There's never a bad time to save money. Online shopping is notorious for allowing you to spend more money quickly, so it is nice to note that there are some apps that can get you a little bit of that money back. IBOTTA is a popular choice among many online shoppers, but whether it's right for you depends on what you expect out of the app.

Features

IBOTTA is a coupon app. Rather than giving you traditional coupons to use at stores or on websites, the app allows you to apply specific discounts generated by the app and to recoup some of the money that you spend at partner stores and on specific items. It's very similar to many of the other cash-back apps on the Play Store, giving people small refunds on what they buy in order to entice them to shop with partner websites and to buy items that are being promoted by those stores. The most unique feature of the app is that it allows you to get money back on physical purchases, so long as you buy specific items and you have a physical receipt.

Benefits

The big benefit of IBOTTA is that it gives you money back on purchases that you were likely already going to make. Though you can't get money back from everything or from every store, many of the partner companies are probably the same companies with which you shop on a regular basis. If you're willing to go through the app to make purchases or to scan in your receipts after you are done, you stand a good chance of getting at least a little bit of money back after most trips.

Pros and Cons

If you're a frequent online shopper, IBOTTA is exactly the kind of app for which you have been looking. Not only does it aggregate quite a few deals all in one place, but it can give you ways to save money that you might never have seen before. It's also nice to note that IBOTTA does tend to give out cash bonuses for bringing in friends to use the app, so you can actually benefit from talking to your friends and family about how much you have saved by using IBOTTA.

There are a few downsides to this app, though. The first is that you have to save at least twenty dollars to cash out, which takes significantly longer than you might hope. In fact, you're going to be saving just a dollar or two on most shopping trips so you might go weeks without actually getting your money back. The other big problem has to do with using the in-store shopping function - you can be incredibly careful while you're out, but the app will only reward you if you make increasingly specific purchases. This means you can often go shopping with a discount in mind only to find out that you bought something that ever-so-slightly different from the product that would have gotten you the discount and you'll end up without a refund.

Conclusion

IBOTTA is a reasonably good app for those who do a lot of online shopping and want to get some money back over time. It's not going to give you instant savings and it does have some problems with the in-store shopping functions, but it does ultimately do everything that the app sets out to do. If you're ready to start saving, IBOTTA is probably worth a download.