The Partners Program
If you set paid communities up for other people, 50% of what we charge them now comes to you. Every month, for as long as that community keeps billing, with no cap and no twelve-month cliff.
Published
Almost every community that starts charging money had help. An agency that runs the server. A consultant who built the onboarding. A developer whose bot the community already lives inside. Somebody sat with the owner while they picked tiers, wrote the perks and connected Stripe, and that person is the reason the launch worked.
Those launches convert at a completely different rate to a creator finding us through a search result. When someone knowledgeable is in the room, a community that sets up actually starts charging. When nobody is, most setups stall halfway. That gap is the whole reason this program exists, and it is why the offer is built to pay for years rather than for a signup.
The offer
Arcalotl charges a community 2% of each successful payment and nothing else. For every community credited to you, half of that fee is yours: 50% of 2%, which works out at 1% of what the community collects.
It is a share of our fee, never of the creator's revenue, and it changes nothing about what they pay. A community that came through a partner is charged exactly what a community that found us on Google is charged.
- Share
- 50%
- Of the 2% we collect from the community, net of refunds.
- Term
- Lifetime
- Per community referred, for as long as it keeps collecting payments.
- Holdback
- 30 days
- A collected fee waits out the refund window, so a statement never has to be reversed.
- Paid
- On the 3rd
- By Stripe transfer to your own account, in EUR, itemised by community.
Why lifetime, and not a bounty
Most referral programs in this category pay once, or for a year, and the incentive follows the money: get the signup, move on. Nobody is paid to care whether the community still has a working payment flow in month eight.
A lifetime share inverts that. A partner earns more from one community that bills for three years than from ten that churn in three months, so the thing worth doing is the thing we want done anyway: pick communities that can actually sustain a paid tier, set them up properly, and stay reachable when something breaks. When a referred community grows, the partner's income grows with it without anyone selling anything again.
The 30-day holdback is the other half of that. Statements pay after the refund window on the fees they cover has closed, so a partner is never asked to give money back and we are never paying out on a charge that is about to reverse.
How a community gets credited
Three ways, because agencies work in three different shapes.
- A referral link
First touch wins and it is remembered for 90 days, so a creator who reads the site today and signs up next month still counts.
- A referral code
Typed during setup, or in the community's own Settings within 14 days. For the clients who never see our website because the partner set everything up from inside their community.
- By hand
For a launch a partner clearly ran where neither was used. They tell us, and we attribute it with a note on the record.
The creator sees who referred them in their own Settings and can change it for 14 days. Referring a community you own yourself is blocked, both when the code is entered and again when the community takes its first payment.
A dashboard of your own
Partners get their own surface at arcalotl.com/partner: the communities credited to them and the stage each one has reached, what each is earning this month, and every monthly statement itemised by community with the refunds netted out.
You can see when a referral is stuck without asking us. A community that claimed but never connected Stripe looks different to one that is billing, and the timeline on each referral says which step it is waiting on. Payouts land as Stripe transfers to an account you connect once through Stripe's own login, so we never see your bank details.
Who we are looking for
Agencies and studios that build and run communities for clients. Consultants who take a creator from an idea to a paying membership. Bot and plugin developers whose users keep asking how to charge for access.
The pilot is small on purpose. We want a handful of partners who launch communities regularly, not a long list of links on affiliate pages, which means we say no to most applications and give real attention to the first launches of the ones we accept. Applications are read by a person, and everyone gets a reply.
Questions
Apply to the program
Tell us who your clients are and how you would introduce us. If it fits, your dashboard and your code are ready within a few days.