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Has PA considered adding a referral program where paid users could receive small discounts on their monthly fees if they refer users that sign up with a paid account? Before upgrading to a 100GB paid Dropbox account, I referred 32 friends to sign up for free accounts with Dropbox, eventually capping out my referrals and accumulating 16GB of space.

Even though I love PA and speak highly of it to friends and on the interwebs, if I had a stronger incentive to get people to actually sign up for paid accounts, I would push harder. I'm not sure what the number (or marginal features?) would have to be to make it worth it, but I know that number exists and is less than the cost of a $5 account.

Signed, Proud owner of 4 paid PA accounts.

Funny you should mention that! We've been looking into doing one of those for a while. The code itself would be pretty simple, and hopefully we'll have it done soon. We were thinking that we'd pay people 10% of the money we received from people they'd referred; there would be a delay between us receiving it and being able to pay it out, though, just to make sure that we didn't pay out for payments that were later reversed with a chargeback.

One thing that we'd be really interested in hearing some feedback on before going live though -- PayPal won't let us adjust the amount we charge for an account on a monthly basis. So if we were to stick with them, we'd have to pay people referral fees rather than by discounting their accounts. Would this be at all useful? We're particularly worried that us paying people might give them a tax liability.

I'm not sure how many it'd be but could you instead accumulate the referrals till you got to enough for a free month? Then all you'd need to do is not bill someone for a month when they accumulated enough?

Or you could add it as an option for people if they didn't want to be paid?

Hmm, that might be possible (if fiddly) -- it looks like we can "suspend" and then "reactivate" billing profiles, which perhaps we could do when someone had a month's worth of affiliate fees accrued.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I want retro affiliate credit...j/k

Oh, and I would welcome you apps, but you don't actually sound new...☺

On the topic...have you thought about discounts for people that have multiple paid accounts? Or perhaps some sort of reseller option? I'm not even sure I want to know these answers, but they seem to be on topic.

Hi, can someone explain how the current referral program is working? I can see the value accumulating, but I dont know how to use it.

Once the money has been associated with your account for more than 60 days (because people can charge-back credit card charges for that long) then you have two options:

• If you've accumulated more than $10, we can send it to you by PayPal.
• Alternatively, we can use it to cover your own account's costs.

You'll need to email us to tell us which you want to do.