Add an affiliate program to your iOS or Android app.

Step 1: Decide what you'll pay creators for

This decision shapes everything downstream. There are three common models:

• Per install. Easy to understand, easy to fake, and it rewards traffic quality of zero. A creator who sends 10,000 low-intent installs costs you money and earns you nothing.

• One-time bounty per subscriber. Better, but the creator stops caring after the first payment. Their incentive and your retention diverge on day one.

• Recurring % of subscription revenue. The creator earns for as long as the subscriber pays. This is the model InfluTo is built around: commission is a percentage of verified subscription revenue, accrued on every renewal.

The hard rule that makes any of this work: pay only on verified paying subscribers. Not installs, not clicks, not self-reported screenshots. If your program pays on anything the client device or the creator can assert, it will be gamed. If it pays on store receipts, it can't be.

You can layer milestone bonuses on top (for example, a flat bonus when a creator reaches N subscribers). On InfluTo those go through a review step before payout, so a spike of suspicious conversions doesn't auto-trigger a bonus.

Step 2: Pick exactly one verification path

A conversion must be provable server-side. There are two ways to prove it, and you pick one — never both:

1. 1

   RevenueCat webhook. If your app already uses RevenueCat, this is the 10-minute path. RevenueCat's webhook becomes the single source of truth: INITIAL_PURCHASE creates the conversion, RENEWAL accrues recurring commission, CANCELLATION keeps payouts honest. The full event-by-event walkthrough is in the RevenueCat affiliate integration guide, linked below.

2. 2

   Store-direct validation. No RevenueCat? InfluTo validates against the App Store Server API (iOS) or Google Play receipt validation (Android) directly. Same guarantee — commission only exists where a store-verified transaction exists.

Either way, the property you get is the same: a creator cannot be owed money for revenue that didn't happen, and you can't be tricked into paying for it.

Step 3: Install the SDK (~5 minutes)

There's one SDK per stack — Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android), Flutter, and React Native/Expo — all open source at github.com/influto. The SDK does two small jobs:

• Capture attribution. When a user arrives through a creator's link or types a referral code, the SDK records it. Codes make attribution deterministic: no IDFA, no ATT prompt, no probabilistic fingerprint matching.

• Connect attribution to revenue. On the RevenueCat path, the SDK writes the code as a subscriber attribute so it travels with the user into the webhook. On the store-direct path, it reports the purchase for receipt validation.

Typical integration is a dependency line plus an initialization call plus a "user entered code" call. That's the 5-minute claim, and it's measured, not aspirational. Full per-platform snippets are at docs.influ.to.

If you use an AI coding agent, you can skip the manual work entirely. After OAuth, the agent gets 57 tools — enough to install the SDK into your codebase, configure the validation path, create the campaign, and invite creators, end to end:

claude mcp add --transport http influto https://influ.to/mcp

Step 4: Verify before you invite anyone

This is the step most teams skip and regret. An affiliate program with a silently broken integration burns creator trust: they promote, conversions never appear, they leave.

Verify with a sandbox purchase: run the app, apply a test code, complete a sandbox subscription, and confirm the conversion shows up attributed to the right code. On InfluTo the check is built in — influto_integration_status reports what the platform has actually seen from your app (SDK pings, webhook events, test conversions), and influto_test_integration runs the live check. An AI agent can run both and won't report the job done until they pass.

Step 5: Fund the wallet and launch

Money mechanics, in one paragraph: you deposit funds into an escrow wallet via Stripe (the deposit is refundable — withdraw it if you shut the program down). When a verified conversion accrues commission, it's paid from that wallet to the creator's Stripe Connect account. Minimum payout is $1, so a creator's first small commission actually arrives instead of sitting under a $50 threshold for months. The platform is free to set up and takes 10% of creator commissions — you pay nothing until a creator earns you a paying subscriber.

Then create the campaign: set the commission rate, add creative guidelines, optionally add milestone bonuses. Campaigns can be auto-translated, so a Czech or Spanish creator sees terms in their own language. Invite creators directly by email or share the campaign's join link.

Build vs. buy

Everything above can be built in-house against the same store APIs: attribution storage, webhook processing, commission math, refund clawbacks, fraud filtering, KYC, payout batching. It's weeks of engineering plus permanent maintenance, and none of it is your product. The honest line-by-line breakdown is at InfluTo vs DIY, linked below. If you'd rather write one dependency line and a deposit, start free.