You probably have Google Play points you can turn into gift cards - how to check

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If you're like a lot of people, you probably don't pay much attention to your Google Play Points. But you might be missing out on real money if you're just letting those points sit there.

Every time you make a purchase through Google Play -- things like paid apps or in-app purchases, digital books, audiobooks, movies, or TV shows -- or you pay for eligible subscriptions (including Google storage plans or third-party streaming services), you earn points.

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Many people don't know it, but you can use those points for a number of things, including merch and gear, Play Store credit, and sweepstakes entries (the current one is for a VIP trip to New York Comic Con and a copy of "one of the single most important comic books in the entire history of the medium").

Here's one of the more useful ways to spend your points: gift cards to retail stores. There aren't a lot of options, but they're solid ones that almost anyone could use, including Amazon, Starbucks, Best Buy, DoorDash, Walmart, Target, and Uber. The cards are all the same price: $5 for 750 points, $10 for 1,500 points, and $20 for 3,000 points.

Unused points do expire 12 months after your last point activity, meaning every single time you earn a point or use a point, the 12-month clock resets for your entire balance.

I had never given these points any thought, even last week when I was diving deep into my Play Store account for this Pixel savings trick . But on the advice of a ZDNET colleague, who stumbled upon a cache of points in her own account that was enough to score a Starbucks gift card, I checked my totals.

When I looked at my own points history, I saw I had over 1,000 points I had been amassing since 2019 and never spent. The vast majority of those came 2 to 6 at a time from subscriptions, but those small amounts add up. It's only $10, but I had a gift card hiding there in plain sight.

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The Play Store also offers weekly giveaways if you want to earn without spending, and you may also be able to get even more points under the "Earn" tab. I only had offers for 3x and 8x point boosts, but my colleague had a challenge to use Google Pay to earn 200 more points.