Everything you need to sell Stacq

Read this part. If it does not appeal to you, nothing further down will.

You cannot sell this well until you can say it in one sentence. Here is the sentence, word for word, and then the detail behind it.

That last part is the whole pitch. A business would normally pay an agency two thousand to ten thousand dollars to build a site, then pay separately for hosting, then pay hourly every time they want a change. We fold the build into the subscription. The client's out of pocket cost to get a new site is nothing, with no setup fee and no contract. Prices exclude sales tax. Washington customers pay Washington sales tax on the monthly subscription and edit packs; it appears as its own line on each invoice.

The two plans

There are two tiers, Basic at $99 a month and Advanced at $149 a month. Here is the thing most people get wrong, so learn it now: the feature list is identical between them. Advanced does not unlock extra tools. The only difference is how big a site each one covers.

Annual billing is eleven months at the monthly price, so the client gets a month free. That works out to $1,089 a year on Basic and $1,639 a year on Advanced, plus sales tax in Washington. On annual billing, the whole year's sales tax appears on that one invoice.

What is included

Every one of these is on both plans. It is a long list, so it is grouped rather than dumped. Open the parts you need.

The site itself

• A new build or a migration and rebuild, free either way. There is no separate build invoice.
• On a migration, their meta tags, URL structure and on page optimization carry over as they are, so the move does not cost them their search position.
• An optional modern design refresh, at no extra cost, or we match their current design exactly. Their choice.
• Managed hosting with SSL included
• DNS and business email management
• Accessibility compliant build
• Built for AI search: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity

Keeping it working

• 24/7 monitoring for downtime, SSL problems and broken pages, plus checks that their contact forms are still wired to a destination and their phone links are still valid. Problems get spotted before their visitors run into them. Be precise if asked: it watches the site, so it catches a form pointing nowhere, not a number that has been disconnected at the exchange.
• An automatic backup on every publish, with one click restore, so nobody can permanently break the site.
• A monthly health and performance report: Google Lighthouse scores for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, plus a site health audit and an AI search readiness check.

Editing, by them or by us

• Full access to a drag and drop editor. No developer needed to change text, images or buttons.
• Safe editing zones and role based permissions, so a team member can be given exactly as much control as they should have.
• Editing is safe enough that an AI agent can do it, which is increasingly how owners want to work.
• 60 minutes of done for you edits every month, requested from their dashboard.
• Expert Access for a trusted outside designer or developer who needs unrestricted control, under a signed acknowledgement.

One dashboard instead of four tools

This is the part that makes it presence management rather than hosting, and the part most worth demonstrating on a call.

• Site analytics: active users, sessions, page views, bounce rate and average session time.
• Conversion tracking for phone calls, form submissions and CTA clicks, with revenue attribution, so they can finally count leads.
• Search performance: impressions, click through rate, average ranking position and first page keywords.
• Custom reports: any metric, any date range, as a table or a chart, saved and waiting next time, with AI Insights explaining what the numbers actually mean.

No juggling Google Analytics, Search Console and three other logins.

Reputation and reviews

• Google review management from their dashboard: read and reply, with AI drafted responses.
• Review insights, an analysis of what their reviews say they are good at, where they are falling short, and where a competitor could exploit it.
• Review page QR codes for receipts, business cards and the counter.
• An embeddable review widget for social proof on their own site.
• One click email review requests to their customers.

Say this accurately: review management is included and working, and it switches on during onboarding once the client grants us Google Business Profile manager access and we link their locations. The widget is requested from the dashboard and we set it up, and we ask clients to allow up to two business days. It is not a future feature, but it is also not live in the first five minutes.

Reaching their customers

• Email marketing: campaigns and review requests, contact lists, scheduling, automated follow ups, and delivery and response tracking.
• A live chat widget with a built in help desk, branded to them: their color, avatar, welcome message, typical response time and business hours, with full message history in their dashboard.
• A custom QR code generator with no limits and no expiry.

Watching their competition

• Automatic competitor tracking with alerts when a competitor changes their pricing or their offering.
• Performance and health comparisons against those competitors.
• Competitor review sentiment, so they know where a rival is strong and where they are vulnerable.

The build, and when the clock starts

There are two ways in. A business with an existing site gets a migration, and during onboarding they choose whether we match their current design exactly or give it a modern refresh at no extra cost. A business with no site gets a new build, where they pick a style direction and we design from a template foundation.

How edits work

This is the part partners most often describe wrongly, so be precise:

• 60 minutes a month are included, and they begin once the site is live. They do not roll over, so an unused month is gone.
• Beyond that, custom work is $10 for each 15 minutes or part of one, for things like new pages, integrations and layout changes.
• Edit packs cost less per minute. 60 minutes for $30, 120 minutes for $55, or 600 minutes for $250. Purchased pack time becomes usable 72 hours after purchase, so a pack cannot be bought to cover something urgent today.
• Only actual time is deducted. If a client allocates 40 minutes and the job takes 15, the other 25 go back into their bank.
• They can also just do it themselves in the editor, for free, as much as they like.

Plans and terms

The two plans differ in price, scope and the year-one exit fee, and share every other term.

The plan page states the shared terms in these words:

• No setup fee, no advanced fee and no contract term: you pay month to month.
• There is no free trial. Billing starts the day your website goes live.
• Annual billing is 11 months for 12.
• You can cancel at any time, and cancelling on its own costs nothing.
• If you move your site to a self-serve plan, or take your site elsewhere, within 12 months of the day billing starts, a one-time fee applies: $499 on Basic and $999 on Advanced. After 12 months it is free.

A client who signed up on an earlier plan keeps it, with its price and its billing dates.

No free trial: billing starts when the site goes live

The plan is not billed while the site is being built or reviewed. The important part is when billing starts:

The build and the client's review of it sit in front of the first bill. A client who cancels before the site is live has not been billed. A client can also set a later go-live date from their dashboard, and a later go-live date means a later first bill.

What is not included

• Domain registration. Clients buy and own their own domain directly from a registrar such as Namecheap or GoDaddy. We manage the DNS for them, we do not sell them the domain.
• Digital marketing. We are an online presence management platform, not a marketing agency. No ad management, no ongoing SEO campaigns. If they already have an agency, they can share dashboard and editor access with them.
• Ranking guarantees. Google controls its own algorithm. We apply on page SEO best practices, we do not promise positions or traffic numbers.

One rate card. No tiers, no ramps, no percentage games.

Ten Advanced clients on the monthly model is $600 a month, every month, for as long as those ten stay. Fifty is $3,000 a month. Nothing about that number decays and there is no cap on it.

The bonus

On top of your commission, you earn $5,000 every 100 billed clients. It repeats at 100, at 200, at 300, with no cap, and it lands on your next monthly invoice automatically. A client counts once their billing has actually started, which on Basic and Advanced is the day their website goes live, so a client whose site is not live yet is not counted.

Introducing other partners

If you know someone who would do well at this, you can introduce them and earn on what they sell.

• You earn 12.5% of the commission they are actually paid, for as long as their clients stay.
• It comes out of our margin, not theirs. The person you introduce earns the full published rate on every client, exactly like every other partner. Nothing they earn is reduced because you introduced them.
• It pays when their client actually subscribes and pays. Introducing someone who never sells earns you nothing, and costs them nothing.
• One level. If someone you introduced goes on to introduce a third person, you earn on yours and not on theirs. There are no bonuses on top of bonuses.
• Anyone can introduce anyone, and the person you introduce chooses their own partner type as normal.
• It is calculated on recurring client commission only. It does not apply to the $5,000 volume bonus or to cancellation settlements.

Invite someone by email or share your invite link, both from your dashboard. You accept a short set of terms the first time. You can see what each person you introduced has generated for you; you cannot see their clients, and they can see that you were paid for the introduction.

Monthly or annual: choose carefully

During setup you pick one payout model for your whole account, and it is not something you can switch yourself afterwards. You would have to ask us. So understand the difference before you click:

• Monthly pays you $40 or $60 for every active client, every single month, starting with the first month they are billed. Steady and predictable.
• Annual pays $600 or $900 as a lump sum. If your client pays us annually up front, you get the lump sum in that first eligible period and again on each anniversary. If your client pays us monthly, you get nothing for their first twelve months, then the lump sum at the twelve month mark and each year after.

When the money actually arrives

Commission is earned on revenue we have collected, so it starts when your client's billing starts, not when they sign up. The terms say: "There is no free trial. Billing starts the day your website goes live." Nothing accrues before then. Here is a realistic first sale:

1. Early March: your client signs up

   They register with your coupon code, pick a plan, sign the agreement, finish onboarding and give us access to their domain. You have earned nothing yet, and this is normal.

2. Mid March: we deliver it and they approve it

   A Basic build takes 5 to 7 business days, and they have a 3 business day window to review it. When they approve, or the window passes, the site is marked Ready to Go Live.

3. The day the site goes live: billing begins

   In this example the site goes live in March, so March is now your first commission month. Commission is calculated by calendar month, so a client whose billing starts on the 19th still earns you the full month. A client can set a later go-live date from their dashboard, and a later go-live date means a later first bill and a later first commission month.

4. April 1: your invoice is generated

   Partner invoices always cover the previous complete calendar month, so this one covers March. Payouts are issued between the 1st and the 5th.

5. Every month after

   Same client, same amount, generated on the 1st, paid within the first five days, for as long as they stay with us.

So roughly a month from the sale to the first payment in this example. In practice it depends on how soon the client hands over their domain, reviews the draft and goes live, because there is no free trial to wait out.

Before we can pay you

Two things, and neither is needed to sign up:

• A way to receive the money. Three options: PayPal by email, Wise by email, or a bank transfer through Wise straight into your own account. See below if you are outside the US, because the three are not equivalent.
• A tax form. A W-9 if you are in the US, a W-8BEN if you are not. This is the one hard block: your commission still accrues without it, and your invoices still generate, but no money is released until the form is approved. File it in the first week and forget about it.

There is no minimum payout threshold. A $40 month produces a $40 invoice.

Getting paid outside the US

Most of our partners are not in the United States, even though every client has to be. Bank transfer is usually the right choice, and it is the option people most often miss:

• Wise bank transfer reaches over 100 countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ukraine and Egypt, and pays into your own bank account in your own local currency.
• We cover the transfer fee. The amount on your invoice is the amount you are sent.
• Your bank details go straight to Wise and are never stored by us. We keep only a masked label, so we can tell your accounts apart and nothing else.

The situations people ask about

• A client stops paying us. Their commission pauses while they are overdue and resumes when they are current. We pay commission out of revenue we actually collected, not out of margin.
• A client cancels inside their first year. What you are paid depends on their plan. On Basic and Advanced, our month-to-month plans, the first-year guarantee holds only when the client paid for the year up front. If they did, you are still paid the rest of that year, because we collected the revenue behind it. A client on those plans who pays monthly earns you your commission month by month, and it stops when they cancel. There is no first-year guarantee on a monthly client, and no fee a client pays funds one. On an earlier plan (a 12 month or 24 month agreement, or no agreement with a setup fee) the guarantee is as it was: you are still paid the rest of that year, as long as we collected the revenue behind it. That means the client paid for the year up front, or paid their setup fee, or paid their early cancellation fee. Any one of the three is enough. A client who cancels before their site is live has not been billed, and earns no commission.
• A client leaves and later comes back. If they restart the account they already had, your commission resumes at the same rate and there is nothing for you to do. If they had cancelled inside their first year, any guarantee we have not already paid you is released when they restart, because the recurring commission now covers those same months. If instead they come back by signing up all over again on a brand new account, we link that account back to you automatically. They do not need to use your coupon or link a second time. A new account is a new client relationship, so it earns the rate on the rate card current at that point rather than the rate your original referral was locked to.
• You stop selling. Nothing happens to your existing clients. Their commission keeps paying you for as long as they stay. There is no activity requirement.

The product has a clear shape. Sell inside it and the sales are easy.

Your ideal prospect

• An established US business with a marketing website. Informational, lead generation, service focused. Trades, professional services, healthcare practices, restaurants, real estate, home services, nonprofits, local retail that points people to a store.
• Or a business with no website at all. A new company, or one running on a Facebook page and a phone number. We build from scratch at the same price, they pick a style direction, and it is often the easier conversation: nothing to migrate, nothing to lose, and no existing site they are attached to.
• Their site is old, slow, or abandoned. Built five years ago by someone they no longer talk to. Broken forms. Not mobile friendly. This is the single strongest signal.
• They are juggling too many bills. A host here, a developer there, a form tool, an analytics tool, a review tool. One predictable monthly bill is a genuinely attractive pitch to someone in that position.
• Nobody in house does websites. If there is a marketing person on staff who loves their setup, this is a harder sale. If the owner is the one who has to call someone every time a phone number changes, it is an easy one.
• They care about reviews and being found. The review tooling and AI search readiness land well with businesses that live on local search.

The natural opener

Run their site through our free audit tool at stacq.io/website-audit before you contact them. It is free, it takes about two minutes, and it gives you something specific to open with instead of a pitch. "Your contact form on the services page is not submitting" starts a conversation. "Do you need a new website" does not.

This is the only part worth memorising. Six rules. Our signup questionnaire will turn most of these away before they reach a plan, but it asks the prospect to self report, so it is a safety net and not a substitute for targeting properly.

The versions that are fine

Most of the scope rules have a perfectly acceptable twin, and knowing the difference will save you deals:

Three ways to help a prospect fit

Size never rules a prospect out. A site with more than 50 pages, or more than 3 integrations, is simply on Advanced, however large it is. For a prospect who wants Basic's price, or whose site has an app in it, three things are worth raising in the conversation:

• Reduce the footprint. Many sites carry dozens of low traffic, outdated pages and old blog posts. Those old URLs can be redirected to the homepage or the main service pages, which protects their SEO while shrinking the site to fit inside Basic.
• Consolidate tools. Separate embeds for chat, calendars and contact forms count separately. Moving to a single unified platform such as HubSpot counts as one integration.
• Split the stack. Even if part of their setup needs custom code, the fast public facing marketing pages can move onto our infrastructure while the app stays on a separate subdomain.

If a prospect is turned away for anything other than the country or auto repair rules, the questionnaire offers them a free manual review with our team. Encourage them to take it. An app, a portal or a store can often be split off so the marketing pages still fit.

Seven ways in, in the order they are actually available to you. Most of our partners are outside the US while every client has to be a US business, so the channels that work from anywhere come first and the one that does not is last. You do not need all of them: pick what suits how you already like to work.

Email

Works from anywhere, which matters because most of our partners are not in the US. There is an email template in Marketing Materials. Use your own words. A short note in your voice about something real on their site will beat our template every time. The only fixed part is accuracy: what you say about what we do and what it costs has to match the plan table above and stay inside what you must not promise.

Send a small number of genuinely individual emails rather than a blast. Your signature, with a working unsubscribe link and our postal address, is ready to copy in Marketing Materials. Use it.

Answering questions where people are already asking

Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups, local business forums. Somebody posting "how do I get a website for my business" or "is Wix good enough for a plumbing company" has raised their own hand, and you are not interrupting anyone. This is the highest-value channel available to a partner outside the US, and the one most people never try.

Three rules, because the fastest way to lose this channel is to be banned from it:

• Read the room's rules first. Many subreddits forbid promotion outright, and the ones that allow it usually require you to be a real participant rather than an account that only ever posts links.
• Say who you are. "I work with Stacq, so take this with that in mind" costs you nothing and is the difference between an answer people trust and a post that gets removed.
• Answer the actual question. If we are not the right fit for what they asked, say so. You will be believed the next time, and people remember who was straight with them.

Content, social and ads

If you have an audience, this is the least effortful route. You get b-roll footage, an ad script and our logo to work with, and your tracking link is the instrument rather than a coupon. Worth knowing: a partner who only shares a link or posts content is not doing outbound prospecting at all, so the lead log and the rules below simply do not apply to you.

Your own network

Zero cost, the highest conversion rate of anything here, and no compliance surface whatsoever. If you know business owners in the US, start there. One warm introduction is worth fifty cold emails.

Phone

There is a cold call script in Marketing Materials. As with email, use your own words; only the facts about our service and pricing are fixed. Dial manually, one number at a time.

Free calling is US-only. Google Voice needs a US number to sign up, so if you are outside the US expect to pay a few cents a minute through a calling service. And check what time it is where they are before you dial, which is the mistake partners abroad make most often.

Direct mail

Your flier is already a mailer. Print it to PDF from Marketing Materials and it comes out as a clean US Letter page with your coupon code on it, in whichever version fits the prospect: the one for a business with a website, or the one for a business without.

The QR codes matter more here than anywhere else, because there is nothing to click on paper. If you pick your tracking link before printing, both QR codes become that link and the whole mailer is tracked.

You do not have to be in the US to do this. Print-and-mail services take an uploaded PDF and print and post it inside the US for you, with no US address of your own and no minimum order. Stannp is around $1.00 a letter, Lob has a free plan at about $1.06 in black and white, and LetterStream is about $1.27 all in. Those are their own published prices, so check them rather than trusting this page.

If you are in the US, stamps are simpler. Fold the flier into a standard #10 envelope and it goes First Class for $0.82; send it flat in a 9x12 and you pay $1.69 for the same piece of paper. No permit is needed at any volume. (USPS prices, as of 12 July 2026.)

Two things that decide whether it gets read. Address it to a person, not a job title, because business post is opened by whoever gets the mail and "Owner" goes in the bin. And put a return address on it: a plain letter does not legally need one, but without it undeliverable mail is destroyed instead of coming back, so a bad list never tells you it is bad.

Skip EDDM. USPS Every Door Direct Mail looks cheap at $0.26 a piece, but it can only be aimed at businesses on routes that are entirely business addresses, it cannot carry a name, and it has to be physically carried into a Post Office. It is a tool for blanketing a neighbourhood, not for reaching chosen businesses.

Judge it on replies, not on published averages. A hundred letters costs roughly $100 to $130, which is the honest way to think about the channel: you are buying a hundred attempts.

In person, locally US partners only

If you are in the US, this is the strongest channel there is and the one most people skip. Every client has to be a US business, so walking into one with a printed flier and a real observation about their website beats any email. Your flier is the only material personalised to you: it carries your coupon code and builds the QR codes for you, and it now comes in two versions, one for a business that already has a website and one for a business that does not.

If you are outside the US this one is not available to you, which is why it is last rather than first. Everything above works from anywhere.

Doing all of it for nothing

Nothing about being a partner costs money, and it never will. What each free option gives you, and the catch:

You do not need a booking link of your own. When a prospect wants to talk, send them to our demo link from Marketing Materials and we will take the call.

One optional exception to the free rule: if you scale up email, a domain of your own costs roughly $12 a year from a registrar like Namecheap or GoDaddy. Not from us, and not required to start. It is the only way to build a sending reputation, so it is worth it once you are sending regularly and pointless before then.

Your address and signature

Do not build this yourself. There is a finished signature waiting in your Marketing Materials tab, under Email Signature. Copy it into Gmail or Outlook and you are done.

It carries the three things that are easy to get wrong:

• Our logo and our postal address. Commercial email has to carry a real postal address, and it is ours rather than yours, so you are not publishing your home address to strangers.
• "Independent Partner, Stacq.io", which is accurate, sells perfectly well, and keeps you clear of implying you speak for us.
• Your own unsubscribe link. Anyone who clicks it is removed immediately, and not just from your list: nobody at Stacq and no other partner will contact that business again.

Use a neutral email address in your own name, like jane.doe.outreach@gmail.com, and let the signature do the identifying. An address with "stacq" in it reads as mail from us, which is the one thing it must not do.

Staying on the right side of the rules

You are the sender, contacting people on your own behalf as an independent contractor. That means these are your obligations, not ours. None of this is legal advice, and it is not complicated:

The FTC publishes both sets of rules plainly: the CAN-SPAM guide for email and their telemarketing questions and answers for calling.

You are not selling a website. You are selling the removal of a recurring headache, at a price that is smaller than what they are already spending in pieces.

The frame that works

Most small business owners have the same story: they paid someone a few thousand dollars for a site once, that person is gone or expensive, and now the site sits there slowly rotting because every change costs money and takes a week. Meanwhile they are paying for hosting they do not understand, and nobody is watching whether the contact form still works.

Your pitch is that this stops. One monthly bill covers the rebuild, the hosting, the monitoring, the backups, the reporting, and 60 minutes of changes a month. And they see the finished site before billing starts.

What you are up against

Almost every prospect is choosing between three options, and it helps to name them yourself before they do:

Objections, and how to answer them

"I already have a website."

Good, that makes it easier. Migrating an existing site is core to what we do. We can match your current design exactly and just upgrade the infrastructure underneath it, or give it a modern refresh using your existing content and colors, at no extra cost either way.

Then run the free audit on their site and read them one real finding. A slow load time, a broken form, a phone link that does not work on mobile. That converts far better than an argument about design taste.

"Paying every month forever costs more than buying a site once."

Do the arithmetic out loud. Two years on Basic is $2,376 total, plus sales tax in Washington, and that includes the build, the hosting, the SSL, the monitoring, the backups, the reporting, and 60 minutes of changes every month. An agency build alone starts around $2,000 and does not include any of the rest, and they will still be paying for hosting and paying hourly for every edit.

They are not choosing between paying monthly and paying nothing. They are choosing between one predictable bill and four unpredictable ones.

"I don't want to be locked into a contract."

They are not. Read them the plan page's own lines. First: "No setup fee, no advanced fee and no contract term: you pay month to month." Then: "You can cancel at any time, and cancelling on its own costs nothing."

Be straight about the one fee rather than talking them past it: "If you move your site to a self-serve plan, or take your site elsewhere, within 12 months of the day billing starts, a one-time fee applies: $499 on Basic and $999 on Advanced. After 12 months it is free."

"What if I don't like what you build?"

They see it before they pay. They review the staging site first, and a client who cancels before the site is live has not been billed. Their plan includes two rounds of revisions, and bug fixes are always covered on top of that.

One thing to warn them about: the review window is three business days. If they do not respond in that time the site advances automatically and is marked Ready to Go Live, and "Billing starts the day your website goes live." They can set a later go-live date from their dashboard. Tell them to watch for that email.

"Will this get me to the top of Google?"

Never say yes. Say what is true: the site is built with on page SEO best practices applied and is optimized for AI search tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and they get search performance reporting in their dashboard. Google controls its own algorithm and nobody can guarantee a position.

If what they actually want is ad management or an ongoing SEO campaign, we are not that. They can keep their marketing agency and share dashboard and editor access with them.

"Can I make my own changes, or do I have to ask you every time?"

Both. They get full access to a drag and drop editor and can change whatever they like, whenever they like, at no cost. Every publish is backed up automatically and can be restored in one click. On top of that they get 60 minutes a month of changes done for them, and can add more time if they want it.

"How fast can you have it live?"

5 to 7 business days on Basic, 10 to 14 on Advanced. Say the important half too: that clock starts when we have domain access, not when they sign up. If they need it live by a specific date, the thing that decides whether it happens is how quickly they hand over the domain.

Do not quote a faster number to close a deal. It is not yours to promise.

"Will your branding be on my site?"

Yes, a small unobtrusive "Powered by Stacq" text link or badge in the footer, styled to fit their design, for as long as the subscription is active. Removing it needs our written consent and may carry a separate white label fee. Say this plainly if asked. It is in the agreement they sign, so it is a bad thing to discover later.

"Who owns the site? What happens if I leave?"

Answer it directly, because hesitating here reads as hiding something. Our client terms are clear:

• They own everything they brought and everything they wrote: their domain name, logos, written content, images and customer data. All of it, outright.
• We own the platform underneath, meaning the component framework, the configuration and our migration process.
• The site itself can go with them. If they want it hosted elsewhere, we export it. In the first 12 months of billing that carries the year-one exit fee ($499 on Basic, $999 on Advanced); after that it is free.

Say the fee plainly rather than letting them find it later. Cancelling on its own costs nothing: the fee is for taking the site we built with them, or moving it to a self-serve plan, in that first year.

If they cancel, the site stays live to the end of the billing cycle, is then unpublished, and there is a 30 day grace period in which they can restart. After that the account expires and only our team can reactivate it, so anyone leaving should take their content within that window.

When to hand it to us

You never have to close alone. Book any prospect onto a demo with us and we will take the call. The link is the Schedule a Demo card in your Marketing Materials tab, and it is at the bottom of this page too. Your credit is not affected by who runs the meeting, as long as the client signs up with your code or link.

Every item here is a real claim a partner could reasonably assume was true. Each one creates an unhappy client, and unhappy clients cancel, which costs you the commission you sold them for.

Two things that sound like limits and are not

What you can promise

There is one formal guarantee in the client agreement, and it is a strong one, so use it instead of inventing your own:

Both are generated in your dashboard in seconds, and you can have as many of each as you like.

Lead with the coupon

The coupon code is the more reliable of the two, for two reasons. It travels: you can say it on a phone call, print it on a flier, or put it in an email, and it survives the prospect switching from their phone to their office computer. And it gives the client something, which makes it easy to bring up. A client who signs up with your code gets a free 60 minute edit pack added to their account once they finish onboarding.

Say it as a benefit, not as paperwork: "use code YOURCODE when you sign up and you get an hour of website changes free."

The tracking link, and its limits

Your tracking link records the click and sets a cookie in that browser. If the person signs up within 50 days on the same browser, you get the credit. It is ideal for anything you post or send digitally, and your dashboard can generate a QR code for it.

Understand where it loses you money. The cookie does not follow someone to a different device, does not survive a private window, and disappears if they clear their cookies. The link also sends them to our main website rather than straight into signup, so they still have to find their way through. For anything face to face or over the phone, use the coupon.

It takes a few minutes and there is no approval queue. There are two choices in it that are awkward to undo, so read this before you start rather than after.

1. Choose Affiliate/Sales Partner

   This is the one people get wrong. The form offers Agency Partner and Affiliate/Sales Partner, and it is set to Agency by default. Agency is for firms that already look after businesses and manage the client relationship themselves. If you are selling to businesses you do not already serve, you want Affiliate/Sales Partner. It is also the only option that gives you the lead log and the cold call script.

   If you pick the wrong one, do not register a second time. Email us and we will switch it.

2. Tick the outbound prospecting box

   The box appears once you select Affiliate/Sales Partner. Tick it if you will be cold calling, cold emailing, or knocking on doors. It turns on your Lead Log and the search tool that finds businesses for you. Leave it off only if you plan to do nothing but share a link or a code. This one also needs us to change it later, so it is easier to tick now.

3. Verify your email

   We send a six digit code. Nothing is created until you enter it, so if you never verify, you never had an account.

4. Choose your payout model

   Monthly or annual, for your whole account. You cannot switch it yourself afterwards. If you are not sure, take monthly. Read the payout model section above first.

5. Choose how you want to be paid

   PayPal by email, Wise by email, or a bank transfer through Wise into your own account. If you are outside the US, start with bank transfer: it reaches over 100 countries in local currency, we cover the fee, and it works in places a PayPal account can only send from. Set it up from your Account page. Whatever you pick, your details are encrypted, and bank details are held by Wise rather than by us.

6. File your tax form

   W-9 if you are in the US, W-8BEN if you are not. It is in the Tax Info tab and it takes a couple of minutes. Nothing can be paid out until it is approved, so do it on day one rather than the day your first invoice appears.

A short list everyone does, then a few things that depend on how you plan to reach people. None of it takes long.

Everyone, whatever you sell how

Then, depending on how you plan to reach people

If you ticked the outbound prospecting box, there is a search tool in your dashboard that finds businesses for you. This is not a complete replacement for the manual prospecting you already do, it is simply a free tool that is designed to help you with prospecting so you can spend more time selling.

How it works

1. Pick an industry and a location. A city and state works best. You get back up to 50 local businesses in that industry, and a search takes 20 to 40 seconds.
2. Everything spoken for is gone before you see it. We remove any business that is already a Stacq client, already in our own pipeline, already claimed by another partner, or has asked not to be contacted. What is left is yours to work.
3. Claim the ones you want. One click each, and the claim behaves exactly like one you logged by hand: 90 days, renewable, and it lands in your Lead Log.
4. Run a free audit on the ones with a website. It produces the same report as our public audit tool, on a link you can send straight to the business. That is a much easier opener than a cold introduction.

Two things it will not do

• It does not give you an email address. The business listings we search do not reliably carry one, so we do not invent it. You get the website, the phone number, the address and the Google rating. Call, drop in, or pick an email address up from their site or their social profiles. The Hunter.io tip in how to reach them is still how you check an address before you send to it.
• It finds businesses, it does not qualify them. A business appearing in your list means nobody else is working it, not that it is a good fit for us. Read who to go after and who we cannot take before you spend a call on one.

If you prospect, this is your most important habit. It exists so two partners do not phone the same business in the same week, and so there is a record if there is ever a question about who worked a lead.

How to use it

1. Check before you contact. Anything you claimed from the search tool is already logged, so this is for businesses you found yourself. Paste the business's website into the checker. It tells you whether the business is available, or gives you one of a few reasons why it is not: it is already a Stacq client, it is already in our pipeline, another partner has claimed it, you have already claimed it yourself, or it has asked not to be contacted.
2. Log it once you decide to work it. That claims the business for you for 90 days. Only the website URL is required, but the business name and contact details make it far more useful to you later.
3. Renew it if you are still in conversation. We email you about two weeks before a claim lapses. Renewing pushes it out another 90 days, and there is no limit on how many times you can do that.
4. Release it if you have given up. One click, and the business becomes available to other partners.

Two honest limitations

• A claim is a courtesy between partners, not a lock. Nothing in the system physically stops anyone from contacting anyone. What the claim gives you is the record, and the record is what settles a dispute if two partners both believe a client was theirs.
• A claim is not how you get paid. Logging a lead earns you nothing on its own. If that business signs up without your coupon or link, the claim does not rescue the commission. Claiming and getting credited are two separate jobs and you have to do both.

Do not contact

If a business tells you to stop contacting them, report it in the log immediately, whichever way they told you. We stop contacting them, every other partner is blocked from them, and any claim on them is released. It is permanent and it cannot be undone by you, so only report a business that actually asked. This is not optional and it is not a courtesy: it is how we all stay on the right side of the rules that govern cold outreach.

Realistically, how long until my first payment?

It depends on how fast the client moves. Your client finishes onboarding and gives us domain access, we deliver the site in 5 to 7 business days on Basic, they approve it, and the site goes live. Commission starts the month their billing starts, which is the month the site goes live, that month is invoiced on the 1st of the following month, and payouts go out between the 1st and the 5th.

There is no free trial to wait out, so the wait is the build, the review, the go-live date and the time until the next 1st. A client who sets a later go-live date moves your first commission month with it.

Which clients earn commission?

Direct full-service clients: a business that signs up with us through you and has us build and look after its website on the Basic or Advanced plan. That is what the rates in this guide are for, and what counts toward the volume bonus.

Two kinds of client do not. A business that builds and runs its own website on our platform is on a self-serve plan, either Free or a flat platform price, and neither has anything to do with Basic or Advanced, so a referral matched to one shows as "No commission" on your dashboard and does not count toward the bonus. And a client brought in by a white-label agency belongs to that agency, which pays us wholesale, so no partner is paid on it.

If a client you referred starts on a self-serve plan and later moves to Basic or Advanced with us building and running their site, the referral takes that plan's commission rate from then on and starts earning.

What happens to my commission if a client cancels?

The recurring commission stops. What else you are paid depends on the client's plan. On Basic and Advanced, our month-to-month plans, the first-year guarantee holds only when the client paid for the year up front. If they did, and they cancel inside their first year, you are paid the remainder of it, because we collected the revenue behind it. A client on those plans who pays monthly earns you your commission month by month, and it stops when they cancel. There is no first-year guarantee on a monthly client, and no fee a client pays funds one.

On an earlier plan (a 12 month or 24 month agreement, or no agreement with a setup fee) the first year is guaranteed as it was. If they cancel inside it you are paid the remainder of it, provided we collected the revenue behind it: the client paid for the year up front, or paid their setup fee, or paid their early cancellation fee. Any one of those is enough.

Where the guarantee does not apply you keep everything you were paid for the months they were actually with us, and if you are paid on the annual model you are paid for the months the client paid for. We notify you when a referred client cancels and tell you which applies.

What if a client I referred cancels and then comes back?

They stay yours either way, and you do not have to do anything to claim them.

If they restart the account they already had, the referral simply picks up where it left off. Your rate does not change and your commission resumes on the next payout run. If they had cancelled inside their first year and we had accrued a guarantee for you that we had not yet paid out, that guarantee is released when they restart, because the recurring commission now pays you for the same months it was covering. You are not paid twice for one period, and nothing already paid to you is ever taken back.

If they come back instead by registering a completely new account, which is what happens once an old account has fully expired, we link the new account back to you automatically. They do not need to enter your coupon or arrive through your link again. The one thing that changes is the rate: a new account is a new client relationship, so it earns the rate card current at that point rather than the rate the original referral was locked to.

The usual attribution rule still applies. If they sign up on another partner's coupon or link, that partner closed them and the client is theirs.

If I introduce another partner, does it cost them anything?

No, and this is worth being able to say clearly. They earn the full published commission on every client they bring in, identical to every other partner. Your introduction bonus is paid separately by us, out of our margin. Nothing is taken from their side of it.

They are told this plainly when they are invited, and they can see that you receive a bonus. You can see the total each introduction generates for you, but not who their clients are.

Do I keep earning if I stop selling?

Yes. There is no quota and no activity requirement. Your existing clients keep paying you for as long as they stay with us.

Can I change my payout model later?

Not from your dashboard. The choice is made once during setup. If you need it changed, contact us and explain why, but treat it as a decision rather than a setting.

Is there a limit on how many coupons or links I can have?

No. Create as many as you like and deactivate any you are done with. Coupon codes are unique across all partners, so if the one you want is taken you will need a different one. One caution: if you deactivate a coupon after someone has signed up with it but before they finish onboarding, they lose their free edit pack. Your commission is unaffected.

A business I want is already claimed. Now what?

Move on to the next one. Claims lapse after 90 days without a renewal, so a business that is unavailable today may be available in a few months. Check it again later. A claim also closes itself the moment that business becomes a client, so an unavailable domain is not necessarily unavailable for long.

My search came back with hardly anything. Is it broken?

Almost certainly not. The page tells you how many businesses were found and how many were already spoken for, and in an area another partner has worked hard the gap between those two numbers can be large. That is the tool doing its job: everything removed was a business you would have been told to stop on anyway.

Try a neighbouring town, or the same town in a different industry. A tight local search in an industry nobody has touched will nearly always give you more to work with than a broad one in a saturated area, and it does not cost you any more of your monthly allowance.

My prospect signed up but forgot the coupon. Can it be fixed?

Contact us straight away with the details, and if you logged the lead beforehand, say so. There is no automatic fix, and the honest answer is that it may not be recoverable, which is exactly why the coupon matters so much. Give the code to the prospect in writing before they sign up, not verbally at the end of a call.

Will we ever take clients outside the US, or auto repair shops?

Outside the US, we hope so, but there is no date. Auto repair is a contractual commitment that runs until 2027, and no amount of the prospect being a great fit changes it. Both are hard nos today and neither gets a manual review.

Can one client have several sites on one account?

Not yet. Each site needs its own plan and its own account today. Multi site management under a single account is on our roadmap.

I am not in the US. Can I actually get paid?

Almost certainly, and bank transfer is the option to use. Wise reaches over 100 countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ukraine and Egypt, paying into your own bank account in your own currency, and we cover the transfer fee. Your bank details go to Wise, not to us.

Do not assume PayPal works just because it exists in your country. In some markets a PayPal account can only send money, not receive it. Check the linked country lists in the earnings section before you rely on it, rather than after your first commission is earned.

Do I need my own website, company, or business license?

No. You need to be 18 or over, accept the partner terms, and be able to file a W-9 or W-8BEN. A company name is optional for sales partners.

Is there a cost to join, or anything to buy?

No, and there never will be. We do not sell training, leads, or materials to partners. Everything in your dashboard is included.