Choose your rewards

With your account set up, the next decision is a product one, not an engineering one — and it's really two decisions: what does the friend you invite get, what does the referrer who sent them get, and how much are you willing to pay for both? This page walks the choices in order: what counts as a successful referral, the friend's reward, the referrer's reward, the mechanics, and who's eligible. You make all of these calls in the dashboard — no code — and you can change them later; edits take effect immediately. The Campaigns builder is where you enter them and Rewards and payouts is the underlying model.

First, decide what counts as "successful"

A reward only ever fires when a referral reaches validated — the moment the referred user does the thing you actually care about. So "how much do I pay" is really two questions: for what, and how much. The "for what" is the campaign's qualification gate — signup, a verified account, or a paid subscription within N days. Pick that first; it decides which referrals ever cost you anything. Merely linked signups that never qualify are free. The gate is shared by both sides: one validated referral triggers the referrer's reward and the friend's reward together.

Pick the friend's (the receiver's) reward

Start with the receiving side — the friend who accepts the invite — because their reward is the offer: it's the reason the invite gets accepted at all. (You can run a referrer-only campaign, but two-sided campaigns are the norm for exactly this reason.)

The receiver can't receive monetary value — they must receive product value: an app grant such as free access (a month or a year) or an in-app unlock (currency, a feature, a skin). App grants cost nothing to fund, involve no KYC or money movement, and are delivered client-side through the SDK or, for abuse-sensitive rewards, a signed webhook.

Pick the referrer's reward

The referrer can receive app grants, monetary compensation, or a combination of both — your pick:

• App grants — no money moves. The same product value described above: free access or an in-app unlock. Nothing to fund, and the store-policy-friendly default for mobile.
• Monetary payouts — from your prefunded balance. Gift cards, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Wise, and ACH. These draw down a prefunded balance, and carry an 8.5% platform fee on the amount paid out, billed on your monthly invoice. See Gift cards and cash payouts.

The two sides don't have to match: the common consumer pattern is monetary rewards for the referrer and a free month for the friend, in the same campaign.

Dial in the mechanics

A few levers turn "a reward" into your reward. All of them live on the reward configuration in the Campaigns builder, set per side:

• Amount and currency — a fixed value per validated referral.
• Milestones and tiers — reward the referrer only after N referrals ("unlock at 5"), or escalate at thresholds. These apply to the referrer's side; the friend's reward fires on their own validated conversion.
• Caps — per referrer, per campaign, and per rolling month. Caps double as a structural fraud control.
• Expiry — how long an earned reward stays claimable, on either side.
• Grace period — how long after signup a forgotten code can still be applied and attribute. Real flows are messy: a friend signs up, then remembers the code ten minutes later — within the grace period (24 or 48 hours is the common choice, via manual entry with applyCode) it counts exactly as if it had been present at signup. Longer windows rescue more honest mistakes but widen existing-user abuse, so keep it in hours or a couple of days, not weeks.

Not sure where to start? When you create a campaign, Invitebase suggests a reward type and amount based on apps like yours, with an explanation — a starting point, not a verdict.

Decide who's eligible

A code arriving with a signup doesn't automatically mean a reward should follow. Whether the referred user can qualify at all — checked before the qualification gate ever starts counting — is decided one of two ways.

AI verification (Recommended)

Use Invitebase's proprietary AI fraud prevention tools to automatically verify referrals and block suspicious invites. You can add user actions to your codebase to help our AI learn user behavior and accurately predict valid referrals faster.

Manual verification

You control the criteria on what makes a valid referral. Start with the built-in rules:

• New users only, or returning users too? The default posture is that only genuinely new accounts qualify — that's what most campaigns mean by "refer a friend."
• How new is "new"? If the person already created an account before the code was applied, how old can that account be and still count — a few days, a few weeks? This is the line between "new user who signed up slightly out of order" and "existing user harvesting a discount."
• Prior payment history. Does someone who once held a paid subscription qualify — a lapsed subscriber being won back — or is the reward reserved for users who have never paid?

Then add your own triggers: track any event or attribute from your app — adding a profile picture, completing a workout, anything custom — and give each a score. A referred user is deemed eligible once their signals add up to a genuine user, by your definition.

Either way, referrals that fail eligibility are rejected before validation, so they never cost you anything and never inflate a referrer's counts. Self-referrals — the same person on both sides of the code — are caught separately, by matching email, device, or payment fingerprint; see Fraud prevention.

Try it for real, for free

Build the whole thing in test mode first. The reward lifecycle runs end to end against a fake-funded ledger and sandbox payout providers — real state machine, real webhooks, zero real money — so you can confirm a reward validates and fulfills before you ever fund a balance or go live.

What's next