Billing and usage
How Invitebase pricing works — 100 free validated referrals on Indie, once, no card up front, usage billed via Stripe
Invitebase bills on two things: the validated referral, and a payout fee of 12.5% on Indie or 8.5% on Growth on the monetary rewards you pay out. The Billing screen makes that consumption legible — what you have used, what the month will cost, and every invoice.
- Indie: First 100 free, then $1 / referral + 12.5% on payouts.
- Growth: $0.80 / referral + 8.5% on payouts.
The pricing model
- On Indie, the first 100 validated referrals are free, once per account lifetime. The allowance never resets; subsequent referrals cost $1 each. Growth charges $0.80 from the first referral.
- Beyond that you pay your plan's per-referral rate: $1 on the Indie plan, $0.80 on Growth ($149/mo billed annually, or $229 month-to-month). Enterprise has custom volume rates. See the full pricing page for what each plan includes.
- Monetary rewards carry a payout fee of 12.5% on Indie or 8.5% on Growth. Every money reward paid out through Invitebase — gift cards, prepaid Visa cards, charity donations, and cash (PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, bank transfer, or debit card) — is charged at your plan’s payout rate, in addition to the per-referral rate. Gift cards are cash equivalents, so the fee applies to them too. App-grant, free-access, and in-app rewards aren't monetary and carry no payout fee.
- No credit card up front. You start with no card on file and are never prompted for one until your usage first crosses the one-time free 100 on Indie — nothing to add, nothing charged, before then.
There is no charge for clicks, signups, or linked referrals, and test-mode data never counts. Referral fees apply only when a referral validates — passes your qualification gates and the AI fraud check — and the payout fee applies only when a monetary reward actually fulfills. The same fraud system that protects your reward budget protects your bill: referrals the AI fraud check flags are not billed unless you review and unblock them, and a payout that is held, cancelled, or clawed back before it fulfills is never charged the fee.
How validated counts accrue
The billing meter counts exactly the referrals that reach the validated state, in live mode only, after the AI fraud check — the same source-of-truth query that fires rewards. See Linked vs validated for the distinction that matters here: a linked signup costs nothing; only qualified, fraud-screened conversions count.
If a validated referral is later reversed — rejected by the AI fraud check or clawed back — the meter is credited back on your next invoice. A credit reduces what you're billed; it doesn't hand a free referral back to Indie's one-time allowance, and neither does deleting an app or its referrals.
Test-mode referrals are never billed, and the usage meter visibly excludes them.
Two balances, two different things
On Growth and above, the dashboard involves two unrelated pools of money. Keeping them straight avoids the most common billing confusion:
| Platform bill | Prefunded reward balance | |
|---|---|---|
| What it pays for | Invitebase's fees: your plan's per-referral rate (after Indie's one-time free 100), plus the plan-specific payout fee (12.5% on Indie, 8.5% on Growth) on monetary rewards paid out | Money rewards delivered to your users (gift cards, cash) |
| Where it lives | Stripe subscription, billed monthly in arrears | A funding account in your name at the payout provider |
| Where you manage it | Settings → Billing (this page) | The Payouts section |
| When it moves | Monthly invoice | Continuously, as rewards fulfill |
The plan-specific payout fee (12.5% on Indie, 8.5% on Growth) is an Invitebase fee, so it lives on the platform bill — it is not deducted from your reward balance. Your users always receive the full face value you configure; the fee is billed to you separately. Topping up your reward balance does not pay your Invitebase bill, and paying your invoice adds nothing to the reward balance. If your campaigns use only app-grant rewards, the reward balance stays at zero and you pay no payout fee — your only cost is the per-referral rate.
Usage visibility
The Billing screen shows:
- Usage meter — validated referrals this period and, on Indie, how many of your 100 one-time free referrals are left, with a month-end forecast based on the current run rate.
- Plan — Indie, Growth, or Enterprise.
- Billing cap — an optional monthly maximum you set. The behavior when the cap is hit is stated explicitly on the screen before you enable it: referrals continue to validate and rewards continue to fire, but you are alerted and can pause campaigns; Invitebase never silently stops your campaign mid-month.
- Payment method and invoices — no card is required to start; on Indie you are prompted for one only once you have used your 100 free referrals. Billing then runs on Stripe metered billing — update cards and download every invoice from the invoice history. Sales tax and VAT are calculated automatically at invoice time.
The same period usage is queryable via the API if you want the meter in your own admin tooling.
Watching cost efficiency
Billing tells you what Invitebase costs; the analytics charts tell you what your campaign costs — reward spend over time and cost per validated referral. Together they give the full unit economics of a referral: your reward + your per-referral rate + the plan-specific payout fee (12.5% on Indie, 8.5% on Growth) on monetary rewards, against the LTV of a referred user who, per your gates, has already done something valuable.