Referral Program
Last updated: 16 August 2026
Invite people to Grainlify and earn shares in the Founding Contributor Pool when they join and when they contribute.
Referrals used to pay points. They now earn shares instead — see What changed.
What you earn
| When | Shares |
|---|---|
| Someone you referred verifies their account | 0.5, up to a lifetime cap of 10 |
| Someone you referred gets a pull request merged during the first GrainHack | 5, uncapped |
The cap is the important part, so it's worth being direct about why it's there: signups are cheap to manufacture and produce nothing. Once you've earned 10 shares from people simply verifying, further referrals pay only when the person you brought actually ships code — which is the thing the pool exists to reward, and the thing nobody can fake cheaply.
What happens at the cap. The cap is a ceiling on your total, not a filter on individual referrals — so the referral that crosses it still pays out the part that fits. If you're on 9.5 shares and another person verifies, you get 0.5 rather than nothing, and the next one after that earns nothing from verifying. This is intended behaviour, not a rounding bug.
Referral shares are recorded whether or not you are eligible — but the pool is only shared out among eligible members, and eligibility requires an approved social-follow submission that has not been revoked. An ineligible member computes to zero and is excluded from the divisor.
So earning referral shares and never submitting follow proof means those shares pay nothing. See Social Follow.
A share is not a fixed amount of money. The pool is divided by every share everyone earned, so what a share is worth isn't known until the first GrainHack ends. How Rewards Work explains the arithmetic.
How it works
- Open Settings → Referrals. You'll find your personal referral code and a ready-to-share link.
- Share the link with friends, teammates, or your community — anywhere you'd normally share a link works.
- When someone signs up through your link, it shows up in your Referrals tab as pending.
- Once they sign in with GitHub and complete identity verification, your referral turns to completed and your shares are recorded.
- If they go on to get a pull request merged during the first GrainHack, you earn shares for that too — automatically, with no cap.
Why verification matters
A referral only counts once your friend actually verifies their identity — not just at signup. That's what keeps the programme fair: it rewards you for bringing real people into the community rather than for creating accounts.
These are two separate things and it's easy to run them together:
- Verification is the only thing that moves a referral from pending to completed. Nothing else is required — no merged pull request, no minimum number of contributions, no time limit.
- A merged PR is an additional reward, not a second condition. If someone you referred ships merged work during the first GrainHack you earn 5 more shares, whether or not anything else has happened.
So a completed referral with no merged PR is normal and correct.
Completed referrals record 0 points. The points programme is frozen — see
the note at the top of this page — so nothing awards points any more. The
referral is still complete and still counts toward the Founding Contributor
Pool; the zero is the retired system, not a failed referral.
Track your referrals
Your Referrals tab shows your code and link, how many people you've referred, how many are still pending, and how many have completed.
Nowhere in Grainlify will you see what your shares are "worth" yet, and that's deliberate rather than an oversight. The value of a share depends on how many shares everyone else earns, so any number shown before the event ends would be a guess presented as a promise. You'll see your share count, which is a fact.