Digital Empire > Referral program
Earn 20 percent commission when your referrals become customers
Refer someone to PixelProof, EntryProof, TariffWatch, or the Founding Trio bundle and you get 20 percent of everything they pay Digital Empire in their first 12 months. Real program, real Stripe payouts, real terms at /referral-terms.
How to get your referral link
Every paid customer is automatically enrolled. Buy any product at /pricing (monthly plans start at $99, the annual Founding Trio bundle is $299 for the first 5 customers), your unique 8-character code is issued to your purchase email inside a few seconds, and your dashboard at /account/referrals lights up on your next visit. Codes are non-transferable and one code covers referrals to all four products.
Your shareable link looks like https://digital-empire-app.vercel.app/?ref=YOUR_CODE for the portfolio homepage, or you can append ?ref=YOUR_CODE to any product URL if you want to send someone directly to (for example) the TariffWatch landing page. Both forms set the same 7-day attribution cookie.
The terms in one paragraph
You earn 20 percent of every dollar your referred customer pays Digital Empire in their first 12 months across all four products (PixelProof, EntryProof, TariffWatch, Founding Trio bundle). Attribution is 7-day cookie-based with first-touch wins. Payouts are monthly, net-30 from earn date, with a $10 minimum threshold to trigger a payout. Refunded purchases automatically claw back the associated commission. Self-referrals, fake conversions, brand-term paid-search bidding, and spam distribution void commissions and can get you removed from the program. Full contract, including Stripe payout method, tax reporting, termination clause, and anti-abuse specifics, at /referral-terms.
Why we run the program the way we do
Most SaaS referral programs cap out at 10 to 15 percent because the vendor is protecting a low margin per seat and cannot afford to give a big cut. We start at 20 percent on first-year revenue because our products are compliance monitors (PixelProof for Meta Pixel drift, EntryProof for CPSC readiness, TariffWatch for Section 232 exposure), the customer either integrates within the first 30 days and stays for years, or they churn in month 2 because they were not the fit. In the first case, the customer lifetime value is high enough that a 20 percent haircut on year one still leaves years of margin. In the second case, the refund clawback protects us and there is no year-one commission to worry about anyway. That math is the reason we can offer a genuinely competitive rate instead of the 8 to 12 percent that shows up in a lot of comparable programs.
First-touch attribution (rather than last-touch) is a deliberate choice too. Last-touch attribution creates an incentive for referrers to spam a customer with their link right before checkout to steal attribution from the person who actually did the education-and-recommendation work three weeks earlier. First-touch rewards the referrer who introduced the customer to the product and stops everyone else from farming the last-click coupon. It is the same model used by Rewardful, PartnerStack, and every serious SaaS-affiliate platform.
The 7-day cookie window is short compared to some SaaS programs that run 30 or 60 days, and we picked 7 deliberately because our customers are compliance operators who evaluate on a compressed timeline (a CPSC eFiling deadline, a Section 232 comment window, a Shopify checkout migration cutover). If they are going to buy after seeing your link, they buy inside a week. A longer window just increases the risk of a stray-cookie attribution to a referrer who did none of the actual work.
What the four products actually do
If you are going to recommend Digital Empire, it helps to have run the products yourself. Every paid customer is automatically enrolled in the referral program, so the natural first step is to buy the product that fits your own workflow, use it for a few weeks, and then start sharing your link with peers who have the same problem.
- PixelProof: continuous Meta Pixel + GA4 + GTM monitoring for Shopify DTC stores, alerts you the moment a pixel goes dark. Best referral fit: Shopify agencies, DTC operators, PPC freelancers.
- EntryProof: CPSC eFiling readiness scoring with real HTML scan against 20 real CPSIA rules, ships before the mandatory CPSC eFile rule takes effect. Best referral fit: customs brokers, cross-border logistics, product compliance consultants.
- TariffWatch: Section 232 exposure monitoring against the Aug 27 2026 BIS comment window plus HTS-code drift alerting. Best referral fit: metals importers, foundries, industrial equipment resellers.
- Founding Trio: all three above for $299/year, capped at 5 customers, real cap not a marketing gimmick. Best referral fit: multi-product compliance operators, holding-company procurement leads, industry-newsletter editors.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get a referral link?
Buy any Digital Empire product (PixelProof at /meta-monitor, EntryProof at /cpsc-efile, TariffWatch at /tariffwatch, or the Founding Trio bundle) at any price tier including the $99/month monthly plans. Your unique 8-character referral code is issued automatically to the email you bought under and appears on your dashboard at /account/referrals within a few seconds of your first successful invoice.paid webhook. Codes are non-transferable, and the code is tied to the email address, not to a specific product, so one code covers referrals to all four products.
What is the commission rate and how long does it apply?
The commission rate is 20 percent of your referred customer first-year purchases from Digital Empire. That means for a subscription product, you earn 20 percent of every invoice they pay through the first 12 months of billing; for a one-time payment (for example the annual $299 Founding Trio bundle) you earn 20 percent of that single payment. After the 12-month window closes on a given referred customer, their subsequent renewals stop generating commission for you but you still earn on any additional first-year purchase they make of a different product (for example if they add EntryProof to their PixelProof subscription in month 4, the EntryProof invoices generate commission for their own 12 months).
How does attribution work? What if two people refer the same customer?
Attribution is 7-day cookie-based with first-touch wins. When someone clicks a link containing ?ref=YOUR_CODE, we set a 7-day cookie tying that browser to your code. If they complete a purchase within that 7-day window, the commission is attributed to your code. If they already have an active cookie from someone else code, that earlier cookie wins and you do not get credit, this is called first-touch attribution and it is the standard used by most SaaS referral programs including Rewardful and PartnerStack. If they click your link after 7 days have passed without buying, the cookie is expired and no attribution happens for that click; a fresh click starts a fresh 7-day window.
How and when do I get paid?
Payouts are issued monthly, net-30, from the date each individual commission was earned. That means a commission you earned on the 15th of March becomes eligible for payout on the 15th of April, and gets bundled into the April monthly payout run. You need at least $10 in accumulated earned (not pending or refunded) commission before any payout is issued, unpaid amounts under $10 roll forward until they cross the threshold. Payouts go to a payment method on file with Stripe Payouts, or to a manual bank transfer where Stripe Payouts is unavailable in your jurisdiction. You are responsible for accurate payout details and for any taxes owed on your commission income, we issue a 1099-NEC to US-based referrers whose annual commissions cross the IRS reporting threshold.
What happens if my referred customer refunds their purchase?
If Digital Empire refunds your referred customer purchase (in whole or in part) at any time, the corresponding commission is automatically reversed and marked refunded in your ledger. If the commission was already paid out to you before the refund, the reversed amount is deducted from your next payout, or invoiced to you if no further payouts are pending. This is standard for every referral program and it is the reason we hold commissions on a monthly net-30 schedule instead of paying instantly, most refund requests happen inside 14 days of purchase, so the 30-day window means we almost never have to claw back a payout that already went out.
Are there restrictions on how I promote my referral link?
Yes, and the ones that get people removed from the program are almost always the same three: self-referrals (referring accounts you own or family/business accounts you have beneficial interest in), fake or coordinated conversions designed to inflate commission without matching real customer value, and paid-search bidding on Digital Empire brand terms (or the individual product names PixelProof, TariffWatch, EntryProof, Founding Trio) which competes with our own ads and gets you removed from the program. You are also solely responsible for making sure however you distribute your link complies with CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL, and any anti-spam law in your jurisdiction, since you are the one sending the message.
How new is this program? What is the current participant count?
The program opened on August 21, 2026 (see /referral-terms for the version 0.1 posted date), so as of late August it is a real but genuinely new program, we are not going to fabricate a "500 affiliates earning $5,000/month" number to sell you on it. The infrastructure is real: the ledger, cookie attribution, refund clawback, Stripe Payouts integration, monthly net-30 schedule, /account/referrals dashboard, and /andy/referrals admin surface all shipped in the same Bravo8 pass on August 21 and are live in production. What we cannot yet tell you is a mature earnings distribution across a hundred active referrers, because there is not yet a hundred active referrers to distribute across. If you want honest current numbers before you commit time to this, email hello@citationsafe.com and we will send you a real screenshot of the current payout dashboard.
How do I actually track my clicks, conversions, and pending payouts?
Your customer dashboard at /account/referrals shows your unique code, your shareable base link, total clicks in the last 30 and 90 days, total conversions (referred customers who completed a paid purchase), pending commission (commissions inside the net-30 hold window), paid commission (commissions already sent to your Stripe payout method), and refunded commission (commissions reversed because the referred customer got a refund). Access is magic-link gated to the email you bought under, same pattern as /meta-monitor/account, so you do not need to remember a password.
Questions the FAQ did not cover
Email hello@citationsafe.com (real inbox, not a shared queue). Program terms live at /referral-terms. Existing customers manage their code, link, and payouts at /account/referrals.
Published: Aug 24, 2026. Digital Empire Holdings LLC, 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan WY 82801. Legal referral program terms: /referral-terms.