Case Study · AI creative production platform · 20,000+ brands & agencies
CreativeOS shipped a full referral program in one week.
How an AI creative platform with 20,000+ brands launched tiered referral credits, an affiliate dashboard, and Chargebee-integrated payouts — without taking engineering off the core product.
Challenge
The problem behind the problem.
CreativeOS's growth team had a clear thesis: creative agencies invite other creative agencies, and a referral loop would compound faster than paid acquisition. They had no engineering bandwidth — the in-house team was heads-down on the core product roadmap and couldn't take on a billing-adjacent build.
The constraints were specific. Credits had to apply automatically through Chargebee. The structure had to incentivize *volume* of referrals, not just first-click. Fraud guards had to handle the obvious gaming (alias emails, self-referral) without breaking legitimate corporate referrals across divisions. And the public affiliate dashboard had to feel like a real product page, not a Notion link.
They needed a partner who could ship inside the existing Astro + Postgres + Chargebee stack and leave runnable code behind — not a vendor pulling them into a third-party referral SaaS they'd have to migrate off later.
Solution
What we actually shipped.
We built the referral program end-to-end inside CreativeOS's existing repo. In-product `ReferralWidget` modal opens from checkout and the product UI — referrers enter up to three friend emails, each gets a unique 16-character hex code (`/r/a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8/`) delivered via Loops transactional email. Clicks resolve through an Astro route that runs IP + alias-normalization checks before crediting.
Credits are tiered: $5 on the first qualifying click, $10 on the second, $20 on the third — so the system rewards a referrer who pulls three friends, not just one. Fraud guards normalize Gmail-style `+` aliases, block referrer-to-clicker IP matches, and reject same-organization-domain self-referrals. A Chargebee `invoice_generated` webhook applies credits automatically on the referrer's next invoice — no manual workflow, no Notion ledger.
We layered Tolt.io on top for the public affiliate program ($40 per conversion, with a dedicated affiliate landing page at `/affiliates`). CreativeOS gets a hosted dashboard for affiliates and we keep the in-product credit loop tight to their own Postgres + Chargebee logic.
In their words
"We told them what we wanted, they told us what the math should actually be, and one week later credits were applying to Chargebee invoices without anyone touching a spreadsheet."
— Head of Growth, CreativeOS
Result
The number on the retainer report.
Live in one week from kickoff. Inside the first 60 days, referral attribution showed up as a steady share of new paid signups — not the dominant channel, but cheap to operate, and growing weekly as referrers accumulated to the third tier. Every credit flows automatically; CreativeOS's billing operator hasn't manually touched the program since launch.
We're now scoping the next two builds on the same code: a tiered partner program for high-volume agencies, and a feature-flagged 'send me a slack of the referral activity' notification for their growth team.
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