38 Surprising Ways People Earn Money Online (With Real Numbers)

People get paid online to rent out a backyard pool by the hour, test unreleased games and design wallpaper that sells by the roll. Below are 38 real examples, each with the platform that pays and a number from the platform itself or a published study. Most are side income rather than a salary, and where a number is a company's own claim about top or average earners, it says so. They are grouped by theme, from renting and testing to creative work, paid expertise and prizes.

Renting out things you never thought of

• Your backyard pool, by the hour. Homeowners list their pools on Swimply for swim sessions and parties. Hosts keep 70% to 80% of each booking, and payouts are released 48 hours after the booking ends.
• Your yard, as a private dog park. On Sniffspot, dog owners book fenced yards and fields for off-leash time. Sniffspot says hosts can earn up to $3,000 a month and pays by direct deposit once a month.
• A corner of your land, for campers. Hipcamp lets landowners host tents and RVs. Listing is free, private landowners pay a 15% commission, and bookings include insurance of up to $1 million.
• Cribs and strollers, for visiting families. Local providers on BabyQuip rent car seats, high chairs and even beach umbrellas to travellers. Providers keep 78% of rental and delivery fees plus all tips, and BabyQuip says its Quality Providers average more than $1,000 a month.
• Your gaming PC's graphics card. Hosts on Vast.ai rent spare GPU time to people training AI models. Invoices run weekly on Fridays once a host has at least $20 in earnings.
• Your unused internet connection. Honeygain pays for sharing spare bandwidth. 1,000 credits equal $1, and you can withdraw once you reach $20.

Getting paid for your opinion, attention or data

• Taking part in university research. Prolific sets a minimum reward of $8 an hour for studies and recommends researchers pay $12. You can cash out from $6.
• Talking to product teams about your job. Respondent pays for research interviews, with an average payout of $75 and $400 or more for senior business roles, typically paid about 48 hours after the session.
• Filming your daily routine for a brand. dscout runs diary studies in its app. It says participants average $1 per minute and that it distributed $13 million in 2025.
• Playing mobile games before release. On PlaytestCloud, players record themselves thinking aloud while trying new games. A 15-minute test and survey pays $5 to $9, with no payout threshold.
• Saying what confuses you on a website. Testers on Userlytics record their screen and voice while using sites and apps, earning $10 to $50 per test, paid every 15 days.
• Helping Google design products. Google User Experience Research sends thank-you gifts adjusted to each country's purchasing power, usually within 3 to 5 business days of a session.
• Photographing supermarket shelves. Field Agent pays shoppers to check displays, prices and stock in stores, typically $2 to $12 per task.
• Recording local prices in your city. Premise contributors complete tasks such as photographing prices, in an app available in 40+ languages, and are paid by PayPal, Payoneer or Bitcoin depending on the country.
• Arguing with a chatbot. DataAnnotation pays people to write, rate and correct AI answers, listing $25 to $50 an hour for generalists and $75 to $150 or more for software engineers.
• The reality check: microtasks. A study of 2,676 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers found a median of about $2 an hour, and only 4% earned more than $7.25 an hour.

Strange and wonderful creative work

• Designing wallpaper and fabric. On Spoonflower, your pattern is printed to order on fabric, wallpaper and home decor. Designers earn a 10% royalty, rising to 15% on months with $15,000 or more in sales.
• Selling patterns to fashion brands. Patternbank sells surface pattern designs to a buyer list of 62,000+ industry professionals and pays designers a 50% commission.
• Building 3D models of everyday objects. Artists sell 3D models on TurboSquid for games, films and ads, earning a 40% royalty that can reach 80%.
• Making games inside Roblox. Creators aged 13 and up can cash out Robux earned on Roblox. The standard rate is $114 for 30,000 Earned Robux, and Roblox reported that about 345,000 developers earned money through the program in 2020.
• Selling Notion templates. Planners, trackers and dashboards sell on Notion Marketplace, which keeps 8% plus $0.40 per sale.
• Making templates for Canva users. Canva Creators earn royalties when any of Canva's 85 million users in 190 countries use their templates and elements.
• Turning art into metal posters. Artists on Displate can earn up to 50% commission on sales made through their own Share and Earn links.
• Filming yourself unboxing products. JoinBrands pays creators from $15 per image and $60 per video for brand content.
• Subtitling films and videos. Rev pays subtitle translators $1.70 to $4.00 or more per audio minute, depending on the language.
• Selling homemade electronics. Makers sell DIY boards, synths and gadgets on Tindie, which charges a 5% marketplace fee on each paid order.

Unusual gigs for your home and your car

• Cooking dinner for travellers in your home. Hosts on Eatwith set their own price for a meal, and Eatwith adds a 30% commission on top for guests, which covers payments, support and insurance of up to about 3 million euros.
• Driving pets to their new homes. Drivers on CitizenShipper set their own per-mile rates and pay a $39.99 monthly subscription after a 30-day free trial. CitizenShipper says pet transport is its highest-volume category.

Expertise by the minute

• Chatting in English. Cambly pays $0.17 a minute for conversation practice with learners, and it needs no degree or teaching certificate.
• An hour on the phone about your industry. AlphaSights pays experts pro-rata for calls with investors. Besides bank transfer, it offers payment as a charity donation or, in some countries, a bottle of Bordeaux wine.
• Teaching tai chi, samba or sushi-making. Superprof hosts tutors in over 1,000 subjects, says its community has more than 7 million teachers, and takes no commission from tutors.
• Language trial lessons. On italki, trial lessons carry 0% commission, and teachers keep 79% to 85% on regular lessons.
• Teaching kids a niche passion. Outschool hosts live classes for ages 3 to 18 on almost any topic, and teachers keep 70% of the class price.
• Being sponsored for code you gave away. Open source developers on GitHub Sponsors receive monthly or one-time sponsorships, with no fee on sponsorships from personal accounts, in 140+ countries and regions.

Prizes and bounties

• Finding one bug worth $10 million. Immunefi paid a single $10 million bounty for a flaw in Wormhole's cross-chain protocol, and had paid out $100.21 million across more than 3,000 reports.
• Hacking companies with permission. HackerOne programs pay at least $50 per bounty, and the platform had paid out over $230 million by December 2022.
• Solving AI puzzles. ARC Prize 2026, run on Kaggle, offers more than $2 million in prizes across three tracks.
• Answering companies' toughest problems. Wazoku Crowd, formerly InnoCentive, says it has paid more than $60 million to solvers, with open challenges such as the $800,000 Global Prize for Innovation in Water 2026.

Before you try any of these

• Company figures are ceilings, not promises. "Up to $3,000 a month" and "average Quality Provider" figures describe the best-performing or most active hosts. Most hosts and sellers earn less, especially in their first months.
• Check local rules and insurance. Renting pools, land or vehicles can need permits or cover that the platform's protection does not replace.
• Know what you share. Bandwidth apps route other people's traffic through your connection, so read the terms first.
• Keep records for tax. Rental income, prizes and gig payments usually count as income, so save payout statements from every platform you use.
• Never pay to unlock earnings. A "task" or "survey" site that asks for a deposit before paying you is a scam. Every platform above is free to join, apart from paid tools you choose, such as CitizenShipper's subscription.

Sources

• Swimply Help: Host payout percentage
• Sniffspot: Host
• Hipcamp Help: Cost to list and commission
• BabyQuip: FAQs
• Vast.ai Docs: Host payment
• Honeygain: Payout
• Prolific: Pricing
• Prolific: Participants
• Respondent: Participants
• dscout: Participate in research studies
• PlaytestCloud: Rewards summary
• Userlytics: Paid UX testing
• Google User Experience Research: FAQ
• Wikipedia: Field Agent
• Premise: Contributors
• DataAnnotation
• Hara et al. 2017: A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers' Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Spoonflower Help: Designer royalties
• Patternbank: Sell your designs
• TurboSquid: Royalty percentage
• Roblox Creator Hub: Developer Exchange
• Wikipedia: Roblox
• Notion: Selling on Marketplace
• Canva Help: About the Canva Creators program
• Displate: Share and Earn
• JoinBrands: Creators
• Rev: Freelancers
• Tindie: Sell on Tindie
• Eatwith Help: Commission
• CitizenShipper: New drivers
• Cambly: Become an English tutor
• AlphaSights: Experts
• Superprof: Become a private tutor
• italki Help: How does italki charge a commission
• Outschool: Teacher earnings and payments policy
• GitHub Docs: About GitHub Sponsors
• The Block: Immunefi ethical hacker payouts
• Wikipedia: HackerOne
• ARC Prize
• Wazoku: InnoCentive