Rewards and payouts

When a referral validates, Invitebase automatically creates a reward — a record of what's owed, to whom, with its own fulfillment lifecycle. Rewards are only ever created from validated referrals; nothing fulfills on a merely linked signup. What the reward actually is comes from the campaign's reward configuration, and it falls into one of two families.

Rewards are given to the sender when a referral validates. You can also optionally offer a reward to the reciever as an incentive to join your app. Typically this would be a free month, or other in-app promotion.

Reward types

Invitebase supports three distinct types or families of rewards: monetary, entitlement-based, and app-based rewards.

Monetary rewards

The reward is money. Invitebase supports payouts via gift card, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Wise, and ACH bank transfer. Money rewards draw down your org's prefunded balance. Invitebase handles all tax, KYC, accounting, and compliance associated with monetary payouts.

How the balance works:

• Top up manually from the dashboard or enable auto-reload. Set daily, weekly, and monthly limits to ensure you always stay in control. GET /v1/balance and POST /v1/balance/top_ups expose the same from the API.
• The ledger tracks credits, debits, and holds: when a money reward enters pending, its amount is held; fulfillment converts the hold to a debit, rejection releases it. Available balance = credits − debits − active holds.
• Low-balance alerts fire at your threshold, and if funds run out, payouts pause and queue rather than fail — they resume automatically on top-up.
• The reward balance is strictly separate from your Invitebase bill (your per-referral rate plus the payout fee below): topping it up never pays your invoice, and Invitebase fees are never drawn from it. Unused balances are refundable.
• Invitebase charges an 8.5% fee on all monetary rewards paid out, in addition to your per-referral rate. It's billed on your monthly platform invoice — not deducted from your reward balance — so recipients always receive the full face value you configure. Entitlement and app-based rewards aren't monetary and carry no payout fee.

Entitlement-based rewards

The reward is free access to your product or service. With product entitlement rewards, the recipient receives access to your premium offering for a set term — any whole number of days, weeks, or months. This reward can be used for subscription-based apps or apps that offer one-time purchases through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

How that access is delivered is a separate choice from what is promised: your own backend over the reward webhook, codes you upload, your code API, App Store Connect, or RevenueCat. Changing the delivery never changes the term the referral page advertises.

Product entitlements can be configured based on if the user is already a paying subscriber. Invitebase supports integration with App Store Connect, Google Play Store, RevenueCat, Stripe, and Adapty.

App-based rewards

The reward is value inside your own app (a skin, a feature unlock, in-app currency, a badge — any payload you define). When a reward is unlocked, you can be notified by webhook or delegate callback within the SDK. App grants cost nothing to deliver, involve no KYC or money movement, and are the store-policy-friendly default for mobile campaigns.

Advanced Options

Milestone-triggered incentives

In certain instances, you may want to offer milestone-based rewards, where the reward or payout is unlocked only after a user completes a certain number of validated referrals. (E.g. unlock an additional $100 at 15 referrals, or unlock lifetime access at 20 referrals).

Incentive stacking

You can offer both monetary-based and app-based rewards to referers at the same time. This can be especially powerful when combined with Milestone-based incentives. A common pattern we see here is earn $X per referral, plus unlock in-app rewards when you hit 3,6, and 12 referrals.

Caps and limits

You can set a limit for the maximum amount of referrals, or the maximum payout per user, in aggregate or per timeperiod. cap_per_referrer and cap_per_month can be used to manage costs, fraud controls, and enforced budgets. See Campaigns for the full config shape.

Reward states

The referral's own status mirrors the terminal outcomes: reward_pending → reward_fulfilled / reward_failed. Webhook events track the same transitions: reward.pending, reward.fulfilled, reward.failed, plus payout.available and balance.low on the money side.

Holds and approval

Between validated and release, every campaign has a configurable hold window (default 48–72 hours; zero-hold is allowed for app-grant-only campaigns). The hold is a structural fraud defense: the fraud decision has already landed by then, so the window is what gives the slower signals — payout dedup and, where connected, refund/chargeback events from RevenueCat or Stripe — time to surface before anything irreversible happens.

During the window:

• If a fraud signal reverses the referral, the system moves it to rejected and cancels the reward atomically, with a billing adjustment.
• If a refund or chargemack on the qualifying purchase occurs, this automatically triggers a hold.

In test mode, the full reward lifecycle runs against a fake-funded ledger and sandbox payout providers — real state machine, real webhooks, zero real money.