💰 Results: $95 received
⏱ Time invested: Around 1 hour for the interview, but around 6 months checking the platform
🔥 Worth it? No
🛠 Platform used: Respondent.io
💳 Payment method: Tremendous prepaid Visa card
I have been checking Respondent.io every 2–3 days for around half a year.
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One email per experiment. Full numbers, no fluff.
For anyone who does not know, Respondent.io is a business interview platform. Companies post paid research interviews, and if you match what they are looking for, you can get invited to a call and get paid for your time.
On paper, it sounds great.
Apply to studies.
Get accepted.
Do an interview.
Get paid.
Simple.
But in reality, at least for me, it was much harder than that.
Why It Took So Long
The biggest problem was that most interviews did not match me.
A lot of the studies I saw were looking for programmers, software developers, business owners, people from specific regions, or users of very specific tools.
I live in Lithuania, and I am an electrical engineer.
That combination did not bring many suitable options.
So for months, my Respondent.io routine looked like this:
Open the platform.
Check studies.
Find almost nothing relevant.
Apply to the few that maybe fit.
Get no result.
Again and again.
Nothing dramatic. Just slow, boring rejection by silence.
After a while, I did not expect much from it anymore.
Finally, One Relevant Interview Appeared
Then one day, after almost half a year, I finally saw a study that actually matched me.
They were looking for an electrical engineer.
That was rare enough that I applied immediately.
And surprisingly, I got accepted almost instantly.
I scheduled the interview, joined the call, and the interview went smoothly. It took close to one hour.
No problems there.
The questions were normal, the call was professional, and the whole interview part felt completely fine.
After the interview, I received the payment:
$100
But Respondent takes a fee, so the final amount I received was:
$95
For one hour of work, that is excellent.
At that moment, I was very happy with the result.
Then came the annoying part.
The Catch: Tremendous Prepaid Visa
The payment came through a Tremendous prepaid Visa card.
At first, I did not think this would be a big issue.
A prepaid Visa card sounds flexible. I assumed I could either move the money somewhere useful or spend it in local online shops.
So I started testing.
First, I tried:
- Revolut
- PayPal
- Wise
All declined the card.
Okay. Annoying, but maybe not surprising.
Then I tried using it in local Lithuanian e-shops.
I actually needed a few things, so I thought this would be a good way to use the money. I did not even need to cash it out. Spending it directly would have been fine.
But again, problem.
Every major Lithuanian online shop I tried rejected the card.
So now I technically had $95, but I could not use it in the places where I actually wanted to spend money.
That felt very different from receiving $95 into my bank account.
Support Did Not Really Help
I contacted Tremendous support and explained the situation.
Their answer was basically that Lithuania is on their acceptance list.
But they could not give me a concrete Lithuania-specific list of shops or websites where the card would definitely work.
That was not very useful.
Because from my side, the card did not work with Revolut, PayPal, Wise, or the largest local e-shops I tried.
Maybe there are places in Lithuania where it works.
I am not saying it is impossible.
But from my testing, it was much more difficult to use than I expected.
Reddit Made Me Less Optimistic
After that, I started googling what to do with the card.
And I found a lot of posts, especially on Reddit, where people were complaining about similar prepaid card problems.
Some people basically described these cards as almost useless depending on where you live and where you try to spend them.
That matched my experience pretty closely.
On paper, the side hustle result looked good:
$95 for one hour
In real life, the payout method made the money much less useful.
That is a big difference.
The Only Place That Worked: AliExpress
Finally, I tried AliExpress.
And there, the card worked.
So technically, I managed to spend the money.
But here is the problem:
I did not actually need anything from AliExpress.
I spent the money mostly because I had to spend it somewhere.
That makes the result feel much worse.
If I receive $95 and can use it freely, that is great.
If I receive $95 and have to hunt for a random website that accepts the card, then buy things I do not really need just to avoid wasting the balance, that is not the same.
It is still money, but not normal money.
At least that is how it felt.
Was the Interview Worth It?
The interview itself was worth it.
No question.
One hour for $95 is a very strong hourly rate.
If the payment had arrived in a normal usable way, I would probably be writing a very different post.
But the full side hustle experience was not only the interview.
It was also:
- checking the platform every 2–3 days for half a year
- finding almost no relevant studies
- applying with no success
- finally getting one interview
- receiving payment in a difficult-to-use prepaid card
- wasting time trying to spend or transfer the money
- ending up using it on AliExpress just because that was the only option that worked
When I look at the full process, it does not feel worth continuing.
My Verdict
My rating for Respondent.io is:
DROP
Not because the platform is necessarily bad.
If you live in the US or another large country where these prepaid Visa cards are widely accepted, Respondent.io might be a good option. The interviews can pay extremely well if you get accepted.
But for me, living in Lithuania, it does not make sense to keep testing it.
The opportunities were too rare, and the payment method was too inconvenient.
The final result is strange:
I made $95 from one hour of work, but I still do not want to continue.
That probably says everything.
Good hourly rate. Bad practical experience.
So I am dropping this side hustle.
Not financial advice. This is just my personal side hustle experiment and real experience testing Respondent.io from Lithuania.