AI referral offers: what they really give you

Referral offers are the most over reported thing in this corner of the internet. A campaign runs for three weeks in two countries, fifty articles get written about it, and those articles stay at the top of search results for a year after it ends.

So rather than list current ones, which would be out of date by the time you read this, here is how to check one yourself in about two minutes.

The four questions

1. Which countries? Referral campaigns are often limited to a few markets. One recent ChatGPT campaign ran for selected users in India, Indonesia and Mexico only, and ended on 17 September 2026.
2. What is the reward, exactly? More usage for seven days is a different thing from a free month, and both get written up as free access.
3. Who gets it, the referrer or the friend, or both? Often only one side.
4. When does it end? If the page does not say, treat it as ending tomorrow.

Contests are not offers

This distinction costs people real time. Anthropic has run invite contests where bringing in new users earns entries towards a prize, such as months of a Max plan. Entries are a lottery ticket. An article describing that as a way to get Claude free is not lying exactly, but it is not telling you the truth either.

What referral schemes are actually good for

Two honest uses.

• You were going to recommend the tool anyway, so you may as well get the credit for it.
• You want the friend to have the better first experience that some campaigns give new accounts.

What they are not good for is a plan to avoid paying. The arithmetic almost never works: the effort of getting several people to sign up and actually use something is worth more than the month of service you get back.

The rule we use on this site

We keep an offer listed only while we can open its page and see it. When one ends, it stays on the site marked as expired rather than disappearing, because knowing something has ended is worth knowing. If you find an offer here with an expired badge, that badge is the useful part.

Current offers, checked by hand

The five shapes these campaigns take

Once you have read a few dozen, they stop being surprising. Almost all of them are one of these.

1. Both sides get credit. The most honest kind, and usually the smallest.
2. The new user gets an extended trial and the referrer gets nothing. Common, and fine, as long as the article you read says so.
3. The referrer gets more usage for a fixed window, often a week. Worth little unless you were about to hit a limit anyway.
4. Entries into a prize draw. This is a competition wearing a referral costume.
5. Credit that only applies to a paid plan you do not have. The fine print people skip.

Why so many articles are wrong

Three reasons, and none of them is malice.

• Offers end quietly. The page comes down, the article stays up.
• Campaigns are regional. A writer in one country describes a global offer because it was global where they sat.
• Everyone copies the first write up, including its mistakes, and by the twentieth copy nobody has read the terms.

The fix is the same as for everything else on this subject: find the company's own page, or treat the claim as a rumour.

How we handle offers here

Every offer on this site is opened and checked before it is listed, and the link goes to the brand's own page rather than to a redirect that earns us more. When an offer ends it gets an expired badge and stays for a while, because a reader who arrives from a year old search deserves to be told it is over rather than to find nothing.