Does Honey Save You Money? Honey Browser Extension Review

***EDIT 12/22/24: I do not endorse the usage of Honey in light of recent events. They participate in some scummy business practices that I do not agree with. This video was made before these findings and additional updates have been made to this video to reflect these findings. Please see more in the pinned comment.


I’m frugal. Like. Super frugal. I hate spending money on things if I know that I can get a discount in some way. I just love a good deal. So that led me to download Honey. Over the last year, I’ve been seeing Honey on ad spots and as sponsors on YouTube, so, I’m about to pull a Marquess Brownless here alright? I’ve been using honey for over 2 year now and here are my honest thoughts and opinions. Should you download it? Let’s find out with a little review.

0:00 Introduction
0:33 What Honey is and & how it works
2:34 Non-US Experience
3:07 How does Honey make money?
3:37 Other Honey features
3:50 How effective is it?
4:26 Ways to save more money without Honey
6:09 Conclusions

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For people who don’t know what Honey is. It's a browser extension owned by Paypal that lives on your browser, next to your adblock. When you’re at the checkout screen of your favorite retail site, this coin with a smiling face appears. He’ll appear only if honey has found coupons for the site, or if you can earn Honey gold off of the purchase. When you hit apply coupon, Honey displays a popup and starts applying coupons. It starts off by applying 20 coupons, and if they all fail, Honey will ask you if you’d like to try more. Sometimes these coupons take like 15 seconds each depending on the website you’re on. If it’s taking long, go brew a cup of coffee or go on a restroom break, it’ll be awhile. From there, enjoy your savings and go on about your day.

Okay great, but how often do I run into a website that supports honey? Your results will differ from mine since we shop from different places but the most common retail sites I visit either have coupons from honey that may or may not work, or provide me honey gold points. Except Amazon. Honey works terribly on Amazon.

Let’s talk about honey gold. Honey gold is pretty much their currency that you can earn by using honey. They require 1000g minimum before you can cash out for a 10 dollar gift card. I don’t currently have enough to cash out on a gift card so here’s a screenshot of the type of gift cards you can redeem the gold for.

Each purchase you make gets them a commission from the website you bought an item from with no expense to you. Similar to how YouTubers have amazon affiliate links in their YouTube description, your favorite YouTuber makes a small commission.

Honey lets you see the price history of products on retail sites as far back as 4 months ago, and set up alerts for price changes.

Okay. Now that we know how Honey works, how well does it do its job? About 14-15% of the time do I get a usable coupon that saves me money. But, remember I’m frugal. I’m here to save the most money I can, not just save a few dollars.

The question is could you save even more money without honey? Yes. for example, Moosejaw, sells travel and camping gear. Let’s say I’m buying these basic looking pants for the price of $50. No thanks. If you use Honey, you’ll find that no coupon works. But, Honey doesn’t have access to special promo codes like those provided to students, first responders, military, and teachers. But if you’re one of those things, you can use those special coupon codes to save more money than what Honey would have saved you. There’s also sites like Rakuten that work similar to Honey’s gold point system except it’s cash back at the end of the month and not some gift card.

There’s plenty of times where you can stack your special student/first responder/teachers/military discount with Rakuten for savings that would outclass honey’s discount. Or if you really want to cheat the system. See what honey picks as a code, and then use Rakuten to get cash back instead of the Honey gold points. For example, if you’re like me and buy wayy too much Peak Design stuff, they have student discounts but no working honey discount. So it would save me wayyy more money if I used a student discount.