Referral Terms

These Referral Terms govern Caudal's Refer & Earn programme. They form part of your Terms of Service. Words defined in the Terms of Service have the same meaning here. If anything in these Referral Terms conflicts with the Terms of Service on the subject of referrals, these Referral Terms apply.

1. Who can take part

1.1 Any contributor with an active Caudal account in good standing can refer people. You do not need to be assigned to a project to share your platform-wide link.

1.2 You cannot take part if your account is suspended, under review, or closed. Rewards accrued while your account is suspended are held and are released only if the review closes in your favour.

1.3 Caudal employees, contractors and their immediate household members are not eligible to earn referral rewards.

2. What counts as a referral

2.1 A referral is valid only when all of the following are true:

• the person is new to Caudal — they have never held a Caudal account, including an account they created and abandoned;
• they created their account from your referral link, in the same visit; and
• they completed sign-up successfully.

2.2 We do not remember clicks. Attribution happens at the moment of sign-up, from the link the person is on at that moment. If someone opens your link, closes it, and signs up later on their own, that is not a referral. If they open your link and then someone else's before signing up, the referral belongs to whoever's link they signed up from.

2.3 Referrals cannot be added afterwards. There is no manual attribution. Caudal support, operations and engineering cannot attach a referral to an account after sign-up, for anyone, for any reason, including where both people agree that a referral was intended. This is a deliberate design decision and there is no exception process.

2.4 One referrer per person, permanently. Once someone is attributed to you, they cannot be re-attributed to anyone else, and you cannot be replaced as their referrer.

2.5 Project links. Signing up from a project link prefills the invitee's field with that project's domain. They can change it while completing their profile. Your referral stands either way — you earn on their accepted tasks on whichever project they end up working on.

3. What you earn

3.1 The reward. You earn 10% of the rate of every task your invitee gets accepted, for their first 10 accepted tasks, on any project they work on, provided the task is accepted within 60 days of the day they signed up.

3.2 Which rate applies. The rate used is the project's rate for the payout cycle in which the task was approved. If a project's rate changes, rewards already accrued are not recalculated.

3.3 What counts as an accepted task. Only tasks that have been individually reviewed and accepted, and that are payable to the invitee, count. Tasks that are rejected, withdrawn, still in review, or submitted during a trial, training or practice exercise do not count.

3.4 What does not count. Bonuses, incentives, streak rewards and any other payment to your invitee beyond the per-task rate are theirs alone and never form part of your reward.

3.5 The invitee's pay is never reduced. Your reward is paid by Caudal in addition to what your invitee earns. They do not pay for it and their rate is not affected.

3.6 The 60-day window. The window runs for 60 calendar days from the date of sign-up. Tasks accepted after it closes earn nothing, even if the invitee has not reached ten accepted tasks. The window does not pause, extend or restart for any reason, including account review, assessment delays, or gaps in project availability.

3.7 No cap on how many people you refer. There is no limit on the number of people you may refer. The ten-task limit applies per person, not in total.

3.8 Reasonable limits. Caudal may apply reasonable rate limits to referral link usage to prevent abuse, and may decline referrals that appear automated or bulk-generated.

4. Getting paid

4.1 Where it appears. Referral rewards are added to your normal Caudal payout as a separate line, shown as Referral rewards.

4.2 If you did no work of your own. If you earn referral rewards in a payout cycle in which you had no accepted tasks of your own, Caudal creates a payout for those rewards alone. You do not need to work to be paid what you have earned.

4.3 Cycles and dates. Rewards for tasks accepted between the 1st and the 15th of a month are paid on the 22nd. Rewards for tasks accepted between the 16th and the end of the month are paid on the 7th of the following month.

4.4 Deductions. Tax is deducted at source on the whole payout at the rate required by law, and referral rewards are part of that payout. You are responsible for your own tax position on what you receive.

4.5 Payment details. You must have valid payment and identity details on file to be paid. Rewards are held, not lost, while those details are missing.

5. Holds and reversals

5.1 Holds. If an invitee's account is placed under review, rewards from that invitee are held until the review closes. Held rewards are not shown as payable and are not included in a payout.

5.2 Before payout. A reward that has accrued but has not yet been paid may be reversed if the underlying task is reversed, the invitee's account is found to breach the Terms of Service, or the referral is found to breach these Referral Terms. A reversed reward frees the corresponding slot in the invitee's first ten tasks.

5.3 After payout. A reward that has been paid to you is not reversed. Once it is in your bank account, it is yours, including where the invitee's account is later closed or found to be in breach.

6. What you can and cannot see

6.1 What you see. For each person you refer, you see their name as given at sign-up, which project they are on, the stage they have reached, how many tasks they have had accepted, how many days are left in their window, and what you have earned from them.

6.2 What you never see. You are never shown your invitee's assessment results or scores, their identity documents or the reasons behind any identity decision, their earnings, their payouts, their bank or payment details, or their email address, phone number or any other contact detail. A stage shown as Getting set up does not tell you whether anything has gone wrong, and you should not treat it as doing so.

6.3 What they see. Your invitee is told at sign-up that you referred them, and exactly what you can and cannot see. They are never told what you earn.

7. Reminders you can send

7.1 You can send an invitee a reminder through Caudal if they have not made progress. You can send at most one reminder to the same person every seven days, and Caudal sends at most one referral notification to any person per day.

7.2 Reminders never tell the invitee what you earn and never suggest that their own pay is affected.

7.3 Muting. Your invitee can turn your reminders off at any time, and turn them back on, from the Account section of their profile. If they turn them off you will see that reminders are unavailable for that person, without being told why. This does not affect your rewards.

7.4 How reminders reach them. A reminder appears in your invitee's Caudal dashboard and is also sent to them by email from Caudal. Caudal sends it, not you, and your invitee's email address is never shown to you. Reminders never tell them what you earn.

8. Your connections list

8.1 If you upload a LinkedIn connections export, Caudal uses it only to show you which of your connections look like a fit for projects that are open.

8.2 Caudal never contacts anyone on that list, by any channel, for any reason. Only you can contact them, using your own channels.

8.3 The email column is discarded at upload and never stored. Only public profile fields are kept, and the profile URL is used to match against open projects.

8.4 You can delete the list at any time from the Refer & Earn page, and it is removed in full.

8.5 You confirm that you are entitled to upload the list and that you will not use anything Caudal shows you for any purpose other than deciding who to invite.

9. Things that will disqualify you

9.1 Self-referral is banned. Creating a second account to refer yourself, or having someone create an account on your behalf to be referred by you, is a breach of these terms and of the Terms of Service. Caudal's identity checks detect duplicate identities. Where self-referral is found, both accounts are closed and all unpaid rewards are forfeited.

9.2 Also prohibited: referring people you know to be ineligible; paying, splitting rewards with, or otherwise inducing someone to sign up; creating or using multiple accounts; misrepresenting Caudal, its pay, or its work; presenting yourself as a Caudal recruiter, employee or agent; posting referral links to coupon, deal, spam or bot-driven channels; automating sign-ups; and any attempt to manufacture accepted tasks.

9.3 Consequences. Caudal may withhold or reverse unpaid rewards, remove referral associations, suspend participation in the programme, or close the account, according to what it finds.

10. How to promote your link

10.1 Share your link with people you actually think would do the work well. Tell them who you are and that you will earn if they work.

10.2 Do not say or imply that you speak for Caudal, that you can influence whether someone is accepted, or that acceptance or income is guaranteed.

10.3 Follow the rules of whatever platform you post on, and any applicable law on unsolicited messages and advertising disclosure.

11. Disputes

11.1 If you think a reward is wrong, raise it through Caudal support within 30 days of the payout it should have appeared in.

11.2 Caudal's records of sign-up attribution and task acceptance are what decide the outcome. Because there is no manual attribution, a dispute cannot result in a referral being created after the fact.

11.3 An invitee can ask Caudal to remove their referral association. Where that is granted, the association is removed, the invitee cannot be associated with any other referrer afterwards, and no further rewards accrue from them. Rewards already paid are not reclaimed.

12. Changes and ending the programme

12.1 Caudal may change these Referral Terms, the reward percentage, the task limit or the window at any time. Changes are published on this page with a new date and apply to referrals attributed after that date.

12.2 Referrals already attributed keep the terms in force when they were attributed, for the remainder of their 60-day window.

12.3 Caudal may suspend or end the programme at any time. If it does, rewards already accrued under these terms are still paid, and links stop attributing new referrals from the date announced.

12.4 Nothing in the programme creates employment, partnership or agency between you and Caudal.

13. Questions

Anything not answered here is covered in the Referral FAQs, or you can contact Caudal support.

These Referral Terms should be read with the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.