Bounts is an app that allows you to earn points for exercising and checking in at sports clubs & gyms which can then be turned into vouchers. The vouchers available are pretty good too, with brands like John Lewis, Amazon, Currys PC World, Debenhams, River Island, Nike, Waterstones, Starbucks, Toys R Us and even Pizza Hut! The app is available to download on both Apple and Android products.
How much does it cost?
There are three membership options:
- FREE - You can earn up to 15 points per day, over a maximum of three eligible activities
- Premium (£9.99 per year) - You can earn up to 90 points per day, over a maximum of 9 eligible activities. Access to premium rewards.
- Premium+ (£14.99 per year) - You can earn up to 180 points per day, over a maximum of 9 eligible activities. Access to premium awards.
Upon signing up, you get the option to choose your membership, however once you have linked your first exercise or lifestyle tracker (I linked mapmyfitness) you get upgraded to Premium for a 14 day trial.
How does it work?
It's a brilliant and fairly simple concept that allows you to sync your fitness trackers to their app, you need to be connected to wifi/data for the sync to occur. So far, it's taken a bit of trial and error to work out what the eligible activities are, and their website/app are still in their very early days so quite hard to navigate and aren't particularly reliable. Here's what I've managed to track with the trackers & devices available to me:
You can earn 5 points per check in/activity on the FREE membership, 10 points on PREMIUM and 20 points on PREMIUM+.
- Activity Check In's - This relies on your device (in my case iPhone) being connected to both GPS and Bluetooth. The GPS tracking is extremely hit and miss, and only works about 50% of the time. The Bluetooth connects, as far as I'm aware if your check in location has a Bounts beacon (I've not come across one yet), so in theory is currently not worth turning your Bluetooth on for this feature alone unless you visit larger venues with the beacon in place (I leave Bluetooth on to sync my Fitbit). For your check in to be successful, your gym or sports club must have a pin on the "Bounts Venue Map", the larger more commercial premises may already have an activated pin, for those venues that don't you'll need to type the address into the search bar, click on the pin and fill in the location details. The report then gets raised with the Bounts team (I'm assuming to make sure it's legit) and finally a member who has premium activates the location. The process is actually pretty fast considering it sounds such a faff, and to be honest most of the local gyms/classes I know of are already listed on my local map. There are also some methods of scanning your own bar code at certain venues but I've not used this feature.
- Activity via GPS tracking - You'll need to complete a minimum of 20 minutes at a minimum pace of 4km per hour, and you'll need to have location settings turned on and all permissions granted. For this I tried using mapmyfitness, however after a 5k run, realised that GPS tracking is a bonus feature, so my distance didn't track, and therefore nothing synced with Bounts. I have since bought a Fitbit, but on my last 5k hadn't synced Fitbit to mapmyfitness, so whilst I had a 26 minute 5k run showing on my Fitbit, once again I had no proof syncing to Bounts... My next experiment is to try again but with Fitbit and mapmyfitness tracking my run simultaneously! Sounds too much trouble? Perhaps, but you still add towards your step total (I would have also liked the 10 activity points). Bounts does not currently allow manually entered distance or timed activities or gym based exercises such as classes.
- Steps - You can connect your activity tracker (mine is Fitbit) to Bounts. You can also connect the health app on your phone to Bounts, and allow permissions to share your daily steps. You need 7000 to earn your activity points.
- Refer a Friend - Both you and your friend will receive 100 bonus points once they have signed up and completed their first activity (my referral code is info53267).
- Rewards Wheel - You also earn credits, along with points for each activity/check in. The credits can be spent by spinning the rewards wheel (wheel of fortune style). You can win a free spin or points, or nothing. You don't lose points and I've won 5 points on several occasions, 10 points once, my partner won 50 points and I've seen 1000 points won via social media!
- There are meant to be other ways to earn points but I haven't found them yet such as activity on social media.
What devices/apps does it work with?
I use Fitbit and iPhone, and hopefully can now track GPS runs on mapmyfitness with the addition of my fitbit Surge (I'll update this review if it works). Bounts is available on Apple and Android. You can also sync the following to Bounts:
- Google Fit
- Fitbit
- Garmin
- Health App
- Jawbone
- Misfit
- Movesapp
- MYZONE
- mywellness
- LF Connect
- mapmyfitness**
- Preva
- runkeeper
- Strava
- SWIMTAG
How many points do you need to buy vouchers?
Here's two example's for you. Vouchers are available from £1+ depending on the store:
- 1 x £25 Amazon Voucher = 6750 points
- 1 x £100 John Lewis Voucher = £25,000 points
Based on a Premium+ membership (£14.99 per year), you could earn a maximum of 65,700 points per year (not including bonus points from referrals and rewards wheel etc), therefore you could earn over £225 of Amazon vouchers and be well on your way towards your 3rd £100 John Lewis voucher. The free membership could earn you 5475 annual points (not including bonus points), which could buy you a £20 Starbucks voucher (5405 points).
My experience so far
I've nearly finished my two week Premium trial and have managed to accumulate 320 points so far. If I'm being 100% honest I've found the trial very hit and miss. Sometimes check in's don't work, the referral link you send friends doesn't automatically enter your code, the website is NOT mobile friendly, having tried on both Android and Apple, you have to turn your phone onto it's side to view more of the website, but not all. The desktop site is extremely basic, and doesn't promote easy navigation. Their customer support is shocking. I've had issues with missing points and have contacted them via email, Twitter and Facebook (as have many others if you take a look), and they rarely reply. The email I sent received a reply around a week after I sent it saying they were sorry and how can she help?! I haven't had a reply since... Their excuse is that they have a small team and are a new business, but I don't see any excuse for the lack of response and feel that much needed beta testing was skipped, since this would have helped to iron out issues before the launch to the general public!
The view of website from a mobile:
Landscape:
App home screen:
Is it worth it?
I've been thinking about this a lot over my trial, and I've concluded that yes, I believe it is worth it. However, I think anyone paying for membership needs to ask themselves whether their £9.99/£14.99 per year is worth it, considering the app doesn't always track your points (let's say 50% of the time as a worst case scenario), and there is zero customer service to help you if you get stuck. If you can live with this then go ahead (don't forget my referral code to get your bonus points: info53267.
At the end of the day, the app is an incentive to be more active. You get paid for becoming healthier! The only added cost you have is the extra charging of your devices due to running Bluetooth and location settings, or if like me you couldn't resist the temptation of buying a shiny new tracking device!
The app itself is very clean looking and much easier to use than the website, but doesn't work all the time, especially the venue map.
I'm considering purchasing the premium+ membership for £14.99 per year, as I think the extra points could be worth it. I want to give the Bounts team the benefit of the doubt, in that they're settling in to high demand and a successful project, so I do hope I can update this review in a few months time with successful news rather than a negative story. It's such a fantastic concept, that I can't begin to tell you how much I want it to succeed, but improving their customer service needs to be their first port of call.
If you have any questions about the app, please get in touch and I'll try to help you. If you do decide to join, and discover new features I've not reviewed, please do let me know and I'll investigate further.
**Edit: Since writing this Blog, Bounts have removed the ability to track activities via mapmyfitness due to MMF charging Bounts to connect, which makes perfect business sense. I've now installed Strava but am yet to test it out. MMF have currently lost a user as I was simply only using it to track activities to collect Bounts points.
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