3 smartphone apps that pay you for small jobs

Forget playing games on your smartphone, some new apps promise to pay you serious money for doing small jobs.

"You're on a treasure hunt to go into a store to see if they have a certain item," explained Donna Baraga, a Colorado mother who makes money on the side with her smartphone. "And you get paid for looking."

Here's how the apps work: A company hires you do to a job using your smartphone (such as checking stock at a grocery store), and they send a payment through Paypal when the task is complete.

"Every time your phone goes 'ca-ching,' and you make money, you just look at your husband and smile," said Baraga. "When you get $15, and then $15, and then $15, it all adds up."

Baraga uses a free app called Gigwalk , which has tasks that usually pay $5 to $20 per job.

Typically, she applies for a "gig" in the area she is going to be, and it usually involves taking a few photos and answering a few questions.

"They're very easy. 'What is the price of the peanut butter?' And you type it in," Baraga explained.

7NEWS followed her on a gig at a Walmart in Broomfield, Colo., where she entered the prices of three types of peanut butter and took pictures of the aisle.

"I just made $15, and it took me two minutes. Now, I can do the rest of my grocery shopping," Baraga said.

Ariel Seidman, the CEO of Gigwalk, said the app is actually adding thousands of new jobs nationwide soon, taking photographs for Microsoft's Bing search engine.

"We'll have more than enough [work] to go around for people who want to give it a shot," Seidman said.

He said the most someone has made in a month was $13,000, but Baraga gave a word of advice.

"Don't expect to make a living off of it. Don't expect to pay your rent or your mortgage off doing Gigwalk," said Baraga, who explained there aren't enough jobs yet in the area. "This is fun money. Fun money to buy extra little things that I want."

She said she has made as much as $125 in one weekend.

Seidman said if you make more than $600 in a year, Gigwalk will send you a 1099 tax form.

Other apps that pay include Field Agent and EasyShift .