What if I told you I know a way you could make ten times the money you put in and get fit in time for summer. Too good to be true right? Well you’re probably right, but read on to find out why your right and find out about a very intriguing new app in the process.
Bounts is a join for free app that tracks your daily exercise through your fitness tracker and turns your tracked activities into points (called Bounts). You can then trade these points in for real cash rewards. Currently the points can be accrued in Australia by downloading the Bounts app but you won’t be able to trade-in those points for real cash until it becomes fully live in Australia. You’ll need that time to accrue your points anyway.
Bounts is designed so that free users eventually realise you can’t earn any substantial points unless you pay for premium. It would take a free user a minimum of 200 days to accrue 2000 points which is the lowest value voucher. You would need to walk 7000 steps a day and go to the gym every single day to do this. So you would basically need to be a personal trainer or an Olympian and work on it for at least 12 months before you saw any substantial rewards.
So the only option is to join premium when it gets released in Australia. It costs 1.49 pounds a month in the UK and gives you back up to 200 pounds a year (or so they say). The maximum you can get on premium membership a day is 180 points, but that would take more than 40,000 steps a day. They give you 60 bonus points if you walk 21,000 steps a day, which is slightly more realistic. You need to vary your exercise to earn the most points, because they don’t reward you for doing the same activities over and over. You would also want to join up to special activities like forest runs and run at those events for more than 20 minutes and you could get up to 200 bonus points. You can also join certain gym and swim events and earn points in the range of 50-150 points just for being there and taking part.
What you can get after the first few months of doing this? Well you need a minimum of 2000 points to redeem for vouchers like iTunes and Amazon. 2778 points will get you a Virgin experience day gift card or a Ticketmaster gift card, but they don’t specify how much you would get to use towards these offers. We think it’s about $20 in real money terms.
Here’s a some of other things you can get;
Clothes, electronics, coffee, supermarket shopping, homewares, sport, spas and wellness, toysRus, give to charity, food, pubs, jewellery, tickets, hardware, hotels and cinema.
See below available apps for fitness trackers you can currently connect to;
It seems like a good app if you want to feel part of a community of fit freaks like you. But the points system seems more like a fun conversation starter or a good secondary fitness tracker.
