Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover giveaways & referrals and affiliate & referral. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| ReferralCandy | Viral Loops | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $39 | From $35 |
| Pricing model | Free trial, then paid | Free trial, then paid |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | 7 days | 14 days |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Everything, in an open format |
| Their cut | 10.5% of what you earn | Not stated |
| Runs on | Web | Web |
| Covers | Giveaways & Referrals, Affiliate & Referral | Giveaways & Referrals, Affiliate & Referral |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
Refer-a-friend for a shop, on a success fee
ReferralCandy runs the customer referral program for an online store: the reward, the emails chasing it, the fraud checks and the payout. Every plan has every feature and the tiers differ only in the split between a fixed monthly fee and a percentage of the sales the program brings in. Working out which tier is cheapest for you is real arithmetic, and the dearer plans can genuinely cost less.
Our note
Do the arithmetic rather than reading down the price column, because the cheapest plan is the most expensive one past a few thousand dollars of referred sales. The break-even between the first two tiers lands near $600 a month in referred revenue.
Referral programs from templates, per campaign
Viral Loops ships templates for the referral mechanics that already worked for somebody else, a waiting list, a milestone giveaway, a straight refer-a-friend, and lets you run one without building it. Participants import and export as a list, so it plugs into whatever you already send email with. Pricing rises with the number of participants rather than with features.
Our note
The ten-participant cap on the trial is the thing to plan around: it proves the mechanics work and tells you nothing about scale. Against UpViral this is cheaper at the entry tier and gives away less of the API.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.