There are two ways to build a referral programme, and the choice tells you a lot about what the company running it actually wants.
The common one is a bounty. Introduce someone, they sign up, you get fifty quid. Clean, easy to understand, easy to put on a poster.
The other is a share: you get a percentage of what the person you introduced actually pays, for as long as the window runs.
We went with the share. Ten per cent of each plan payment, excluding tax, for six months. This post is about why, because the reasoning says more about how the Vehiso Referral Programme behaves than the headline number does.
What is wrong with a bounty
A bounty pays exactly the same for two completely different outcomes.
Dealer A signs up on your recommendation, gets their website live, runs their stock through it, and is still with us in two years. Dealer B signs up, never really gets going, cancels in March.
Under a bounty, you got fifty pounds for each. The scheme cannot tell the difference, so it does not try to.
That has a knock-on effect on how the programme gets promoted. When every sign-up pays the same, the incentive is volume: get bodies through the door and let the software worry about whether they stay. Which is how referral schemes end up full of people who were talked into something that was never right for them, and how the companies running them end up quietly tightening the rules a year later.
What a share does instead
A share only pays when the introduction was a good one.
If the dealer you introduced stays and keeps paying, you keep earning, every month, for six months. If they pay once and leave, you earn once and that is that. The reward tracks the thing that actually happened rather than the moment of signature.
That means we are not asking you to sell. We are asking you to point the right people at us, which is a much easier thing to do honestly, and the only thing that pays properly anyway.
It also means the size of the reward scales with the size of the account without us having to invent a tier system for it. Someone you introduce on the £49 Starter plan earns you about £4.90 a month. Someone on the £199 Ultra plan earns you £19.90. Same rule, different number, no table to read.
Why the window ends at six months
The obvious question about a revenue share is why it stops. If the introduction was good, why not pay for ever?
Two reasons, and I would rather say both than dress it up.
The first is that a permanent share turns into something else over time. After three or four years, a lifetime commission is no longer paying for an introduction, it is paying rent on one. The work happened once, at the start.
The second is that programmes offering a lifetime cut usually pay a much smaller one, and hedge it with conditions. Two per cent for ever reads better than ten per cent for six months, right up until you work out that you need to keep the referral alive for four years to catch up, and that the terms give them plenty of room to change the deal in the meantime.
Six months at ten per cent is money that arrives soon enough to matter, on terms that are simple enough to check.
Why there are no tiers
Plenty of referral programmes have levels. Bronze at five referrals, silver at fifteen, an extra two per cent at thirty. There is nothing here.
Tiers exist to make a programme feel like a game, and games have a way of encouraging behaviour the rules did not intend. They also mean nobody can answer the question "what do I get for this referral" without first knowing how many they have already made this year.
One rate. Ten per cent. It is the same for your first referral and your fiftieth, and you can do the sum in your head.
The same goes for leaderboards. There is no public ranking of who has referred the most dealers, because your business is not our marketing material.
Why nothing pays on a sign-up
Earning starts when the dealer you introduced pays their first bill on a paid plan, not when they create an account.
This is the rule that gets questioned most, so here is the honest version: a sign-up is not a customer. Anyone can make an account. Paying a bill is the point at which somebody has decided the software is worth money, and it is the only signal worth rewarding.
It also protects the programme from the obvious abuse. If sign-ups paid, the fastest way to earn would be to create accounts, and then the whole thing turns into a policing exercise instead of a referral scheme. There is more on that in what we do to keep a referral scheme honest.
What this means in practice
You do not need to think about any of this to use the programme. You share your link, and if the dealer you sent stays, you get paid every month for six months.
But if you have been burned by a scheme that paid once and then went quiet, the shape of the reward is the thing to look at. A programme that pays a share of real revenue has to keep the referred dealer happy to keep paying you. That is a much better alignment than one that pays you a bounty and then loses interest in both of you.
Your link is in your account under Billing, then Referral Programme, and the full rules are in the Referral Programme Terms.
If you want to see what ten per cent looks like against your own bill, the arithmetic is in the referral that pays your Vehiso bill. If you have money sitting in there already and are deciding what to do with it, wallet, invoice or bank covers the three routes.
