Atlas Earth has been around for a few years now, and they always have some kind of advertising push to try and get more people to sign up. Since I’ve got some experience with apps that claim to earn you money, I thought I’d take a look.

What is Atlas Earth?

Imagine the planet, split up into small squares, similar to the What3Words app that went round a while ago. Now imagine you can “buy” those squares and over time they generate money for you. Sounds too good to be true, right? Probably.

Does it do what it says?

Technically, Atlas Earth works exactly as advertised. You pay for the squares (which they call parcels) with a virtual currency called Atlas Bucks. Each parcel costs 100 Atlas Bucks, and you can buy those Atlas Bucks with real cash, or earn them by completing certain tasks – and that’s where my problems start.

You can buy 100 Atlas Bucks for $7 (I assume it’s showing Canadian dollars for me, but it doesn’t make it clear and I’m not clicking the button to test it), or a batch of 2400 for $130. You also get a single parcel assigned to you when you sign up. The maps look fairly basic, but seem to be mostly accurate. On the home screen there’s a feed showing what tasks players are doing all over the world. Is that feed legit, or is it totally fictional? Without knowing someone else nearby who also uses it, there’s no way to know. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here, and assume it’s true until I hear different.

What else does it do?

They hold regular events, which are temporary mini-games that pit you against random players. At the end of the event, the top three players are rewarded with a big batch of Atlas Bucks. The mini-games are kind of crappy though, with variations on the style of basic mobile game that were popular 15 years ago. I’ve had some real issues with UI lag in these games, where things don’t always click exactly when I tell them to. It’s almost like it’s sending my tap request to their servers, then waiting for the ping back before it actually registers the touch. This is a terrible system that wouldn’t hold up in “real” online games, but I can’t think of any other way to explain it. But whatever, that’s not really what we’re here for. We want that free money!

There’s an option of booking vacations through them too, but it had an extra permissions checkbox, so I have no idea what kind of info they’d be sharing with their ad partners or the booking companies. I didn’t accept this, so I couldn’t say what the return is like.

Nothing going on but the rent

Okay, let’s get into it. Parcels come in 4 rarities – Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary – assigned (I assume) at random when you purchase one, and each generates rent at a different rate. Legendary is 4x the speed of Common, and the others fall somewhere in between. Let’s look at my profile.

First of all, let me be clear – I’ve spent no real money here. All of the Atlas Bucks I’ve earned have been through playing games or completing surveys. Right now I have 4 Common parcels, 4 Rare and 1 Epic. Here are the rent rates:

That means I’m generating a massive $0.0000000130 per second. I think the idea is that by measuring it in seconds, they make you think that it’s going to build up super quickly. But as you’ll see, it doesn’t. Let’s get mathing!

$0.0000000130 per second is $0.0000007800 per minute, $0.0000468000 per hour, $0.0011232000 per day and $0.4099680000 per year. About 41 cents. PER YEAR. That’s more than the cost of the power it’d use to recharge my phone after loading the damned app!

Time to dollar rate

The time it would take me to earn a dollar right now is about 2.5 years, which is absolute nonsense.

Now, you could argue that I’d be earning more Atlas Bucks during this time, so I’d be able to buy more parcels and speed that up. To that I’d point out that I could’ve earned significantly more money by just completing the same surveys I’ve done for years.

Let’s go back and look at the Atlas Bucks deals I mentioned earlier. For $130 you get 240 parcels. That’s around 26x the earnings that I’m on now. I’ll even round up to 27x to allow a Legendary parcel. That works out to around $11 per year, meaning it would take over 10 years just to earn back your investment!

Boosts & bonuses

One last thing to consider is the bonus Atlas Bucks you can earn. You get them for daily check-ins (of course), which vary from 1 most days, 8 on day 7, 25 on day 14, 50 on day 30, 80 on day 60, up to 200 for 90 straight days. They have a subscription (of course) called the Explorers Club that bumps those daily logins up to 90 per day at the start, right up to 1200 on day 90. That might seem like a good deal, until you realise that the Explorers Club is $50/month!

Thankfully, someone else has done the math on this so that I don’t have to. But even to earn back that $50/month you’d need to have over 10,000 parcels and have invested countless hours of your life to break even. The Explorers Club gets you other bonuses too, like points bonuses in the events, but I can’t see how that could possible make up the difference. You can unlock badges as you purchase parcels, each adding +5% to your rent rate, but again this is trivial until you’ve reached a staggering number of parcels.

The last thing that’s available to everyone for free, is the ad bonus. Watch an ad and you can get a 20x multiplier on your rent for an hour (50x during events). Again, if you have hundreds of parcels that’s probably great, but for me it takes my $0.0000000130/second up to $0.0000002600, which isn’t going to get the tax man frothing at the mouth. Or watch an ad to earn 1 Atlas Buck, which might be the better option, but definitely feels like nothing.

Sunk cost fallacy

The only saving grace here, and one that hasn’t been the case with every “earning” app I’ve tried, is that so far I’ve actually enjoyed most of the games they’ve rewarded me for playing. There’s a couple I really like that I’d never have tried otherwise. And I got to play another arrow maze escape puzzle game, which is a sub-genre that I can’t get enough of (my brain is broken).

Bottom line, Atlas Earth is interesting as a concept, but it feels like they’re taking the piss. The high score table shows some people with tens of thousands of parcels, and for them I guess it’s probably okay. At the Common rate, that would be just over $500 per year, which isn’t something to be sniffed at. But with the amount of time invested, it seems like that would be way better spent in almost any other app.