Quickstart

Launch your first referral program end to end in about 10 minutes.

This guide walks you from sign-up to your first paid commission. By the end, you'll have an active program, a partner with a working referral link, and a sale tracked through your stack.

  1. Create your account

    Sign up at partli.app/sign-up. You get a 7-day trial on any paid plan — pick a tier, add your card, and you won't be charged for 7 days. Cancel anytime during the trial.

  2. Create your first workspace

    On the onboarding screen, name your workspace (usually your product name) and pick a URL slug. Workspaces are containers for one product's referral program — you can create up to 3 on Starter.

    Behind the scenes we auto-provision a Default API key for you. Copy it from the violet banner on your dashboard — you'll need it for tracking.

  3. Create your first program

    From the workspace overview, click Create program. The 3-step wizard asks for:

    • Basics — name, slug, destination URL
    • Rewards — percentage or flat, one-time / recurring / lifetime
    • Launch — review, set status to active

    Set Auto-approve applications to on for faster testing — you can turn it off later for manual review.

  4. Approve your first partner

    Open your public apply page atpartli.app/apply/<workspace>/<program> and submit a test application from a second email. Approve it from the Partners page in the workspace sidebar.

    On approval, the partner gets a referral link likepartli.app/r/alex-x9k4. That's how they refer traffic.

    How click attribution works

    When someone clicks the partner's referral link, our redirect endpoint records the click and sets a pref_cid cookie that lasts 90 days. Then we 302 to your program's destination URL. Your stack reads the cookie at conversion time and forwards it to our sale-tracking endpoint.
  5. Wire up sale tracking

    Pick whichever path matches your stack — full details on the install overview page.

    • Stripe Checkout / Payment Links? Paste the JavaScript snippet into your site's<head> and connect your Stripevia OAuth. Two clicks, no code, ~2 minutes.
    • Custom backend or non-Stripe billing? POST every successful sale to our REST API from your backend.

    However the sale event arrives, we resolve the click → partner, calculate the commission per program rules, and create a pending commission row.

  6. Approve commissions

    Pending commissions auto-promote to approved after the program's holding period (default 30 days) — handled by the/api/cron/approve-commissions cron job.

  7. Pre-fund your payout balance

    Before payouts can run, top up your account's payout balance from /account/billing. We never front money — you pay only what you actually owe partners.

  8. Run payouts

    Either click Run payouts now on the Payouts page, or wait for the monthly cron to fire on the 1st. Each partner with active Stripe Connect + earnings above their program's minimum gets paid.

Next steps