Referral program: link, statuses and settlement

Who this is for: a partner in Referral mode — unlike white-label, you don’t manage customers of your own here: you recommend the Platform with your link and earn a commission on what every customer who came through it pays. The two partner modes and their differences are in Access and summary.

What you see before you have any referrals

Before you share your link, the Referrals screen is empty and your console’s Summary shows your mode (“Referral”) with no tenants in your portfolio yet:

Nothing to settle yet — as soon as someone signs up with your link and verifies their email, they show up here.

In Referral mode you don't need to complete Stripe Connect — you never charge a referral directly, the Platform settles with you.

The full circuit, at a glance

1. You share your link https://…/register?ref=your-slug — the same self-service sign-up screen any agency uses, with your identifier added.
2. Someone signs up with that link and verifies their email by code — the same step in any self-service sign-up. At that exact moment, your commission % and the number of months your window lasts get frozen for good — even if your own agreement changes later, that specific referral keeps the terms it was born with.
3. While the referral stays alive and inside their window, their status is Active.
4. Every time that customer pays an invoice — by Stripe or by a manual payment the Platform’s staff records — a new commission is generated for you; the first paid invoice also marks the start of the window.
5. The Platform’s staff reviews the accrued commissions and settles them with you outside the platform, with a reference, after a short safety period — it never reaches you through Stripe.

Your link: first-touch and permanent

When you sign up as a Referral-mode partner, your slug becomes your referral link. Two rules with no exceptions:

• Permanent first-touch: the first partner link an email signed up with is the one that sticks forever — if that same person signs up later with another partner’s link, it doesn’t get reassigned. A tenant only ever has one referrer for their whole lifetime.
• The referral never becomes your customer: they stay 100% direct with the Platform. They don’t show up in your Customers section, you can’t impersonate them, and they don’t use up any of your seats — the only thing you earn is the commission.

If someone starts signing up with your link but never verifies their email code, no referral row gets created at all — there’s no commission possible on an account that never finished being born.

Two similar-looking “statuses” that aren’t the same thing

• The referral’s own status (Active / Window ended / Customer churned): says whether that customer is still generating new commissions right now.
• The status of a commission already generated (Pending / Settled / Reversed by refund): says whether that specific commission has already been paid to you.

A referral with “Window ended” can perfectly well still have old commissions “Pending” settlement — they’re independent questions. Likewise “Customer churned” (the customer cancelled their subscription) always wins over “Window ended” when both apply: a churned customer whose window had already run out shows “Customer churned”, never both at once.

What to configure

• Nothing to turn on: as soon as your account is Referral mode, your link already exists — you just need to share it.
• Stripe Connect isn’t needed in this mode: you never charge a referral directly.

Limits and honesty

• There’s no button to “reassign” a referral to another partner, or to change your own slug once shared — first-touch is permanent by design.
• The % and the number of months are frozen when the referral signs up: if your agreement with the Platform changes later, existing referrals keep their original terms.
• Settlement is always manual, outside the platform, with a safety period — there’s no “collect now” button.

See also

• Access and summary — the two partner modes (White label / Referral).
• How you get paid and how referrals settle — the overview of both revenue models.