into requesting them and run the gauntlet of offers and free trials that they try to shove down your throat.
That being said, if all you want is some free samples, then it does absolutely provide that for you.
Pinchme really is a judgement call for you as an individual, but for me personally, I’d rather spend my time earning on other more profitable sites.
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