Why our referral reward goes to both sides, and why it is months not money
Most referral schemes pay the referrer and leave the friend paying full price. Three design decisions behind the KasbPro programme, and what each one costs us.
A referral programme is a statement about how a company sees its customers. Ours makes three choices that are not the obvious ones, and each has a cost we accepted deliberately.
Decision one: both sides get the reward
The common design pays the referrer. You send a friend, you get a credit, your friend pays full price and never knows a transaction happened around them.
We give 3 free months of Pro to both sides. The person you invite gets exactly what you get.
The reason is uncomfortable but simple: a one-sided reward turns a recommendation into a sale. If you get something and your friend gets nothing, you have been quietly enlisted as an unpaid salesperson, and the moment they find out, your recommendation looks like it was about the credit.
Making it double-sided means you can send the link without editing your motives. The honest sentence — "I use this, and if you join through me we both get three months free" — is one you can send to someone whose opinion of you matters.
The cost to us is exactly double. Each conversion gives away about $24.50 of Pro time rather than $12.25. We think a recommendation you are not embarrassed by is worth twice as much as one you are.
Decision two: months, never a discount
Every reward is time, never a price cut. Your renewal date moves; the price on the pricing page never changes.
This one is easy to get wrong, so it is worth spelling out what a discount would actually do:
| Discount | Free months | |
|---|---|---|
| Value if the price rises later | Falls | Unchanged |
| Do two customers pay different prices? | Yes | No |
| Can it quietly expire? | Usually | No |
| Easy to state exactly? | Rarely | "Three months" |
A percentage off is a promise whose value you cannot pin down, because it depends on a future price you do not control. Three months of Pro is three months of Pro in 2026 and in 2036.
It also protects something less obvious: one price for everyone. Once you start issuing discounts, your pricing page stops being true, and any customer who finds out someone else pays less has a legitimate grievance. With time-based rewards nobody is on a different price. Some people simply are not paying it this year.
Decision three: trials never count
The reward is granted only when the referred company has really paid — and when you have too. A signup earns nothing. A 30-day trial earns nothing, on either side.
This is the least popular rule and the most important one. Here is what it prevents.
A programme that pays on signups is a programme that pays for volume. Within weeks someone works out that the cheapest way to earn is to create accounts, and the cost of that lands somewhere — usually in the price everyone else pays, or in a cap that quietly limits honest referrers to protect against dishonest ones.
By paying only on real conversions, the programme funds itself: each referral gives away about $24.50 across the two sides and brings in a customer paying $49. Because every referral is net positive, we never need a cap, an expiry, or a monthly ceiling. Four referrals cover a year. Forty cover ten.
The rule that feels least generous is precisely what allows the rest of it to be uncapped.
What we deliberately did not do
- No tiers. Referral twelve is worth the same three months as referral one. Tiered schemes exist to make big numbers look attainable while paying most people at the bottom rate.
- No expiry. Banked months do not lapse if you go quiet for a year.
- No cash. Cash rewards attract people who want cash, not people who like the product — and it would make every recommendation suspect.
- No leaderboard. Turning your customers into competing salespeople changes what they say about you, and not for the better.
The test we hold it to
A referral programme is working when a customer would send the link to someone whose good opinion they care about.
That is a higher bar than conversion rate, and it rules out most of the tactics that raise conversion rate in the short term. If the terms are ones you would rather your friend did not read closely, the programme is not built right.
Ours fits in a sentence, and the sentence is true: refer a business, and when they become a paying customer, you both get three months of Pro free.
Related reading: the full terms and the arithmetic behind four referrals.