How Much Money Can You Make With StepBet? (Part 2)

So a few weeks ago I let you in on an app Marge started using called StepBet. This is a fitness challenge app that syncs with your FitBit and encourages you to make your walking goals by taking your money if you fail! You pay $40 into the pot, and at the end, everyone who hasn’t failed out splits the remaining money from all the losers. In other words, their loss is your gain.

Naturally, I was wondering what kind of return you would get on your $40 investment, and what kind of cut exactly StepBet takes. Well, now that the six week game is over, I can tell you how much she made.

What do you get?

On an initial investment of $40, she got back $46.55.


On one hand, that’s $6.55 for six weeks worth of work, if keeping on top of your walking every day counts as “work” for you. Not a ton of money, but what can you expect? Anyway, six dollars is six dollars.

On the other hand, if you’re walking a lot anyway, that’s an annualized return of 142%! Sounds so much better that way, right? I mean, it almost meets the definition of passive income, if you walk a lot. But if something fails, or you miss two days in a week, you would have a 100% loss on your hands.

What does StepBet get?

The game started out with 1,192 players, and almost 300 failed before the six weeks were up.  If you were to divide that total pot of $47,720 over the remaining 897 players, they would each get $53.20 back. But that’s not what we got… StepBet has some convoluted rules about the payout amount, but by giving each of the 897 remaining players back $46.55, we know that the total paid back was $41,755.

That means StepBet took nearly $6,000 as their “cut” from this one game. Keep in mind, groups of people are starting up new games constantly, and big games like this, I think, start weekly. Not a bad gig. Maybe instead of walking so much, we should all be inventing apps!

It is intriguing. I may even try it myself sometime. See, I also just bought myself a Fitbit. And in keeping with our frugal philosophy (Marge got hers as a gift), I bought mine used. I have a whole entry coming up on the insane discount you get when you buy electronics secondhand.

Have you ever done a fitness challenge where money was involved?

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