UPDATED 27/05/23

Earning TRUE passive income is certainly a rare luxury that’s only reserved for people who risk large amounts of capital or sink many hours of time into creating something. However, there are a few hidden gems where you don’t need any of that and The Piggy Box is one of those gems.

The Piggy Box is a small device from BrightData that collects public web information using your spare bandwidth and pays you a fixed rate of $10 USD/month. Your internet activity is kept safe and is not seen by the entities using your spare bandwidth while all of the traffic to and from the device is encrypted to keep your privacy safe.

The only thing you need to do to receive the full $10/month is to keep it powered on and connected to the internet 24/7. The device is light-weight, both physically and in terms of resource usage; it only uses approximately 3 Watts of electricity and only uses your SPARE bandwidth so it doesn’t bog down your internet connection.

This all seems too good to be true… Being paid to literally plug in a device with no maintenance or set up, but companies pay for spare bandwidth to download web information from different IP locations for research and financial analysis. This information is valuable to companies because they want to make sure their products and services are being represented accurately among the real world population.

For a limited time, you can get a Piggy Box for free if you live in the US by applying at www.thepiggybox.net but if you live outside of the US, you can still apply to receive one. Once your country is accepted or beta users are needed, they will reach out to you via email. Although I live in Canada, they were looking for beta users from different countries and I ended up paying $20 USD for one. I suggest joining their official discord server at https://discord.com/invite/FwjwazgKBG to keep up to date with updates; this is where I learned of the beta testing.

Update - It is no longer offered for free. It now costs $25.

Live outside of the US and don’t want to wait? BrightData also runs EarnApp which works the same as The Piggy Box, except you run the software on your own devices. The only downside to EarnApp is that you don’t get a fixed income and it consumes as much power as what your device uses. The earn rate is also dependent on your country which is separated into 3 tiers with the US earning the most. Being in Canada with EarnApp installed on 1 Windows PC, and 2 Raspberry Pi’s, I would earn an average of $2.50-$5 USD/month. Earn rates change throughout the year based on demand and spare bandwidth is dependent on your internet provider, so my earnings may not be accurate to your personal results. If you’re interested in joining EarnApp, the link to register using my referral link is https://earnapp.com/i/b8mn1pk

You cannot earn from both The Piggy Box and EarnApp at the same time on one IP address, although if they are both running, the Piggy Box gets priority. However, if you're only running EarnApp, you can have it running on as many devices as you want (Android devices, Apple devices, PC, Raspberry Pi) on a single IP address. For Piggy Boxes, you may set up as many as you’d like as long as each one has a unique residential IP address.

I joined EarnApp back in December 2021 and received a Piggy Box in July of 2022. So far my total lifetime earnings are $49.24 USD. Since getting my Piggy Box, I have stopped running EarnApp and started getting the consistent $10 USD/month paid out into my PayPal account. (In fact, withdrawals are automated as soon as your balance reaches $2.50, so I receive a ~$2.66 payout every ~8 days). Note that this won’t make you rich, but it’s nice to receive money for no work. That $10/month can pay towards subscriptions such as Netflix, Spotify, or any other media streaming platform that you most likely have.

Payment options include PayPal, Venmo, and Amazon Gift Cards.

Screenshots

UPDATE - New payment
27/09/22 UPDATE - New payments - Currently $1 away from break even, next $2.66 payout is on the 29th of September. 

27/05/23 UPDATE - Payment screenshots added - Lifetime balance is now $159