You earn one "credit" for every dollar you deposit into a registered savings account (or every dollar you pay off a registered mortgage, or whatever).
There's no limit to how many credits you can earn, but there is a limit to how many credits you can spend: a maximum of thirty a day.
Credits are spent by putting 'em into a big slot machine which dispenses prizes whose value and winning probability are unknown. Hopefully you can get something, though.
The best way to game the system seems to be:
1. Move, say, $10,000 out of your savings account into your checking account
2. Sign up for saveup
3. Move the $10,000 back into your checking account, claim your ten thousand credits
4. Spin the wheel three times a day for the rest of the year and hope you get enough prizes to make the effort worthwhile.
Do I have it right?
edit: Aha! I found more information on the precise rules of the contest: https://www.saveup.com/rules including the probabilities of winning prizes. For instance, your odds of winning the two million dollar prize they're so keen on talking about are 1:170,230,452. On the other hand, your chances of winning $10 are one in 4133. There seem to be various different types of drawing which you can enter, but none of 'em seems to have better than a 1:1000 chance of winning even the most trivial amount of money (five dollars).
By that metric, 1 credit is worth $0.0016, and 10,000 is worth $16.
Or to put it another way, you can, at the cost of an extra daily chore and a bunch of "special offer" emails, earn about four point eight cents a day. I'm afraid I'm just not sold on the value proposition.
Basic concept is we reward you for good financial actions. We have sponsors and will get more sponsors to offset the prizes, as well as financial referrals.
Then again, it's mostly self-explanatory: just click on a Play Now button. :)
(EDIT: Hah! This is kind of cool. I'm playing slots, except not spending any money. (Au contraire, the more I save the more I can play.)
Hopefully that's helpful.
saveup.com/?tour=1
edit: Wait, I found https://www.saveup.com/about/faq