Vast has a referral reward program. You can drive traffic to your referral link or a public template referral link. If someone registers a new client account and purchases credits, you will receive 3% of the credits spent as a reward into your account. Furthermore, you can turn 75% of those referral credits into cash and withdraw it via Stripe Connect, Paypal or Wise.

A referred account will give you 3% rewards for the lifetime of the account!

We suggest using a separate account for referrals. It is also possible to create a Vast template for referrals that will autoload a Docker image and settings for a certain use case. Read below for details.

Setup a Dedicated Account For Referrals #

In order to receive payouts for referrals you MUST create a new account. You are unlikely to be able to receive payouts to any bank account outside Vast if the account you are using for referrals has ever rented instances or hosted machines

If your goal is to receive payouts to an entity outside of Vast, you will need to create an account on Vast dedicated for referrals. If your goal is to receive credits on to your credit balance, you can use your current client account. The default payout method for referral credits is to your credit balance on Vast which you use to rent instances.

If you choose to use an already existing client account with an instance rental history, you will not be able to receive payouts until your referral earnings surpass your instance spend.

Creating a new account will also allow you to more properly track your referral earnings since they will be harder to track if your referral earnings and being directly sent to your Vast credit balance.

For those that are curious how to receive a payout when you have a client account with a rental history:

A user has purchased $700 in credits, received $300 in referral credits, and accumulated $855 in lifetime charges. This user has a payable balance of $300 - $855, which is less than 0. The user would be unable to receive payouts to an entity outside Vast due to their lifetime spend being greater than their referral earnings.

In order to receive a payout to outside Vast the amount you've earned in referrals must be greater than the amount you've ever been charged in your accounts lifetime.

Get your link #

Navigate to your account page and find the referral link in the bottom right hand corner in the section for referrals. The hyperlink has your referral link. It should look like this:

When a new user clicks on that link, creates an account and purchases credits, you receive 3% of the purchased credits as a reward. Those credits will appear as a positive balance in the account.

Note that you cannot refer yourself or refer new accounts associated with yourself. Those accounts are not eligible for rewards.

Use a template for referrals #

Templates combine a Docker image, launch mode(s), an onstart script and other settings into a single configuration. They are very useful for a specific use case. For example, the Stable Diffusion template loads a Stable Diffusion Docker image, opens the port for the Automatic1111 webui, starts Jupyter for file transfer and then sets appropriate environment variables.

You could make your own Docker image and Vast template for a new use case and then set the template to public and refer people using that template link. That way the user will have the correct Vast settings pre-loaded when they come to the Vast website and will find it much easier to follow your instructions.

We have seen this system used well in Github repos and linked from Videos or Blogs. You can write software or develop content for a particular use case and then earn referral credits as your audience uses the Vast service.

The template link is available in the Edit image and config menu underneath the Docker image name.

The link will have this format:

Cashing out credits #

75% of earned referral credits can be cashed out using Stripe Connect (bank account), PayPal or Wise. Go to the earnings page to setup your cash out methods.

Larger referral opportunities #

Feel free to contact us at support@vast.ai for larger referral or marketing opportunities.