ProfitGuard and GrowthGuard: running a creator programme that cannot bankrupt you

Every creator programme pitch skips the same question: what stops this costing more than it makes?

Two limits answer it, and both refuse rather than warn.

The Safe Reward Ceiling

The order is fixed and nothing may reorder it:

Revenue → variable costs → protected margin → available growth pool → creator + platform + reserve

Take a £100 sale with £55 of variable costs. Contribution is £45. If the business protects £20 of margin, the pool available to acquisition is £25 — not £45, and certainly not £100.

So a £35 creator reward on that product is refused, naming the £10 it would take out of the protected margin. A configuration of £15 creator, £5 platform, £2 reserve is allowed, and the business keeps £23.

The creator never reaches the protected margin. There is no override, no advanced checkbox, no "just this once" — a floor that can be switched off in a hurry is not a floor, and the hurry is exactly when it would be used.

GrowthGuard's 5%

The second limit is simpler and it is the one that lets an owner sleep: the entire programme can never cost more than 5% of the value it generates.

That 5% covers everything: creator rewards, referral and squad bonuses, campaign incentives, the fraud and refund reserve, and the platform's own fee. There is no second budget hiding behind it.

And the rate actually used is the lower of that 5% and what your own economics can survive. A software business may run at the full 5%; a supermarket will run at a fraction of it, and neither has to work that out for itself. Set a survival floor — "never take my retained contribution below 25%" — and the rate drops further to respect it.

It earns before it spends

Capacity is created by settled transactions, one at a time. Generate nothing and the performance-funded budget is nothing; there is no starting balance to burn through.

In Revenue-Locked mode — the default for sale-based campaigns — commission is funded out of the transaction it came from. Nothing leaves your account before the customer's money has arrived, which is what makes this runnable by a business with no marketing budget at all.

A refund or chargeback before settlement voids the commission entirely. There is no revenue behind it, so there is nothing to pay it from.

The kill switch

Campaigns stop themselves. Cost per acquisition above the ceiling and a collapse in conversion quality throttle; return on spend below the minimum, an exhausted budget, a refund rate over 12% or fraud over 3% pause it outright. Every trip says what happened and what was done about it, so nobody has to watch a dashboard all day.

One word we will not misuse

A sale attributed to a creator's link is not proof it would have been lost otherwise. Classifying a buyer as "new" does not establish that either.

So without a holdout, every figure says attributed — the campaign was credited with these sales. Configure a real holdout and lift is measured properly against it, and only then does the word "incremental" appear. A finance director who catches a product calling attributed revenue "incremental" once will never trust another number on the screen, and would be right not to.

What it looks like in practice

Creator rates sit at 0.5% on SHARE2EARN and 0.75% or 1% on the influencer bands — all of them bounded by the ceilings above. Where 0.5% would make a product lose money, that product is marked ineligible rather than the creator's advertised rate being quietly cut.

Run it from Partner Network. The full picture of how creators earn is here, and the Gen-Z layer covers what keeps creators active once the economics are safe.