How to Make Money Recommending Software You Already Use

You already do this for free. Someone asks how you keep your farm books straight, or which app finally killed your spreadsheet chaos, and you tell them — you recommend the software you use, with real conviction, because it solved a real problem. The only thing missing is that you’re not getting paid for it. This is a plain-English guide to fixing that: how recommending software you already use turns into recurring monthly income, what it actually pays, and why you don’t need a website, a following, or any of the things people assume are required.

The Idea in One Sentence

Companies would rather pay you — a real customer giving an honest recommendation — than pay a stranger to run ads at people who don’t trust them. So they offer referral programs: you get a personal link or code, you share it with people who’d benefit, and when someone signs up and pays, you earn a commission. That’s the whole mechanism. The recommendation you were already giving for free now comes with a check attached.

Why “Recurring” Changes Everything

Here’s the distinction that separates pocket change from a real income stream.

A traditional one-time affiliate payout pays you once when someone buys, then it’s over. You earned it, it’s done, and to earn again you have to find the next person. You’re always running on a treadmill.

A recurring referral pays you every month the customer keeps their subscription. That difference compounds quietly and powerfully. Refer one person in January and you earn from them in January, February, March, and every month after, for as long as they stay. Refer another in February, and now you’re earning from two. By summer you’ve got a stack of small monthly payments that grows even in the months you refer nobody new. The work is front-loaded; the income is ongoing. That’s the model worth your attention.

How the Insider Model Works

The cleanest version of this is the Insider model, and it’s worth understanding because it fixes the most annoying thing about juggling referral programs: having a different login, link, and payout for every single product.

With Insider, you join once for $7.99/mo and get one code that works across all the connected apps. Recommend any of them, and the referrals roll up under your single identity with one combined payout. No separate dashboards, no tracking five different links, no wondering which program owes you what.

For FarmsFlo specifically, the payout is:

• $10/mo for every Pro subscriber you refer (Pro is $29/mo), and
• $25/mo for every Complete subscriber you refer (Complete is $79/mo) —

both recurring, for as long as that customer stays subscribed. Do the quick math: a single Complete referral pays $25/mo, which more than covers your $7.99 Insider fee with margin to spare. Ten active Complete referrals is $250/mo, recurring, arriving whether or not you lift a finger that month. And because Insider spans the connected apps, every other product you genuinely use and recommend stacks onto the same payout.

The Myth: “I Need a Website and an Audience”

This is the belief that stops most people, and it’s wrong. You do not need a blog, a YouTube channel, a newsletter, or ten thousand followers. Those help you scale, but they are not required to start.

What you actually need is two things: a tool you genuinely use, and people in your world who’d benefit from it. You already have both. Think about where you already talk to other farmers and homesteaders:

• The Facebook groups and forums you’re already in.
• The group text with the people you swap hay and advice with.
• Your local co-op, breed association, 4-H, or farmers-market network.
• The handful of friends who keep asking how you stay organized.

One honest recommendation and one link, dropped where it’s genuinely helpful, is the entire playbook. If you happen to run a website or an audience, great — point it at your link and let it scale. But the farmer with no online presence and a good reputation among twenty other farmers is in a better position than a stranger with a million followers, because trust is the only thing that actually converts.

How to Actually Do It

1. Use the tool for real first. You can’t recommend convincingly what you don’t use. Run your own farm on it, hit the wall it solves, and let that be your story.
2. Join Insider and grab your code at insider.tasktroll.com. One sign-up, one code, all the connected apps.
3. Share it where it’s already relevant. Not spam — answers. When someone in a group asks the question you once asked, answer honestly and include your link.
4. Be transparent. Say you earn a commission. It costs you nothing and it’s the difference between a recommendation and a pitch. People respect the honesty and trust the rec more for it.
5. Let it compound. Each referral stacks on the last. You’re not chasing a sale every month — you’re building a base that pays you for past recommendations.

The Honest Bottom Line

This isn’t a get-rich scheme, and anyone selling it as one is lying. It’s something better and more durable: steady, recurring income for doing something you already do for free — telling people about a tool that genuinely helped you. The integrity guardrail is simple: only recommend what you actually use and believe in, and disclose that you earn from it. Stay on that side of the line and everyone wins — you get paid, the company gets a real customer, and the person you helped gets a tool that solves their problem.

If recurring income is your goal, this is one of the lowest-effort, highest-honesty ways to build it. For more income ideas built for farm life, see our roundup of farm and homestead side hustles that actually pay — but this one might be the easiest to start, because you’re already halfway there.

Start earning on the recommendations you already give: join the Insider program for $7.99/mo and earn $10–$25/mo, recurring, for every farmer you refer.