There's One Way To Get Free PokeCoins In 'Pokémon GO'

Pokémon GO may be a free game, but we all know how that goes by this point. Pokémon GO, like most free-to-play games, uses various premium items to entice you into spending real world money to accelerate your ingame progress — in this case, it all revolves around PokeCoins, the premium currency that you can use to buy egg incubators, lucky eggs, lure modules, bag upgrades and the works. Most of the time, if you want PokeCoins, you’re going to have to pay for them, and they can really accelerate things if you do.  There is, however, one known method for getting free PokeCoins.

The gym system is one of the most problematic features of this new game, but that’s where you’re going to have to go to get your free PokeCoins. You can station your Pokémon at a gym if you either train at a friendly gym long enough to increase its level and thus its Pokémon capacity, or if you knock an enemy gym down and put your own champion on the now empty gym. Just getting one Pokémon out at a gym is something of an accomplishment in this wildly popular game, but if you want, you can travel around and try to get as many of your little creatures sitting on gyms as possible. Read up here for tips on how to win those battles without too much trouble.

That’s where the free PokeCoins come in. If you go to your “shop” page, there’s a little icon in the upper right hand corner that will give you a Pokecoin and stardust bonus for every Pokémon you have defending a gym, as well as every day that Pokémon has successfully defended the gym. You can only collect this bonus once every 20 hours, so you’ll want to do one of two things. You can either try to get as many Pokémon as you possibly can out at gyms before collecting, or you’ll want to snag it as soon as you put one down because you know it won’t be there for very long. I’ve been leaning towards the latter.