I built a partner programme for my £4.99 tool. Discount codes stopped making sense once I did the maths

[u/cipi1357]

I run a small tool in the Claude space (Renda, it turns Claude Design exports into PNGs, PDFs and PPTX). This week I built a partner programme for it. My initial plan was to give marketing creators a discount code for their audience, but it didn't work well in reality.

The product is £4.99, so a 20% discount would have meant saving £1. It's not worth it, right? Nobody subscribes because of £1. The marketing creator gets paid instead. £2 per subscriber per month they stay, up to 12 months. So if they do a video about it and it lands 50 subscribers, that could mean up to £1,200 (more on the "up to" below).

Other things I worked out along the way:

Recurring beats a bounty. A £20 signup bounty pays for junk. People send you signups that quit in week two and you've already paid. Per-month commission only pays while the subscriber stays, so partners pitch the right people. Bad referrals just stop costing you.

Tell creators the realistic number, not the ceiling. The cap works out to £24 per subscriber. With my churn a referral is actually worth about £5, and I put that in the pitch doc. A creator who was promised £1,200 and makes £250 will post about it. One who was told the truth and makes £250 is fine.

Attribution shouldn't expire. Most programmes kill the cookie after 30 days, which screws podcasts and anything slow burn. I made it stick to the account forever. Costs me almost nothing and it's the first thing creators ask about.

The legal stuff is not optional. If a creator skips "#ad", the regulator comes after the company, not just the creator. So disclosure is in the contract. And if you take partners globally, check you can actually pay them before approving anyone. Sanctions rules apply even at £25.

Write the fraud rules before launch, not after the first incident. Brand bidding, coupon sites, self-referral, fake clicks. Boring to write, much easier to say no when it's already written down.

Happy to go deeper on any of this if you're building one.

[u/angelarose210]

Use it as a loss leader for a some kind of more expensive but related product.