Earned tiers in the wild
The instinct behind the earned tier is already everywhere: products have rewarded users with the product itself for years. What follows is the evidence — programs running today, the posting-for-credits precedents, and the adjacent mechanics that prove users will act for consumables.
The pieces are already shipping inside successful products, and they already drove real distribution. An earned tier takes the best of them and makes it a standing tier: opt-in, bounded, and disclosed.
Running earned tiers
Earnesty running — ours
We run the mechanic we sell, on ourselves, through the same public API our customers integrate — no backdoors. Earnesty's reward is seats: a verified post about Earnesty adds capacity to the poster's organization — room to enroll more earning users. The plan card on our pricing page is the program in one line: 100 earning users on the unpaid tier, grown to 500 by posting. Our own dials, our own cooldown, our own disclosure tag in every post.
Know Reply integrating
Know Reply — the email product Earnesty grew out of — is folding its free plan into an earned tier: a small draft-only baseline that keeps working for every inbox, with expansion earned in the consumable its paid plans already meter. It is in integration now; the numbers go here when they ship, not before.
The posting-for-credits precedents
Two AI products arrived at the core trade independently — public content in, product credits out — each with a different pricing shape:
MindMap AI
Grants bonus credits for posting about the product, writing a review, or sharing it, alongside a conventional referral program. The closest published precedent to an earned tier: the reward is the product's own credits, and the act rewarded is the public saying-so.
Higgsfield
Higgsfield Earn pays creators for posting AI-generated content, scaled by the views and engagement it draws — reach-based payout as the whole price, where an earned tier splits it into a flat amount for the post and a bounded bonus for its reach. Same trade, different risk shape: uncapped upside for the poster, uncapped exposure for the operator.
Public by default: visibility as the price
A harder version of the same insight already ships: make the free experience public, and sell privacy as the upgrade. There is no reward for going public and no way out short of paying. The earned tier is the opt-in version of the same trade — post if you want more, on your own terms, with a disclosure tag — instead of everything you make being public unless you pay.
Replit
On a free account, personal apps are public by default; making them private requires a paid Core subscription. Building in the open is the free path, and privacy is the feature you pay for.
Midjourney
Generations are public by default on the Midjourney site, and Stealth Mode — which keeps them hidden from other users — is available only on the Pro and Mega plans. Whatever the intent, the effect was a continuous public stream of the product's own output.
These two are the outer edge, not a template. It only works where the output is itself the marketing: images and apps are things people want to show. Most products can't make their users' work public at any price — an inbox, a payroll run, a customer list. That is the practical reason an earned tier asks for a post about the product rather than the work done inside it: a post is something any user of any product can give.
Next door: rewards for private actions
Before anyone rewarded public posts, products rewarded private effort — the pattern the growth literature calls onboarding gamification. It matters here as proof of the underlying behavior: users will do real work for the product's own consumable.
Dropbox
The canonical program: storage for actions — 250 MB for completing the Get Started checklist, 500 MB per referred friend up to 16 GB on the free plan. The reward was the product's own meter, which is why it worked and why everyone copied it.
Apollo
Apollo's onboarding presents setup tasks as missions that pay in-app credits — configure the account, install the extension, earn the consumable the plans meter. Learning the product's gated features is itself the rewarded act.
The earned tier takes the same instinct one step outward: the rewarded act stops being private setup and becomes a disclosed public post — so the same spend buys exposure as well as activation.