Experiment: We let our affiliates swap their earnings directly for internal credits (to skip withdrawal fees). Has anyone else tried this in their SaaS?
Hey everyone,
I work on a niche SEO tool (we basically help agencies and webmasters force Google/Yandex to index their backlinks). Like many SaaS products, we have a standard 15% recurring affiliate program.
Recently, we noticed a pretty stupid loop in our user behavior. A lot of our partners are also active users of the tool themselves. They would wait to hit the $20 minimum payout, withdraw their commissions via Crypto or PayPal (eating the network fees), and then literally 10 minutes later, they’d use their credit card to buy a new package of tokens on our platform.
It felt like unnecessary friction for both sides.
So, as an experiment, we just rolled out a tiny feature: an "Exchange for tokens" button right inside the affiliate dashboard. Now, users can instantly convert their referral balance into product tokens without any external transfers or payment gate fees.
Full disclosure: Obviously, we like this because it keeps the money inside our ecosystem and acts as an automatic reinvestment. But for the users, it completely removes the "pain of paying" and the annoyance of crypto/bank fees.
We are treating this as an experiment for now to see what percentage of users actually choose to reinvest vs. cash out.
I’m curious if other SaaS founders or marketers here have implemented a similar "closed-loop" economy for their affiliates?
- Did it actually increase usage/LTV?
- Do your affiliates actually use it, or do they always prefer cold hard cash?
Would love to hear your thoughts or if you have any tips on how to optimize this flow.
TL;DR: Noticed our affiliates were cashing out just to buy our product again. Built a feature to let them buy internal tokens directly with their affiliate balance. Wondering if this is a common practice in SaaS and how it affected your metrics.