Selling clothes on Vinted, delivering takeaways, freelancing after work. The British side hustle has boomed over the past few years, but UK fintech Prograd is betting that its next iteration could look considerably less like work: playing a game on your phone.
The company has been moving deeper into rewarded gaming, where users earn cash for downloading mobile games and hitting specific milestones within them. Prograd now has more than 900 games available on its platform and says £1.5 million has been earned by its users so far.
It sounds, at first, suspiciously close to one of those internet promises about making hundreds of pounds from your sofa. The business model behind it however, stands strong.
Mobile Gaming Pays
Mobile game developers already spend money trying to acquire and retain players. Through rewarded gaming platforms, some of that budget instead goes towards paying users for specific activity within a game, such as reaching a certain level or completing a mission.
Prograd sits in the middle, connecting players with those offers and paying out when the required activity has been verified.
For a company originally built around helping young people make better financial decisions, the move towards gaming reflects something its founders have seen first-hand people aren’t only looking for help managing the money they have. They want more ways to make it.
“When we started Prograd, a lot of the conversation was about helping young people manage their money better. But there’s only so much you can save or cut back,” says Ethan Fraenkel, Co-Founder at Prograd.
“What we kept seeing was that people wanted more ways to actually earn. Gaming has become a big part of that. People are already spending this time on their phones, so the question for us was, can some of that time actually have a financial return?”
The Side Hustle is Changing
Prograd’s bet comes at a time when earning money outside a main job is becoming increasingly normal in the UK.
Research published by Finder earlier this year found that 46% of UK adults now make money from a side hustle, up from 39% in 2025. Among Gen Z, that figure rises to 66%.
The reason is fairly simple. The most common motivation given by side hustlers wasn’t starting a business or funding a passion project. It was covering everyday living costs.
But the traditional side hustle still asks something fairly substantial of people. A second job needs shifts, freelancing needs clients, selling online means finding stock, photographing it, listing it and posting it.
Rewarded gaming asks for something people are already giving away every day: time on their phones.
That doesn’t mean downloading Monopoly Go is about to replace a salary.
Prograd says smaller gaming tasks can typically earn around £5 to £10, while more involved ones can pay £25 or more. Some offers advertise much higher maximum rewards, but those figures usually require players to complete several milestones over a period of time.
The company itself is careful not to pitch gaming as a replacement for a job. Its proposition is extra cash, rather than an income to live on.
Still, it represents an interesting shift in what we mean when we talk about a side hustle.
Why Pay Someone to Play a Game?
For game developers, acquiring players is a competitive and expensive business. Rewarded gaming gives them another way to do it.
Rather than spending all of their acquisition budget on conventional advertising, publishers can reward people for actually trying a game and engaging with it. Prograd says publishers pay the platform based on verified user activity.
Fraenkel compares the principle to other performance-based marketing models, where businesses pay when a customer takes a particular action.
“Games companies already spend huge amounts acquiring players. Rewarded gaming changes where some of that money goes,” says Fraenkel.
“Instead of all of that value sitting with an advertising platform, some of it can go back to the person actually playing. That’s what makes the model interesting to us.”
There is an obvious benefit for Prograd too. Gaming gives people a reason to keep coming back to the platform, rather than visiting once to read a piece of financial guidance and disappearing again.
And with more than 900 games now listed, the company is putting a big part of its proposition behind it.
From Budgeting to Earning
There has been no shortage of fintech businesses built around telling younger consumers how to manage their money.
Budget better, save more, track your spending, invest your spare change.
Those products still have a place, but the growth of the side-hustle economy points to a slightly different problem. For many younger consumers, finding another £50 can be more useful than being told where to cut £50.
That makes Prograd’s move into rewarded gaming an interesting one.
It isn’t trying to turn every user into a freelancer, entrepreneur or gig worker. Instead, it is trying to put a monetary value on small chunks of time that might otherwise be spent scrolling.
Whether rewarded gaming becomes a meaningful part of Britain’s side-hustle economy remains to be seen. There are limits to how much users can earn, and the headline rewards attached to some games can require considerably more effort than the phrase “get paid to play” might suggest.
But Prograd is betting that the appeal doesn’t depend on people making a fortune.
If millions of people are already spending hours playing games on their phones, being paid something for doing it may be enough.
