How it works
Four participants. One shared base.
FormaBase separates the people who create and sell software from the infrastructure it takes to run a software business. Everyone does the part they are best at, and the platform keeps score.
Participants
Who does what
Creators
Identify a problem, build the product, hand it off. Earn a 20% royalty on its net receipts, after any Affiliate share, for 24 months from launch.
Affiliates
Promote products from the catalog with links and codes. Earn 50% of net receipts for each referred customer's first 12 months.
Customers
Subscribe to focused, polished products that solve one problem well, with one FormaBase account across all of them.
FormaBase
Owns and operates the products, runs the shared infrastructure, supports customers and pays everyone automatically.
The flow
One path from idea to payout
Every product travels the same road, which is what makes the hundredth product as easy to run as the first.
Shared infrastructure
Built once, used by every product
Products stay small because the heavy machinery lives in one place.
Identity
One sign-in for every participant and every customer, across every product.
Billing
One merchant of record. Every product is a Stripe product with its own prices.
Attribution
One link service records every click and code, so no product tracks Affiliates on its own.
Ledger
Append-only. Corrections are new entries, and every entry records the terms that produced it.
Payouts
Monthly statements and payouts through Stripe, with each line traced to the ledger.
Support
Centralized first-line support for every customer of every product.
Payouts
Who gets paid, in what order
The same written rules apply to every product and every participant, and the version that applied when a product or customer started is locked in.
Net receipts
Start with what a customer paid and has cleared. Subtract only sales taxes, refunds and credits, chargebacks and payment processing fees.
Affiliate first
If an Affiliate referred the customer, they earn 50% of net receipts for that customer's first 12 months of paid service.
Creator next
During the 24 months after a product launches, its Creator earns a 20% royalty on what remains after any Affiliate share.
FormaBase keeps the rest
And pays every operating cost from it: support, hosting, AI, staff, marketing and overhead. None of those reduce anyone else's share.
$100
- Affiliate
- $50
- Creator
- $10
- FormaBase
- $40
$100
- Creator
- $20
- FormaBase
- $80
Examples from the FormaBase Payout Rules. Signed agreements set the actual terms.
Guardrails
Trust is designed in, not bolted on
Versioned terms
Agreement changes come with 30 days' notice and only apply going forward. Existing products and referrals keep their terms.
Reviewed releases
Products are screened for security issues and reviewed by a person before release, and again on every update.
Least access
Creators only reach their own product. Payment details, customer data and platform keys never leave the core.