Not everyone may be aware, but using coupon apps can be a fantastic way to save money.
At times, especially when managing tight budgets, every dollar saved can make a significant difference. Even after cutting back on expenses, you might still need to save more.
One of the aspects that many find hardest to cut costs down on is groceries. Luckily, a slew of great coupon apps will help you cut down on your food/toiletry shopping expenses or get some of your payments down. Some will even help you find severely discounted deals for activities and events.
Here are 15 of the best coupon apps to help you save big on your shopping.
Top Coupon Apps Featured in This Roundup:
1. Coupons.com
Rather than sorting through your weekly coupon mailing and trimming out the coupons you may need, now you can rely on the Coupons.com app from your favorite app store to list everything you need.
The easily intuitive app lets you attach it to your PayPal account, choose one or a few favorite stores, create your shopping list, and see which items have coupons available. Add the coupons to your list and mark off the items as you purchase them.
Once you have checked out of the store, take a picture of your receipt with the app and submit it. Upon processing your savings, PayPal will deposit the money directly into your account. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
2. Ibotta
Ibotta is an alternative to Coupons.com, and while generally similar, it does claim to offer the most coupon-based discounts of any app of its type.
You scan your receipt after shopping, and Ibotta analyzes your purchases, linking you to any available savings.
Ibotta lets you redeem certain offers up to three times on the same receipt. Most offers reset every couple of days, meaning you can purchase the item again two days later and get the discount with the Ibotta app all over again.
The cash you get in return for your savings is deposited into your PayPal account. You do need to accrue up to $20 to be able to withdraw the money.
However, Ibotta gives you $10 just for joining and an impressive $5 when you refer a friend to the app. Between the savings you can accrue, you will be reaching $20 and seeing it arrive in PayPal in no time.
3. Honey
The Honey app is a handy tool that works with your browser to help you find the best prices for products you want to buy online.
It is available on all major browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Opera. When you have added the Honey extension to your browser, you can continue shopping much like you usually would.
When you are ready to check out, go over to your cart, but before completing the purchase, click the Honey icon on your browser and click the Apply Coupons structure.
Honey will inform you whether a coupon is available or not. The money you saved will be displayed on the screen if any coupons are found. You will be prompted to “Continue to Checkout” to complete your purchase as you normally would.
As a nice little bonus, if you shop on Amazon and Honey finds your product available elsewhere for less, a small icon will appear next to the product to indicate that it is cheaper at another retailer and will show you how much money you can save.
- Best used for: scoring great discounts
- Platform: Desktop app
4. Shopkick
Shopkick is a phone app that operates on a point-earning system. The points (referred to as kicks) are tallied up and translated into gift cards based on the amount earned. The point system roughly translates to $1 saved for every 250 points.
Shopkick allows you several ways to accrue these points.
- The first is to enable Bluetooth when you walk into a store. You can then go into the “Kicks Nearby” option under the “Earn” tab in the app, select your store, find the listed product you want, and scan it with your phone’s camera.
- Whenever you use your credit (or debit) card at a participating retailer, Shopkick will apply the savings as points to your account within 48 hours.
- If using a debit card, run it as credit for the app to work correctly. If you check out the app for any listed sales before you shop, you can scan your receipt as proof of purchase to get points for the products you bought.
- To simplify it, use Shopkick at a participating online retailer to receive points for your purchases. As a bonus, the app allows you to watch short ads to earn “kicks” as well.
5. RetailMeNot
RetailMeNot is a handy app where you can scan for daily sales at your preferred stores. You can search the listings by store or check out “today’s hot deals” to see what is available on sale.
- The retailer listed next to the deal will let you know if the coupon is for in-store only or an online purchase.
- Those that are designated for online use will generally provide a coupon code or a promo code.
The in-store coupons can be shown directly to the retailers at checkout. There will be more online coupon deals than in-store ones.
RetailMeNot shows you deals at over 50,000 stores, so there is a good chance that you will identify a deal you are happy with by using it as an app or as an online extension.
If shopping online, you can use the coupon codes by simply copying and pasting them into the promo code field to apply the discount to your purchase.
6. Checkout 51
Checkout 51 app allows you to browse a list of discounted grocery items and select those you are interested in purchasing.
The list is updated weekly (midnight on Thursdays), with the deals good until midnight on Thursday the following week.
You can shop normally and upload your receipts to the app during that time. Once processed, the savings will be transferred into your Checkout 51 account.
With Checkout 51, you must purchase the items that have applicable coupons exactly. A comparable item or an item of a different size that is available will not qualify for money back.
The nice thing about Checkout 51 is you can purchase multiple items several times. While each offer applies to one purchase, you can use the plus sign next to the product in the app to bump it up to the maximum allowable purchase amount and receive a reward on several instances of the product.
You can receive your savings once you have accrued $20 worth of them. One of the outdated aspects of Checkout 51 is that they will not deposit it into an online cash wallet (like PayPal) for you. Rather, they send you a check, which you will get within 2 to 3 weeks of the cashout request.
7. Walmart
Walmart is typically known for its more generous price offerings in-store, but that does not mean they do not engage in the coupon game.
By scanning your Walmart receipt, the Walmart Savings Catcher app compares the price you paid for your items against other retail stores’ prices.
It will give you back the difference if you find the item cheaper at another store.
In order to make it easier for you to return to Walmart for more shopping, they’ll redeem the gift card in the form of a Walmart gift card.
8. Target
The savings for Target are two-pronged. Signing up for the store’s REDcard gets you an automatic savings of 5% on the total of your purchase.
This means that regardless of what you purchased, if you use the REDCard at checkout (available as a debit and a credit option), if you made a $100 purchase, you will only pay $95.
On top of that, Target’s handy Cartwheel app offers the latest available coupon deals that you can use. Check out the available offers you are interested in and add them to the app’s Target app’s “wallet” section.
You will receive a special barcode that you will use at checkout for the coupons to be applied to the products you purchase.
The coupons remain good to use until they expire. Once they are no longer available, they will just come off your list.
Depending on the product in question, the offers will rotate weekly, monthly, or quarterly, so you can always check for new offers on your favorite products.
9. Dosh
Dosh is a popular mobile app that acts much like the other apps of its nature, with one notable difference. It takes the hassle of you doing the work onto itself.
Instead of choosing things you are interested in saving on, seeking out coupons, and scanning codes and coupons at checkout, Dosh monitors where you dine, shop, visit, or make online purchases.
It partners with a good variety of merchants, including Target, Microsoft, Holiday Inn, and many others.
Essentially, you are going to be doing all the things you already normally do. And if Dosh detects applicable savings, it will process them for you with no effort on your behalf.
You don’t have to wait for a check to show up with your savings. You can link Dosh up with your PayPal or bank accounts, and the money will be sent to you quickly.
10. GoodRx
Prescription medications can be expensive and sometimes are not covered by insurance carriers. GoodRx allows users to find discounts on prescription medications around the United States.
Consumers can compare the prices for their prescriptions at their nearby pharmacies and then print coupons to bring with them to help them save money on the purchase.
This works because many pharmacies partner with insurance companies that can provide discounts to those without insurance or insurance plans that do not cover the prescription.
Consumers can search for medications online to get any pertinent information, like the directions of use and potential side effects. GoodRx also provides discounts on pet medications.
11. ShopSavvy
This app is a nice, smooth-running barcode and QR scanner that consumers use to find the lowest price for this item.
Items on ShopSavvy can also be searched without a barcode scan by manually typing product details into the search feature.
You will be provided a list of retailers who carry the item and how much it currently costs so that you can choose the least expensive location to purchase.
It also allows you to create a favorites list of items, and this list can be shared online with friends and family through social media channels.
ShopSavvy also allows you to set up price alerts if a product you are interested in has a discount.
You will be notified of the price drop when this happens so that you don’t unintentionally miss out on a good deal.
ShopSavvy connects to thousands of retailers, so you are sure to find many options available for good deals in your area.
12. Groupon
The beauty of the Groupon platform is that it incentivizes consumer purchases, helping both the business and seller promote a product immediately.
This increases customer engagement while being a cost-effective option for happy customers getting a bargain offer.
Groupon has a website and an app that allows sellers to deeply discount their products and services, often by over 50% of the price.
The offers are time-sensitive and often are applied only when a certain number of customers participate.
For example, Groupon may offer a 75% discount on an activity, but only as long as at least four people participate. Sometimes, businesses have excess inventory or additional tickets left for the day to a theme park or an event like a play or a concert.
With Groupon, you can get great deals for shows, theme parks, home services, specialty products, and a variety of otherwise pricey purchases for bargain prices.
13. Flipp
Flipp is a virtual coupon clipper app that helps shoppers on a budget. It allows users to search for geographically convenient sales at over 300 retail stores and then “clip” them for later use.
This allows savvy shoppers to get the products at the locations near them where they are available at the lowest price.
Users also have the option of searching the store by name. While this method does not allow for geographical searches, the stores and products found will be within a roughly 50-mile radius of the querying party.
Using the app is very simple. It requires you to enter your zip code to allow your position to be identified and to be prompted with the best and most relevant store deals.
Flipp also provides expiration dates for the ads and zooming functionality for those who want to examine the products or the details closer.
You can even use a sliding scale to narrow down the discounts based on the discounted percentage. The users can tap on their desired coupons and select to clip them.
The clipping gets stored on a “clipped” page, which can be saved later. It will also indicate that the coupon has expired.
14. Receipt Hog
Receipt Hog is an app similar in nature to Ibotta, but while Ibotta scans your receipts and grants you cash, which you can withdraw at a $20 threshold, Receipt Hog gives you “coins,” all adding up to an exchangeable monetary value.
When you shop, enter the Receipt Hog app, and you will be prompted to take a picture of your receipt.
After it is analyzed, qualified products will get you a certain amount of coins. For every thousand coins, you earn $5 in PayPal or Amazon gift cards.
Those products that are not eligible for “coins” through the app will still allow users to play a “spin the wheel” game of chance to get more coins to their account.
The other advantage of Receipt Hog is that you are not as limited to what you buy as with other apps.
While Ibotta relegates you to earn rewards only on specific items, Receipt Hog’s ‘coin” strategy allows you to ‘earn’ for whatever you buy by getting some number of coins or a chance to play for coins.
The cash-out limit of $5 is also lower than most apps like this, which require a higher withdrawal threshold.
15. CouponCabin
Couponcabin is a website that provides clippable online coupons as well as ones that can be printed.
The company boasts that you can get discounts on anything you purchase through them. With certain online partners, you can get 20% cashback offers on selected products.
You can increase your savings by stacking the cashback offers and coupon codes and leveraging the combination for greater discounts.
Couponcabin does not provide a sign-up bonus, but it is free. You can also earn $2 for downloading its “Sidekick” browser extension.
If you made a $100 purchase from Amazon, Amazon will pay Couponcabin $6, who will then share $4 with you. This will happen regardless of any other coupon deal factored into the purchase.
When you purchase through Couponcabin, you do not receive payment immediately. They hold off on payment until the return period has ended.
Once you reach the $10 threshold and the purchase has been verified as “final,” you can withdraw funds to PayPal or e-gift cards.
Final Thoughts on the Best Coupon Apps
As you can see, there are plenty of coupon apps out there that can help you find money-saving deals on basically anything you want to buy.
With the help of these apps, you could save hundreds of dollars. They are all free and easy to use to find the best coupons for your shopping needs.
So before your next shopping trip or you buy something online, it’d be crazy not to check some of these apps.
Please let us know which is your favorite coupon app, and if it’s not on our list, let us know so we can check it out.
