Most subscription apps have a referral program that gives the referrer five dollars and the referred friend a 10% discount on month one. The referred friend pays $19.79 instead of $21.99, the referrer gets a Starbucks coupon, and the program does almost nothing because the math doesn't move anyone.
Bonfiyah Friends is built differently. Both sides earn a full free month at their actual subscription tier. A Pro AI subscriber refers a Pro AI signup and both subscriptions get a $34.99 month credited. A Pro subscriber refers a Free user who upgrades to Pro and both subscriptions get a $24.99 month credited. The credit is real — Apple extends your subscription's renewal date by a month at no charge — and there is no cap on referrals.
Six paid referrals on Pro AI, after the intro window, is $209.94 of free service. Twelve referrals is $419.88 — a free year, plus $0.20. That's the design.
The four-stage mechanic.
The program flows through Apple's Promotional Offer Code infrastructure, which means the credits are real Apple billing extensions — not store credit, not vouchers, not points to redeem manually.
Stage 1 — Find your code. Open Bonfiyah on iPhone, go to Settings → Bonfiyah Friends. Your unique code and a tap-to-copy invite link live there. Every Bonfiyah account gets one, including Free-tier users. Free users can share their code too — the credits bank against the account and apply automatically once the user upgrades.
Stage 2 — Share it. iMessage, email, AirDrop, social, group chat — wherever you'd normally recommend an app. The invite link drops your friend onto the App Store with your code pre-filled in Apple's redemption sheet. They tap Redeem, sign up, choose Pro or Pro AI, and Apple attaches the free month to their first billing cycle automatically.
Stage 3 — Bank the credit. The moment your friend signs up, Apple credits them with their free month. Your account banks one free month at your tier — lockboxed for thirty days while the friend's subscription seasons. The lock-in window exists for one reason: if a referred friend cancels and refunds within thirty days, the corresponding banked credit reverses. After day thirty the credit unlocks and applies automatically against your next renewal — Apple extends your renewal date by a month.
Stage 4 — Stack credits. You can bank multiple credits in parallel during your active referrer window. They queue up and burn down one per renewal, in earned order. If you've earned six credits and you're on monthly billing, that's six months of free Pro or Pro AI ahead of you, applied automatically without your involvement.
The math, with real numbers.
The example I use most often is a Pro AI subscriber paying $34.99/mo (post-intro). They refer six friends over a year. Each completes thirty days on a paid tier.
The friends collectively earn six free months at their respective tiers — six months of Pro or Pro AI that Apple comp'd them. The referrer earns six months of free Pro AI — $209.94 of service. After their next six renewals, they have effectively paid for half a year and gotten a year of service.
Twelve paid referrals — one a month, conservative for someone who genuinely uses the product — produces a free year of Pro AI. Twenty-four referrals is two free years. There is no cap.
Compare that to the alternative. A 10% off discount code that Bonfiyah might have run instead would give a referred friend $3.50 off month one and the referrer $3.50 in store credit. The referred friend's lifetime expected value is the same as without the program; the referrer goes through the friction of sharing a code for $3.50 and never recommends Bonfiyah to anyone again. The economics push in the wrong direction. Bonfiyah Friends pushes in the right one.
The six-month referrer window.
Every Bonfiyah Friend gets a six-month window to refer new users. After that, your code retires from the program. Already-banked credits on your account are not touched — they continue to redeem at your renewals until used up.
The window is in there for fairness. Without it, the program would converge to a small number of accounts who joined early and accumulated thousands of referrals across years. With it, every Bonfiyah Friend gets exactly the same six months, regardless of when they joined. The math compounds for everyone or for no one.
The window also keeps the program calibrated against churn risk. Bonfiyah is paying out free service in proportion to referrals. If the window were unbounded, a single super-spreader could exceed any reasonable per-account credit budget. Six months is enough time to refer everyone in your network you'd genuinely recommend the app to; it's short enough that Apple's billing extension exposure stays bounded per account.
Why the rules are deliberately light.
The fair-use rules for Bonfiyah Friends are short. Codes are for personal sharing — friends, family, colleagues, your professional network. Mass-spammed codes get the credit reversed. Paid placements where you've taken money to publish a code don't qualify; that's affiliate marketing, which has its own framework. Fake-account farms get deactivated.
Beyond that, the rules are intentionally light. Most people don't need a 4,000-word terms-of-service to share an app they actually use. The few who try to game it — and there will be a few — get caught by the thirty-day lock-in window or by the manual review that runs against the daily referrer leaderboard.
The trust posture matches Bonfiyah's stance everywhere else. The privacy commitment is one page, not ten, because the actual commitments are simple. The feedback flow goes directly to me, not a tier-1 ticket queue. Bonfiyah Friends works the same way: clear rules, light touch, trust that most people are honest about referrals because most people are honest about most things.
A note on intro pricing + referrals.
Bonfiyah ships with intro pricing — Pro at $14.99/mo for two months, Pro AI at $24.99/mo for sixty days, then standard rates of $24.99 and $34.99 respectively. Referral credits and intro pricing both apply, but they don't stack on the same month.
What that means in practice: credits earned during your intro window apply against the post-intro standard rate, not the intro rate. So a free month after your intro window expires is genuinely a free $24.99 (Pro) or $34.99 (Pro AI) month — not a free $14.99 or $24.99 intro-priced month. The credit is sized at what you'd actually be paying, which is the right behavior.
A referrer on Pro AI standard pricing who banks twelve credits effectively gets a year of service worth $419.88. A referrer who banks credits during the intro window and burns them post-intro gets the same value — Apple extends the renewal date one full standard-price month per credit. The intro window doesn't penalize referrers who get going early.
Why I built it this way.
Three reasons.
First, because the friends-and-family signal is the single most-credible product signal in software. Someone you trust telling you "this app is actually good" is worth more than ten ads, ten App Store reviews, and any number of comparison tables. Bonfiyah Friends pays the people who provide that signal in proportion to its real value to the business — months of subscription, not points of store credit.
Second, because at-scale referral economics work for Bonfiyah specifically. Every referred user has an LTV that justifies a full month of free service paid to the referrer. Pro AI's $34.99 standard price covers comfortably more than one referrer-month of cost. The math closes.
Third, because I wanted a referral program I'd actually enroll in. Most subscription-app referral programs feel like they were designed by someone optimizing for a metric instead of for the experience of the person sharing. Bonfiyah Friends is what happens when you ask "what would actually feel rewarding to refer this app to a friend with?" The answer is "a real free month for both of us." So that's the program.
Get your code.
If you're already on Pro or Pro AI, your code is in the iPhone app under Settings → Bonfiyah Friends. If you're on Free, your code is there too — credits bank against your account and apply once you upgrade. Read the full referral page for the FAQ, or grab the app at bonfiyah.com/pricing and start banking credits during your intro window.
