Guide
Set your dials.
The whole economics of your earned tier is a handful of numbers, and every one of them is yours — Earnesty never prices or caps what your users earn. This is the hour your product team spends before typing them in.
The dials
What a post earns
The claim value: what one qualifying post pays, in your reward. Flat — a post is worth the same whenever we find it, and however long verification takes.
How often a user can earn
The cooldown: the space between one user's earning posts. It's the only rate limit, so it is also the whole per-user budget — the console shows the most one user can earn in 30 days as you adjust it.
What conversation adds
The reply bonus: so much per distinct account that replies, up to a per-post ceiling, settled once, five days after the post. The post pays for the post; the bonus pays for its reach.
Five questions before you type
The short answers; the argument behind each one runs at essay length on our category site.
What is the earned tier replacing?
Make it your only unpaid tier — fold your free plan or trial in as a small baseline, and let posting be the way past it.
What should a reward be?
The unit you already sell (credits, tokens, messages); if your plans gate capabilities instead, a taste of the paid capability.
What’s a post worth to you?
Anchor the month: a regular poster should land near what your old free plan gave, an always-poster should beat it. The cooldown and claim value divide that into the per-post number — the console shows the ceiling as you type.
How fast should one user be able to earn?
The cooldown is the only limit per user; set it against your margins. One user earning often, with posts that perform, is the point — not a loophole. If the aggregate still worries you, an optional monthly pool caps total payout across all users — posts past it simply wait for spend to age out.
What do you call the reward?
The unit your users already buy. Never an invented point they have to convert in their head.
A worked example
Say your product sells AI credits: the old free plan included 100 a month, and a paid month is 1,000. One honest shape for the dials:
- A post earns 25 credits — a quarter of the old free allowance. Posting is clearly worth doing; a quiet post costs you little.
- The cooldown is 7 days — up to five earning posts in a rolling month, so the console shows a 125-credit ceiling from posts alone.
- Each reply adds 5 credits, up to 75 per post — a post that draws fifteen real replies refills most of a free month. Reach, not volume, earns the big number.
A typical poster — a couple of posts and some real conversation — lands near the old 100-credit month, and the ceiling from posts alone already beats it, before reply bonuses. That isn't a leak — it's the trade. An active poster out-earning your old free plan, month after month, is the distribution you're buying.
That's one shape, not the answer — your margins, your unit, your call. Whatever you pick, it isn't permanent: set the numbers, watch what happens, adjust. A change touches only the posts made after it — nobody's earlier post gets repriced.
The full argument behind each question: Pricing an earned tier, on our category site.
Two numbers and a bonus. That's the whole setup.
The console walks you through them in step 2, shows the ceiling they imply, and lets you change them any time.
Set yours