What happened to referrals (and all my referral credit)?

[jdaviescoates]

It used to be that when logged into console.cloudron.io I'd see a referrals menu item here:

But now it's gone and for the first time in ages I've actually been charged by Cloudron (for a Long While my invoices were being covered by the credits I'd accrued by all the referrals I'd made)...

....which is why I went to check to see if I still had a positive referrals credit balance, and noticed it's all disappeared

Could @staff please explain what happened, why an when?

Thanks!

Josef.

[nebulon]

So yes we have removed the referral section there, however all credit a user had so far is still there and will be used towards future invoices normally.

I have checked @jdaviescoates account directly, and it turns out your credits were all used up on June. If you want, you can contact us on support@cloudron.io and I will send you an activity log for the credit from stripe for transparency.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in What happened to referrals (and all my referral credit)?:

So yes we have removed the referral section there

Is that because you've now ended the referrals scheme?

@nebulon said in What happened to referrals (and all my referral credit)?:

it turns out your credits were all used up

I see, thanks. Is it still possible to earn referrals to generate more credits?

I've still been sharing my referral link - but I'm guessing that may now be a pointless endeavour?

[nebulon]

Yes we have essentially ended the referral scheme as it saw little use and we try not get tangled up in things which aren't used much to better allocate resources. However the links will still work and accrue credits for the moment. We merely removed the UI bits during a cleanup.

[scooke]

It was a good run @jdaviescoates. I think you got a lot out of it. I posted mine randomly here and there but never had any takers.

[eddowding]

Shame. Seems like a mistake to me. Even a little bit of a 'thank you' helps encourage growth and word of mouth. Eg it was @jdaviescoates who introduced me, and I've told a few people. I've noticed that cloudron keeps not adding the more useful apps I'm looking for and not allowing a bounty market for those apps .. so I'm now extra-encouraged to seek out alternatives. (I'm not sure I'll find anything as stable, but .. main point: every little helps.)

[girish]

@eddowding of course, thank you from us

We sometimes have a tendency to make quick decisive changes when we hit issues like spam and fraud. This causes some collateral damage but we unfortunately have no resources to deal with extra load. This costs us real money in Stripe and we decided to just remove the whole thing.

So again, thanks for spreading the word about us.

[micmc]

@girish I'm not too sure of "how" you referral program had affected your Stripe account, however maybe you should look into the "affiliate program" side of things?

According to my experience I believe that your "referral program" had no attraction simply because of what you offered, in exchange to referring new clients.

Really, "referral or "affiliate or "partner marketing" is almost a 'science' and not something one should just guess. To make it really work one should know what one's talking about, and if not get advice and be informed on the subject. before any implementation.

Of course, any kind of 'MSP' or 'reseller' program or in the like, you name it, is also a viable way to go that goes along with the nature of the product.