u/joshualubelski

Hi guys, I'm on the other side of this as a solo app developer, but I wanted to ask the people who actually live it. I'm building a swim training app on iOS, and I'm looking into setting up an affiliate arrangement with a few smaller creators, paying an ongoing cut of subscription revenue for as long as someone they bring in stays subscribed, rather than a flat one off fee.

The way this tends to work on iOS is that instead of a trackable link, you get a unique code and your audience has to actually type it into the app after they install, since Apple has made proper link based attribution pretty unreliable. I've dug around and can't find much from the creator side about what that's actually like to work with day to day.

So genuinely asking, if you've done affiliate or referral work for an app where the mechanic was "here's your code, get people to enter it after they download," how did it go? Did your audience actually bother typing it in, or did you feel like you lost people right at that step compared to a normal link. And on the payout side, did it feel reliable, did you trust that redemptions were being counted properly, would you do it again?

Thanks for your help, looking forward to chatting with you all!
Emile

Hi guys, Hope to get some insight from you all. I've been looking into running an affiliate scheme with a few smaller influencers for the iOS fitness app I'm building, paying them an ongoing cut of subscription revenue for as long as someone they referred stays subscribed, rather than a one off bounty for the install.

The obvious snag is that proper link based attribution barely works on iOS, so the pattern I keep seeing (and the one a few tools like Insert Affiliate, InfluTo, GrowthCat and GoMarketMe are all built around) is an in app referral code instead. Someone types the code in after they install, that redemption gets tied to their subscriber ID via a RevenueCat webhook, and every renewal after that pays the affiliate automatically. Technically it seems solid...

...but I've spent a good few hours trying to find anyone who's actually published real numbers on it and come up almost empty. The vendor sites don't have a single case study between them, a dev asking this exact question on the RevenueCat community forum got zero replies, and the only proper first hand account I found was one founder who built it himself and pays a fitness coach $15 per redemption, which is a nice existence proof but not much of a sample size.

So I'm asking here in case anyone's actually lived it. If you've run one of these code based affiliate programs, either with one of those platforms or something you built yourself, I'd love to know what redemption actually looked like in practice. Did people actually bother typing the code in, did the influencers rate the payout, and would you do it again?

Cheers!