What a TAPCO referral pays, and what makes one count

Every figure on this page is read from the server that pays it. An invite pays three times over: once when your friend arrives, once when they are genuinely playing, and then a share of everything they earn for as long as they keep playing.

How a referral pays

The link is recorded the moment your friend opens the game with it, and it is read from the signed Telegram launch rather than from anything the browser claims. It is set once and for ever: a player belongs to whoever brought them in, and a link opened later cannot move them. You are paid 500 points at that moment.

The larger reward waits until they are genuinely playing. When your friend meets all four conditions — and their Telegram account is at least a week old — you are paid 5,000 points and they are paid 2,000 points as a welcome, one event seen from both sides.

After that you earn a share of what they go on to make: 10% of what your friends earn, and 5% of what their friends earn. Both are added by us, so your friend loses nothing, and neither is capped or reduced. The share counts what they earn from the moment the link was made, not what they had already earned before it.

The commission is not paid tap by tap. It builds up as an amount waiting to be collected, is worked out whenever you open the referrals screen, and is added to your points when you press Collect. Points are what the rest of the game is built on, and the rate they convert at and the limits on converting them are published in full.

Two more rewards sit on top of that. Once one invited friend has qualified, a chest opens on the referrals screen and can be taken once a day, the day turning at midnight UTC — 400 points at the basic tier, rising with the number of friends who stayed. And four milestones pay themselves the moment you reach them; there is nothing to claim.

What makes a friend count

The 5,000 points are paid for a player, not for a launch. Four conditions decide it, and all four are measured on your friend's own play: level 5, 1,500 taps in total, an account at least 24 hours old, and 2 days on which they actually played.

They are there to protect your real invites rather than to slow them down. Without them, anyone with a list of fresh accounts could mint the qualifying reward at will, and the only way to survive that would be to make the reward smaller for everybody. Nothing is hidden from you while you wait, either: each friend's row on the referrals screen carries all four conditions and how far along they are, so 2 / 4 is a state you can read rather than a mystery.

One thing is not about play at all: the friend's Telegram account has to be at least 7 days old. Telegram gives out account numbers in order and hands us that number inside the signed launch, so the age of the account is the one fact about a new arrival nobody can manufacture — and level 5 and 1,500 taps are an afternoon's work for somebody who does this for a living. A friend who joined Telegram this week is not refused: the 5,000 waits, and it is paid the next time you open the referrals screen after their account reaches a week. Their row shows 4 / 4 while it waits.

There is a window and there is a rate, and both exist for the same reason. A referral that never qualifies expires 21 days after the link was made and cannot be revived; otherwise accounts could be bound cheaply now and activated together at a chosen moment. And at most 12 referrals can be settled as qualified in one day. The reward itself is never reduced — a friend who qualifies after the twelfth is paid on a later day instead, as long as the 21 days have not run out.

The checks a referral goes through, and what to do if you believe a valid one was missed, are set out on the referral policy page. The other systems a player meets — energy, levels, the boss, the daily activities — are described in how the game works, and why a referral programme has to be built this way is the subject of its own article.

The numbers, as the server pays them

Common questions