How to make $100 fast as a student

The useful thing about $100 is that it stacks. Almost nothing legitimate pays a student $100 in one shot on day one — but two sold items or a Saturday of gigs gets there, and a batch of short videos stacks on top: $15 for each approved one that gets 300 views in its first week, plus view pay. Ignore anything that promises the single-shot version.

The paths to $100, compared

Path 1: sell your way there (fastest for most people)

Walk your room with a flashlight mentality: textbooks from finished classes, the game console that lost to your course load, clothes, a skateboard, an old phone in a drawer. Two or three decent items at $30–$60 each is the whole assignment. List on Facebook Marketplace with real photos, price 10% under comparable listings, and meet in a public spot. Most students genuinely have $100 of unused stuff within arm’s reach — this path fails only when you have already used it.

Path 2: a weekend of gig work

Two focused days clears $100 in most markets: delivery apps typically net $10–$20 an hour after expenses, moving help pays $20–$40 per job, and an evening of babysitting runs $15–$20 an hour. The constraints are real — most gig apps require you to be 18 and take a few days to approve new drivers — so if your deadline is this weekend, apply today and fill the gap with Path 1 meanwhile.

Path 3: a batch of short videos

This is the path that did not exist a few years ago — and the only one where a single piece of work earns on every view for two weeks. Here is the program behind it in full.

Getting paid to make short videos: the Write It creator program

Write It — the AI writing extension a lot of students already use in Google Docs — runs a creator program that pays you for short videos about the product on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. It is the rare version of "get paid to post" with a floor, not just a lottery ticket:

• $15 guaranteed when a video gets 300 views in its first 7 days. If an approved video hits 300 views within 7 days of posting, a flat $15 in cash lands in your creator balance, on top of its view pay. That is the floor you can plan around.
• $1.50 per 1,000 views for the first 14 days. View pay covers every view in the first 14 days after posting, with no cap on how many. A video with 50,000 views by day 14 earns $15 plus $75 in view pay, so $90.
• 10 free AI uses per approved video. Once a video passes review, the uses land in your Write It account automatically, even if the clip barely gets seen.
• No follower minimum, no application. You post from your own account and paste the link in the creator dashboard, up to 10 videos a week (you can ask for more). Proven video formats with reference clips are provided, or run your own idea.
• Cash out from $20, paid through Stripe. The $15 counts toward it, so two approved videos that each hit 300 views in their first week ($30.90), or one video with about 3,340 views by day 14, gets you there. Payouts go to your own bank.

Each approved video that gets 300 views in its first 7 days earns a guaranteed $15, and view pay adds $1.50 per 1,000 views for the first 14 days, with no cap on views — a video with 50,000 views by day 14 earns $90. A week of posting one clip a day costs well under an hour per clip once you have a format down, and if all seven are approved and each gets 300 views in its first week, that is $105 before view pay. The honest caveat: the $15 needs approval and 300 views in the first week, and the rest is performance-based, so treat this as the path that compounds, not the one with a guaranteed date.

Stack the paths and the timeline collapses

The fastest honest plan uses all three at once. Saturday morning: list three items. Saturday afternoon: film and post your first video, then batch two more. Sunday: one moving job or a babysitting evening. By midweek you have sale money in hand, gig pay landing, and videos clearing review on their way to 300 views by day 7 — arriving at $100 from three directions beats waiting on one.