Referral Tracking for Indie Hackers: Skip the $300/mo Tools

This article was originally published on Jo4 Blog. I needed referral tracking for my SaaS. The options were depressing. When I checked (early 2026): ReferralCandy started at $59/mo, designed for e-commerce. Rewardful at $29/mo, but that's just the starting tier. FirstPromoter and PartnerStack were priced for larger teams. I'm a solo founder. My MRR is in the hundreds, not thousands. Every dollar saved is another month of runway. Here's the thing: I don't need a referral platform. I need to know which users came from which invite link. That's it. What I Actually Needed Let me break down the "enterprise referral solution" into what matters: Unique links per referrer - So I know who sent them Click tracking - How many people clicked Attribution - Connect the click to a signup The first two are literally what URL shorteners do. The third is a query parameter and some code. The Setup I created invite links using jo4.io: https://jo4.io/invite-sarah → myapp.com/signup?ref=sarah https://jo4.io