Honey is tainted now


How Honey got worse

Plus: A year of great apps, iPhone storage savings, and a Kindle Scribe price drop

Hey there! I’m Jared Newman, a longtime tech journalist, and this is Advisorator, my weekly tech advice newsletter. Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up to get it every Tuesday.

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When I started regularly using Honey in late 2020, it almost seemed too good to be true.

The free browser extension, which began as a startup and was acquired by PayPal five years ago, claims to save you money while shopping online. When you’re about to check out on a site like Best Buy or Target, Honey looks for coupon codes that it can apply to your order, calls out lower prices from competing retailers, and occasionally offers cash back that you can redeem via PayPal.

I wondered if there was a catch, but Honey’s privacy policy makes clear that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers, and it really did save me money. By the end of 2021, I’d racked up more than $70 worth of rewards through Honey’s cash back programs alone.

But over the last year or so, Honey’s product has gotten noticeably worse. It’s not saving money like it used to, and it’s becoming more of a nuisance to use. All I needed was one final push to remove it from my browser.

Honey’s unscrupulous behavior

So it was with great interest that I watched this 23-minute exposé on Honey’s business practices by a YouTuber named MegaLag, in which he accuses the extension of two shady things:

  • Honey allows retailers to suppress coupon codes. If Honey finds a great coupon code, but the retailer doesn’t want a lot of people using it, Honey will hide that code from its users in exchange for a cut of the final, higher-priced sale.
  • Honey hijacks affiliate commissions from content creators. Lots of websites, YouTubers, and social media accounts use affiliate links to get a kickback when you buy something they’ve recommended. If you interact with Honey’s extension during the checkout process after clicking one of these links, Honey collects the commission instead.
Honey can automatically apply coupons, but not necessarily the best ones.

MegaLag’s investigation quickly went viral with over 15 million views as of this writing, in part because it calls out some popular YouTubers who were paid to endorse the product. One of those endorsers, Marques “MKBHD” Brownlee, has now publicly disavowed Honey, having learned that it’s been quietly siphoning away affiliate fees, and 9to5Google reports that Honey’s Chrome extension has lost more than 3 million users over the past couple weeks

For the record, I have no financial relationship with any tech company that I write about, including Honey, and had no incentive to recommend it other than that it seemed like a useful product. But over the past couple years, that product has deteriorated in my experience. The latest revelations were just the last straw.

The bigger problem: Honey just doesn’t pay anymore

Thanks to Honey’s activity page, I can see exactly how much value the browser extension has provided over the years.

One thing that’s clear is that Honey’s coupon code finder has never been worth all that much. Since I started regularly using Honey in late 2020, I’ve only saved $27.76 through its coupons. Maybe that’s because Honey’s been suppressing some valuable ones, but I suspect that working coupons are just hard to find in general for most purchases.

The bigger draw for me has always been Honey’s cash back rewards, which you can activate at checkout and redeem as cash through PayPal. In my first two years of regularly using Honey, I earned more than $111 in cash back rewards.

Since then, those rewards have dropped off dramatically. In the last two years, Honey’s cash back earned me a mere $9.54.

Honey rewards during the good times.

Maybe I’ve just been shopping less on sites where Honey offers these rewards, but I research a lot of tech deals for this newsletter, and I’ve generally noticed fewer cash back offers in dollars. Instead, more of Honey’s offers seem to be for a teeny percentage of the total sale price, resulting in savings of mere cents.

Honey also stopped offering gift card deals in 2023. These deals would occasionally pop up when you were about to buy something, letting you buy a discounted gift card that would cover the full purchase price. These offers saved me about $33 over a two-year period before Honey nixed the program.

Additional annoyances

All this adds up to a browser extension that just isn’t worth its nuisances.

Honey has always been somewhat annoying, popping up with information whenever you’re on a supported retail site. Those distractions seemed tolerable when Honey was saving significant money at checkout. Now, those savings are diminished, and they come at the expense of supporting content creators via affiliate revenue.

Meanwhile, the annoyances are getting worse. Recently, Honey has started showing additional nags after you’ve completed a purchase, hawking free trials for services like SiriusXM and representing yet another pop-up to dismiss.

So I’ve had enough. Once an excellent product, Honey has become yet another example of “enshittification,” and I’m glad to finally be rid of it—and it seems like a lot of other folks are as well.


A year of great apps

Over at Fast Company, I put together my annual list of the year’s best apps. Many of them I’ve already mentioned here in Advisorator (including on my list of more than 300 useful apps), but here are a few highlights that haven’t appeared in this newsletter yet:

  • Lazy Weather: A single-screen weather app that tells you the day’s forecast.
  • Cleft Notes: Record your messy thoughts and have AI organize them into clean text notes.
  • Partiful: Create and send party invites without using Facebook or dealing with Evite’s gunk. It’s free, monetized only by optional party favors, and might be my favorite new app of the year.


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  • One way to free up storage on newer iPhones.
  • Deals on e-readers, power banks, and more.
  • A roundup of the latest tech news.

Subscribe here, and you’ll have instant access to the full newsletter archives, all my online tech tutorials, and Advisorator’s Slack group. You’ll also be supporting my ad-free, paid endorsement-free journalism, which is always appreciated!


Thanks for reading!

By sheer coincidence, the first Advisorator newsletter of 2025 also happens to be its 300th issue! Happy New Year and thanks so much for following along with me.

Speaking of which, I’m currently running around Las Vegas covering the CES tech trade show. It’s a week of pure chaos and I’m already exhausted, but I’ll have some observations and neat gadget finds to write about in next week’s issue. Stay tuned!

Until next week,
Jared


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