Why hasn’t my referral reward been credited?#

The most common reason is simple: your invitee has registered but has not paid yet, and the referral reward is released only by their first payment — a subscription checkout or a balance top-up — never by the sign-up itself. Until that payment happens the referral sits in Pending and no credit moves in either direction. This article walks through that case and the rarer ones where a reward can never fire at all.

First check: what does the status say?#

Open the Referral page in the dashboard and find the person’s row — see how to track your referrals and rewards for reading the table. The status answers most tickets on its own:

• Pending — the connection is recorded and healthy; APITube is waiting for the person’s first payment. Nothing is wrong and nothing is stuck.
• Rewarded — the credit was already granted; the row shows the amount and the date. If your balance looks unchanged, remember the reward lands on your account balance (spendable dollars), not on your monthly request quota.
• Rejected — the reward could not be granted; this state is final. It is used as a safety valve when the referrer’s account can no longer be found at the moment the reward fires.

If the person is missing from the table entirely, no referral was recorded at sign-up — that is the case to investigate next.

Did they actually sign up through your link?#

The referral connection is written once, at registration, when the person arrives through your ?ref= link and creates the account in that browser. If your invitee typed the site address directly, registered on another device, or cleared cookies between clicking your link and signing up, the account is created without a referrer — and the connection cannot be attached retroactively. A referral that never appears in your table almost always means the sign-up happened without the link.

Two protections also block the connection silently at sign-up:

• Self-referral — an account cannot be its own referrer. Registering through your own link, or registering a new account with the same email address as the referrer, records no referral.
• One referrer per account — the referrer is fixed at registration and never changes, so a person who signed up earlier without any link cannot later be “claimed” by anyone.

What does not trigger the reward#

A few payment-adjacent events look like they should release the credit but do not:

• Registration alone — the sign-up creates the pending row, not the money.
• Second and later payments — the reward fires once per invited customer, on the first payment; renewals never grant additional referral credit.
• The same invitee counted twice — one person can only ever be one referral row, so duplicate payment events cannot double-pay a reward.

The reward amounts themselves are fixed by the program: $25 to you and $10 to the person you invited, both delivered as account balance — the details are in how the referral program works.

Common Questions#

• How long after the payment does the credit appear?
• My friend paid but the row still says Pending — what now?
• Can support add a referral my friend forgot to use the link for?

How long after the payment does the credit appear?#

The grant is processed automatically by the payment webhook, so under normal conditions the status flips to Rewarded and the balance updates right after the payment settles — there is no manual review step or scheduled batch to wait for.

My friend paid but the row still says Pending — what now?#

First confirm the payment really completed (an abandoned checkout counts as no payment). If it did and the row stays Pending, contact billing support at [email protected] with your account email and the approximate payment date — referral credits are an account and billing matter, so that inbox is the right channel. See how to contact support for what to include.

Can support add a referral my friend forgot to use the link for?#

The system itself records referrals only at registration through the link, and the referrer on an account never changes afterwards. There is no self-service way to attach one after the fact — if you believe a sign-up was genuinely yours, raise it with billing support and they will look at the individual case.