I read a couple of articles about crypto-faucets here on Steemit and some of them had a lot of very positive reactions, like this one by 
So I thought "why not try this myself?" The past couple of days I've been at home with not much to do but write some articles, which gave me the time to do my little faucet-experiment and share the results with my fellow Steemians.
First it must be said that you don't get anything for nothing: you will have to endure the pain of constantly clicking captcha pictures (you know, to prove you're not a robot) and the brutal discomfort of not being able to use any kind of ad-blocker... These are not free coins; they cost a serious amount of mouse-clicking and frustration.
But still, relatively minimal effort is required for these small amounts of coins. And when I say "small amounts", that's an understatement. Like I said: I had two days (and nights) to accumulate as much free money as humanly possible (well, I DID sleep and eat of course), and I put the earned amounts in my super simple crypto spreadsheet to quickly see the results. Well, here they are:
Yes, that's right: around 50 cents USD in 48 hours which translates into approximately $7.50 per month. I used the apparently quite popular set of "Moon" faucet sites in combination with the online wallet CoinPot. Links to the faucets are below for those interested (no, they're not referral links).
For me this has been a short experiment; I earn more with the occasional trade and just hodling (although... read the case against hodling here). And it's just not worth the effort for me. There's one use-case I do see here: if you want to get started and are absolutely against investing your own money, it could be worth doing this for a month and to then start out with a very small amount of money on an exchange like Binance and hope you get lucky ;-)
If you would like to use my super simple crypto dashboard in Google Sheets, you can get that here.
The links:
CoinPot wallet for all 5 coins at the moon sites
moon bitcoin
moon litecoin
moon dogecoin
moon dash
moon cash