How much can you really earn from airtime referrals in South Africa?

Any programme can show you a large number. The useful question is what the number depends on. Here are ours, including the small ones.

The building block. Each team member on a package earns you 5% of their package airtime every month: R2.50, R5.00 or R7.50 (about $0.15, $0.30 or $0.46), depending on which package they chose. Add 2.5% of any top-ups. That is all. Nothing on the package price, nothing on trials.

What one person can do alone. Say you sponsor one R5 (about $0.30) trial every week and three in ten of those people join. After two years you would have about 31 people. On the middle package that is about R155 ($9.42) a month. It roughly covers your own line. It is not an income.

What changes it. The same plan, where one in four of the people in your team also sponsors one trial a week. Now the team grows from many hands. In our published example it fills six levels, 5,460 people, in about 23 months, and that is R27,300 (about $1,658) a month on the R160 (about $9.72) package.

Why you should treat that carefully.

• It assumes three in ten trials join. If two in ten join, the same plan takes about 34 months.
• It assumes one in four keep sponsoring every week. If one in ten do, it takes six years.
• It assumes nobody leaves.
• Most people who join any referral programme do not invite anyone.

So the truthful answer is a range. Alone: enough to offset your phone costs. With a committed team: real money, over years, and only if the team keeps going through the slow first year.

We show both figures on our own Earn page, side by side, and the app shows each member where their team actually stands this week. We would rather lose a sign-up to honesty than gain one with a promise we cannot keep.

This is an illustration, not a promise of income.