Every partner program eventually gets asked the same question, and most of them answer it with a chart. We’d rather answer it with a sentence.

A partner is paid when a business pays for something it actually uses.

Everything below is that sentence, taken apart.

One rule under all of it

Every payout in the partner program traces to a real subscription — a business that signed up, picked a plan, and keeps picking it. No payout is triggered by another person joining the program.

That isn’t a line we added for appearances. It’s the only structure that survives contact with reality, because it means the program can grow in exactly one direction: by making businesses better off. Anything else pays for motion instead of work, and motion runs out.

It also means a payout can stop. If a business leaves, the subscription ends, and what it was paying for ends with it. A program that pays whether or not the customer stayed isn’t paying for work — it’s paying for signatures.

Three kinds of work

Partners do three different things. Each is paid for differently, because each is a different job.

You introduce a business

This is the one everyone pictures. You sit down with an owner, show them their own operation running, and they subscribe. That’s a success fee, sized by the plan they commit to — a bigger commitment is a bigger piece of work, and it pays like one.

You support what you brought

This is the part most programs skip, and it’s the part that decides whether the first part meant anything. You stay in the business’s orbit as their local face: the person who answers when something looks wrong, who shows them the thing they didn’t know it could do.

While you serve an account, you share in its subscription. Stop serving it, and the share goes where the work went. Support isn’t a bonus attached to a sale; it’s a job that pays while you’re doing it.

You train a partner

The third is teaching. Help a new partner find their feet — sit in the training channel with them, watch them run a demo, be the person they ask.

The bounty attached to training is not paid when someone joins. It’s paid when the businesses that partner serves start thriving. That’s slower, harder, and far more honest, because it can only happen if the person you trained is genuinely good and their customers genuinely stay.

That distinction is the whole design. Training pays because trained partners serve businesses well — never because a person signed up.

Payouts need somewhere to land, and on myOrbit that place already exists. It’s your Echo.

An Echo arrives with the public things a partner makes anyway — an orbit, a community, avatars. Link a bank account to it and the Echo becomes the rail the money runs on: one account, one place to look, the same object you already use to run everything else.

Payouts land there net of taxes and processing costs. That phrase is on the partner page for a reason. The amount that leaves a customer’s card is never the amount that arrives — not here, not anywhere — and a program that lets you believe otherwise is arranging an unpleasant surprise for you later.

Why there are no numbers in this essay

You’ve read this far without a percentage, a rate, or an example month. That’s deliberate, for two reasons.

First, terms belong in terms. Your partner agreement is the authority of record: what each kind of work pays, when it’s calculated, what happens when a subscription changes. An essay that quotes a rate is wrong the day the agreement is revised — and people remember the essay.

Second, a number here would be fiction. Any figure we published would describe a partner who doesn’t exist, in a town we’ve never visited, working an amount of hours we invented. The honest version is duller and more useful: this pays the way work pays — in proportion to how much of it you do, and how well what you did holds up.

Two places, in this order. The partner program page has the shape of the work: what the three roles are, what a week on the ground looks like, and the steps to join.

Then the agreement itself, in its channel inside the app. It’s short and it’s in plain words, and it’s the document every sentence above answers to. Read it before your first demo, not after.

The rest is the part no essay can do for you: walking into a business you already know, and showing them what their day looks like when the work runs itself.