As a standard, any website that gives away free prizes is all right with us. After all, who doesn’t love getting free stuff?
However, certain factors determine how great these types of sites are. These, sadly, can make a site that might be great in theory actually be one that is better to just avoid altogether.
In this Freebies.com review, we will look at a site that gives you access to plenty of free prizes and so much more. We will also look at whether this great concept is ruined by its execution or lives up to its promises.
How Does Freebies.com Work?
We should start this review by saying that Freebies.com is not your average free draw website. In fact, it is way more than many other free sweep sites.
The site is the parent site of numerous other websites. These include Gratuit.ca, Free.ca, WomanFreebies.com, and OurFreeStuff.com. As the parent of all these sites, you can imagine how big Freebies.com actually is.
To use the site, you will need to register a user account. This is not stated outright. However, you will not be able to view any of the entry links unless you are logged in.
To register, click on the Login button at the top of the site. Once the login lightbox has loaded, click the Sign Up option.
You will need to provide your country of residence, name, email address, date of birth, gender, and physical address. After completing all this information and submitting your registration, you will need to confirm your email address.
After registering, you can look for a draw that you would like to enter. Once you have a found a draw that you are interested in entering, you need to click the entry link provided in the draw listing.
This link will take you to the official website of the host of the draw. Here, you can follow the onscreen prompts to submit your entry.
Is Freebies.com Legit or a Scam?
Freebies.com has been around for several years. The site has built a solid reputation online as the premier place to find free draws.
The site is entirely legitimate. The only worry that you will need to have when using it is the massive amount of spam that you will begin to receive.
Sadly, the site underwent a change in management a few years back. This seems to have brought many problems to the surface. The user reviews have been consistently negative after this happened.
Usually, we ignore negative reviews for these types of sites because they are generally just complaints from people who have not been lucky enough to win anything.
What worries us is that all the reviews we have looked at are from people who were notified that they have won and yet never received their prize.
There are also countless complaints from users about the amount of spam that they are receiving. There is a common understanding that registering on a site like this will make you receive spam emails.
However, the copious amount of spam generated by registering a Freebies account is uncalled for. It appears that the site has no issue selling your information to other advertisers.
If that’s the case, then they are double dipping because they are subjecting visitors to tons of ads (more on this below) and making money off your personal data. Not cool.
User Experience
Freebies.com has a lot of content. There is no politer way to state that.
Sadly, when it comes to having tons of content on a site, it is important to manage all that content so that it is presentable, easily searchable, and doesn’t look like a mess.
For the most part, Freebies only half achieves this. The site is very cluttered, and you may not know exactly where to go or what to do at first glance.
The biggest reason for this is the ads that are littered everywhere. There are ads at the top, side, and bottom of the screen. When you scroll down a page, more ads appear. There are even times when navigating to a different page will spawn an ad, although not always.
These ads mix in with all the site content to become slightly too much to deal with. This is a shame considering the actual design of the site is pretty decent.
It uses great colours, has decent-quality graphics, and has a good navigation system by using a large top menu bar. There is also a footer menu for all the extras such as terms and conditions.
The site works well on mobile but suffers from the advertising the same way that the PC version does.
Lotteries Available
Freebies.com offers visitors the chance to enter free draws that are hosted and organised by various brands, companies, and websites.
However, if you are looking for great prizes that cost nothing to win, you should look at the many draws available.
Amazingly, unlike other sweepstakes sites, the prizes on Freebies.com are not listed according to a category. In fact, there is no way to sort available draws according to what they are offering.
This is a major let-down and is something that even Freebie subsidiary sites such as Free.ca offer. We cannot understand why this is not done, especially if this website is as popular as it seems to be.
Freebies.com Extras
Freebies tries to make up for its many shortcomings by hosting a wide variety of additional extras. These include:
Free Samples: There are plenty of listings posted on the site that gives you access to great free samples offered by well-known brands. To receive these samples, you will only need to register on the brand website and wait for your samples to arrive.
Coupons: If you prefer going in-store and purchasing items yourself, you will enjoy the website's coupons section. Here, you will find great coupons to give you discounts to various things from fast food to electronics.
Promotions: This section of the website is dedicated to the best deals, sales, and promotions being offered by just about everyone. You can browse the many promotions available until you see one that you want to take advantage of. Once you have found one, simply click the link and follow the onscreen instructions.
Rewards: The rewards centre is where you can complete surveys, submit reviews, and share your opinion on different services and products. For your efforts, you will be rewarded with gift cards to major retailers.
Tips: Under tips, you can find videos covering everything from DIY projects to how to save money. These are fun to watch if you have nothing better to do. However, they don’t do much else.
Exclusives: The site hosts plenty of draws that are exclusively available for members. These draws are all clearly labelled and are specifically curated by Freebies.com. The exclusive draws work hand in hand with the ballots below.
Ballots: When registering as a member, you will begin to accrue ballots. These ballots act as points assigned to your user and are what you use to enter exclusive draws held on the site. One ballot is equal to one entry in any of the member draws. You can earn more ballots by completing surveys, doing quizzes, or just by visiting the site daily.
Payment/Withdrawal Options
There are no available payment methods on the site. This is because all the draws available are free to enter, and you should never have to pay anything to enter any of them.
Because all prizes are delivered directly from the brand or company that is hosting a draw, there are also no withdrawal options.
How to Claim Your Winnings
Each draw has its own unique claims process if you are a lucky winner. This process is listed within the rules of the draw.
Sadly, Freebies.com doesn’t list these rules when they post the draw information. This means that you will need to go and look for the rules on the official website where you can enter the draw.
As we have always maintained, it is best to familiarise yourself with these processes before entering a draw. That way, in the event that you are a winner, you will already know how to get your prize.
Customer Support
The provided FAQ section will answer some of the basic questions that you may have about how the site operates and what features such as ballots are. There is not plenty of information here, but it should be enough to give you a general understanding of the website.
If you still have questions, you can contact customer support using the provided online form. There is no mention of how long you will be expected to wait before receiving an answer to your request.
Rules and Regulations
There are strictly stated limitations on who can use Freebies.com and register a player account. The first rule is that all users must be 18 years of age or the age of majority in their region.
The second imposes a much greater restriction on who can use the site by limiting access to only those in certain territories:
Canada
United States
Australia
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Freebies.com Review Conclusion
We truly expected much more from Freebies.com for being such a large site with so many subsidiary sites.
Therefore, we are more than slightly disappointed at the cluttered look, annoying ads, and lack of prize categories that the site has. However, it is more than that.
Small things such as forcing players to register a user account just to access an entry link is something that we don’t find necessary to do. In fact, there are plenty of other similar sites that don’t require this.
Add to this the fact that there are so many complaints against the site since it has undergone its management change and we are genuinely concerned.
Freebies.com is a decent site if you are looking for a massive array of free things from coupons to contests. However, due to the drawbacks of the site, we would rather have access to fewer freebies by using a different website than return to where things just aren’t right.
