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 covers programs running today, the posting-for-credits precedents, and the adjacent mechanics that prove users will act for consumables.
The pieces already ship inside successful products. An earned tier makes them 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, with no backdoors. Earnesty's reward is seats: a verified post about Earnesty gives 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 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 independently at the core trade of public content for product credits, 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 is the whole price, where an earned tier splits it into a flat amount for the post and a bounded bonus for the reach. Same trade, different risk shape: 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, 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. Most products can't make their users' work public at any price: an inbox, a payroll run, a customer list. That is why an earned tier asks for a post about the product rather than the work done inside it.
Next door: rewards for private actions
Before anyone rewarded public posts, products rewarded private effort, the pattern called onboarding gamification. It matters here as proof that 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, and 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.