TL;DR: Honey is a simple and useful browser extension that can help you find coupons and promotional codes for deals while shopping online. For the most part, Honey works like a charm but there are a few hiccups in the interface and browser compatibility.

Everyone likes getting money off of their purchases. Companies have figured this out too, which is why pretty much every online retailer has promotional and coupon codes that let you save money.

But it can be annoying having to search high and low for these coupons. Even worse, when you do find coupons after searching Google, they may not work or be expired. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was some app that found those coupons, figured out if they were valid, then automatically applied them for you?

That is what Honey is for. Honey is a browser extension that automatically scans websites for valid coupons to help you find the best deals. Honey will find any applicable coupons, then apply them to your purchase so you can save some money.

Sounds pretty cool right? But how good is Honey actually? Is it legitimate, or just another scam trying to get their hands on your personal data? We will answer all these questions and more in our Honey review.

Honey: Overview

Honey is a browser extension that searches and applies coupons to your online purchase. When you shop on a site, Honey will automatically search for coupons for retailers and apply them to your checkout account. The browser extension is available for most popular browsers, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge, among others.

After you load up your cart with your purchases and proceed to checkout, click on the Honey button in your browser and any coupon codes it finds will be applied. Honey works with thousands of online retailers and the best part is it is 100% free to use.

So now you don’t have to waste time looking for deals online. You can just shop at your leisure and the extension will find them for you. According to the company, the average user saves about $32 a month using Honey and the extension works for thousands of stores.

Is Honey a Scam?

We will get this out of the way early: No, Honey is not a scam. It is completely legitimate and it can actually help you save a nice chunk of change while shopping online. The company is based out of Los Angeles and they have a fancy website that looks great and has contact info.

We will put it this way. We played around with Honey a bit to write this review and were able to find coupons and discounts for practically every website we shopped on that offered them. Overall, Honey helped us save an average of $5-6 per purchase, up to $10 on some websites. There were a couple of hiccups and sometimes the extension could not find coupons for sites that clearly have them, but otherwise, it works just fine.

So you can take it from personal experience. Honey is not a scam and it actually does what it claims to do.

How Do You Use Honey?

Honey is a browser extension that you have to install before you can use it. For those not in the know, browser extensions are basically little widgets you can install on your browser’s toolbar to give it some extra functionality. Google AdBlock is a browser extension, so if you have that then you already know what extensions are and how to get them.

When you install the extension, you will then be prompted to make a Honey account. All you need to provide is some basic info like your name, email address, and password. You do not have to enter any financial information.

You can also log in to Honey through your Facebook account. Google account, PayPal, or Apple account.

Once you download the extension and create an account, a Honey icon will appear at the top of your browser right next to the website address bar. While you are shopping, if Honey has found any coupons or promotions for the site you are on, you can click the button and it will show you a list of valid deals.

How Does Honey Find Coupons and Promotions?

Honey finds coupons and deals through crowdsourcing information. Thousands of members share real-time data about deals, prices, and more. The extension takes all of this data and uses it to help you find the best deals on the web.

What Else Does Honey Do?

Account Feed

The first thing that you see when you log into your Honey account is a list of Top Trending coupons. This section tells you popular coupons and their relative success rates. For example, as of the time of writing, the top trending coupons on my feed are Lands’ End, ULTA, Levi’s, JCPenney, Gap, and Lenovo.

Your account feed will also have daily deals and editor’s picks for new and trending items. You can also browse for specific categories such as video games, electronics, clothing, personal care items, and more.

Honey Gold

Honey also allows you to earn “Honey Gold” which you can redeem for gift cards. Whenever you shop online, you will get Honey Gold points for making purchases. You can redeem Honey Gold points for gift cards to your favorite stores. Each Honey Gold point is equal to $0.01 in rewards So for example, I currently have 157 Honey Gold points which come out to $1.57 in rewards. You have to have at least 1,000 Honey Points to redeem them.

Honey will offer anywhere between 1% to 10% cashback on shopping from certain retailers.

Once you have at least 1,000 points, you can redeem them for gift cards for places like Walmart, Sephora, eBay. Amazon, Target, Lowes, Apple, and more.

Honey will also offer up to $5 in rewards if you refer a friend to the platform. From your account page, you can copy the special referral link and give it to your friends. When they sign up using the link, you will automatically get $5 deposited into your Honey account.

Droplist and Price Alerts

If you like searching for deals then Droplist will be an extremely useful feature. If you are browsing and find something that you like but the price is too high, you can add it to your Honey Droplist and the extension will let you know when the price has gone down. From the Droplist tab on your account, you can pin certain items and pick how long it will track.

The Droplist will also tell you when you could be getting a better deal on an item. For example, I was searching for stuff on amazon and the Honey pop-up did a search and told me that I was not looking at the best deal for the item. So even if it’s not giving your coupon codes, Honey can still be useful for finding better deals on your purchases.

Mobile App

Honey also has a mobile app called the Honey Smart Shopping Assistant. For the most part, it works exactly like the browser extension but there are a couple of differences. Whereas the Honey extension follows you to whichever site you go to, the app works kind of like its own marketplace.

However, the app noticeably has some issues. We found that the interface is not as clean as the browser extension and it had some problems refreshing and loading new deals. It is still relatively new (they just dropped an Android version in the past few months) so hopefully the development team will be able to work out some kinks in the near future.

Does the Extension Work Well?

One thing we noticed when we first installed the extension is that our browser performance slowed down. However, once we uninstalled and reinstalled the extension, the browser was working normally. Since then, we haven’t noticed any browser slowdowns.

There were also a few times when Honey was unable to find coupons for a site even though there clearly should have been some. Unfortunately, this problem occurred mostly while shopping on Amazon. Considering that most people who shop online use Amazon, this can be very frustrating.

Even if the extension cannot find coupons for whatever reasons, it is pretty consistent at finding better deals on purchases. I was trying to buy a Playstation 4 game on Amazon and Honey was able to find the same game for about $6 cheaper. That is not a lot all things considered, but over time those savings can add up.

We also found some people saying that Honey does not work as well on some browsers. We were using Honey Chrome extension and for the most part, it works fine. However, some people claim that it does not work as well on Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. It seems to work just fine on Safari too, although we could not check to see if that was the case.

Can Other Extensions Mess up Honey?

Since extensions are often made by third parties, there is the possibility that some Honey can interfere with each other. The most common problem we found was with Google AdBlock. AdBlock can prevent Honey pop-ups from appearing. If this happens to you, just disable your AdBlock on the page and refresh it. That should fix the problem so Honey can work its magic.

This can be a potential problem if you have a lot of extensions and are not sure which one is causing the problem. In the worst case, you might have to disable them one by one to see if that resolves the issue.

How Much Does Honey Cost?

Honey is 100% free to use. You don’t have to buy or sign up for anything, and you won’t have to provide Honey with any payment information. This is a good feature for people that are averse to giving out their personal information.

So how does Honey make money, you ask? Honey makes money through commissions from its partners. Every time you use the extension to find coupons for a site, the company pays Honey a little bit of money. Unlike many third-party apps and extensions, Honey will not sell your information.

Honey also does not track your search engine history, location, or your browsing on any site. The only information the extension tracks is the availability and pricing on deals on the website you are visiting. Honey does use cookies to collect some of its data, but you can manage your cookie preferences and remove these.

Honey Pros & Cons

Pros

• Super simple to use. Honey will automatically search for coupons that you can then apply to your checkout cart with just the click of a button. Now you don’t have to spend time on Google searching for coupon codes that may or may not work.
• Several brand partners. Honey has partnerships with some of the biggest and best companies on the internet. If you shop online, Honey will be able to find deals for most websites.
• Extra savings features. Aside from the coupons, Honey has features that tell you about trending deals and can tell you when products drop in price.
• Rewards program. When you shop with the browser extension installed, you will get Honey Gold points that you can redeem for gift cards. It’s not a lot but over time these points can add up.
• Free to use. Honey is 100% free to use. You do not have to pay a single cent to use any of the features.

Cons

• Doesn’t always work. Honey is not perfect. Sometimes it won’t be able to find coupons even though there definitely should be some.
• Browser performance. Honey might impact your browser performance. The most serious issue is slowdowns. Other extensions might also interfere with Honey so it does not work properly.
• Mobile app could use some work. The mobile app is fairly lackluster and has some performance issues. Hopefully, the development team can iron these issues out in the near future.

Conclusions

So, is Honey worth it? If you shop online frequently then yes, Honey is definitely worth at least trying out. It can help you save a bit on your purchases and has some nice rewards attached to it. If you do not shop online very often, then Honey can clog up your browser and not be of much use. But if you do shop online frequently, there is no reason not to try out this shopping rewards extension.