What a referral is actually worth over three years

9 September 2026 · 6 min read · by the NordTell team

Before anything else, the honest part. The NordTell partner programme is brand new. There are no partners yet, no payouts, no average earnings, no earnings per click and no conversion rate. We have no data to share, so everything below is arithmetic on our published prices, not a promise about what you will make. It is a calculator, not a forecast. Do the sums with your own guesses about how many customers you could realistically bring, and treat the answer as a shape rather than a number.

The one sum everything else is built on

A commission is your tier's share of what a referred customer pays NordTell in a month, excluding VAT. Nothing else goes into it. So the sum is: their bill, times your rate, once a month, for as long as they stay.

The mechanics behind that sentence are in How the NordTell partner programme works. Here we are only interested in the money.

One customer, on the real prices

NordTell's packages are Launch at €29, Momentum at €99, Authority at €299 and Empire at €899 a month, all excluding VAT. Suppose you have brought exactly one paying customer, which puts you on Kompas, the first tier: 15% of what each of your customers pays, excluding VAT, every month they stay.

Two things jump out of that table. The first is that the package matters more than anything you can control. One Authority customer is worth roughly ten Launch customers. The second is that the three-year column is not a bonus; it is the same small monthly number, thirty-six times. Nobody gets rich in month one.

Why recurring beats a one-off fee

Plenty of software pays a finder's fee: a lump sum when the customer signs, and then nothing. Say an invented programme offered you €300 for each customer you introduced, once. Against that, one Momentum customer here pays €14.85 a month, at the Kompas rate of 15% of their bill, excluding VAT, every month they stay.

The lump sum wins for a while. It is still ahead at month ten and month fifteen. It is passed in month twenty-one, when the recurring version has paid €311.85. After three years the recurring version has paid €534.60 and the one-off has paid €300 for two years running. With an Authority customer at €299 a month the crossover comes in month seven.

Put plainly: a one-off fee pays you for the introduction, and a recurring share pays you for the relationship lasting. That also changes who you should introduce it to. A business that will still be using a phone agent in three years is worth far more to you than one you can talk into signing up this week and which cancels in March. Sending the right kind of business is the whole job, which is why we wrote Nine kinds of business that already have the audience for a voice agent.

Why the tier at the moment of earning is the tier that counts

Your rate is set by how many paying customers you have brought in total, and it is frozen onto each commission the moment that commission is earned. Climbing a tier lifts everything from that point on, across all your customers, old and new. It never goes back and rewrites what is already in the ledger.

Here is an invented sequence to show the shape. You bring two customers, both on Momentum at €99 a month. On Kompas, at 15% of each bill excluding VAT, that is €29.70 a month between them. Four months of that is €118.80. In month five a third customer signs, which puts you on Varde: 20% of what each of your customers pays, excluding VAT, every month they stay. From month five the three of them together pay you €59.40 a month, including the two you brought in first. The four months already written stay at the rate they were earned at. Nothing is clawed back and nothing is topped up.

Which is why the same customer is worth quite different amounts depending on when in your own journey they arrive. One Momentum customer at €99 a month, held for thirty-six months, at each of the five tiers, assuming you never move tier during those three years:

• Kompas, 15% of that bill, excluding VAT, every month they stay: €14.85 a month, €534.60 over three years.
• Varde, 20% of that bill, excluding VAT, every month they stay: €19.80 a month, €712.80 over three years.
• Nordlys, 25% of that bill, excluding VAT, every month they stay: €24.75 a month, €891.00 over three years.
• Fyrtårn, 28% of that bill, excluding VAT, every month they stay: €27.72 a month, €997.92 over three years.
• Polaris, 30% of that bill, excluding VAT, every month they stay: €29.70 a month, €1,069.20 over three years.

The gap between the top and the bottom of that list is exactly double. It is worth knowing, and it is not worth chasing at the cost of sending us businesses that should not be buying a phone agent at all. They cancel, and cancelled customers pay you nothing at all.

A mixed handful, which is what real life looks like

Nobody brings four identical customers. Here is an invented bookkeeper, and she is invented: no NordTell partner has earned anything yet. She has four clients on NordTell. Two took Launch at €29, one took Momentum at €99, and one took Authority at €299. Together they pay NordTell €456 a month, excluding VAT.

Four paying customers puts her on Varde, so she earns 20% of what each of them pays, excluding VAT, every month they stay: €91.20 a month. Over twelve months, if all four stay and nobody changes package, that is €1,094.40. If the Authority client upgrades to Empire, her share follows the bill upward without her doing anything. If the two Launch clients drift away after a year, those two rows simply stop, and she keeps everything already earned.

When the money actually reaches you

The totals above are what is earned. What lands in your bank is delayed twice, and both delays are worth planning around.

Each commission is held for 30 days while the refund window runs, then it becomes payable. And a payout can be requested once your payable balance reaches €50. Under €50 the balance waits and adds up; it does not expire.

So a single Launch customer at the Kompas rate earns €4.35 a month. Twelve of those months make €52.20, which clears the €50 line, and the last of them is payable a month after it is earned. That is a year and a bit before the first payout. Three Launch customers, which also puts you on Varde, earn €5.80 each a month, so €17.40 between them: three months makes €52.20 and the wait is closer to four months. One Authority customer on Kompas earns €44.85 a month, so two months clears the line. Small packages are slow to reach the minimum. That is arithmetic, not a policy.

What could make the real number smaller, or larger

Smaller: a customer cancels, and future months stop. A customer downgrades, and your share follows the bill down. A payment is refunded, and the matching commission is reversed as a visible negative row. Larger: a customer upgrades, or their business grows into a bigger package, or you cross a tier line and every commission after that is worked out at the higher rate.

What is not in any of these sums is your own effort, which is the real variable. Sending one link to one business you already advise costs you nothing. Building an audience of thousands costs a great deal. The arithmetic above is the same either way; the number of customers you plug into it is not.

The only outside evidence we will quote

We have no partner numbers of our own, so we will not pretend to. For what it is worth, research by Awin and Forrester in 2024 found that customers acquired through affiliates showed about 21% higher average order value than those from other channels. That describes the industry, not this programme, and it says nothing about what you will earn here. When NordTell has real partner data, we will publish it, including the parts that do not flatter us.

Until then, the numbers on this page are the ones we can stand behind: our published prices, our published rates, and long division.

The partner programme · Pricing · Partner kit