How I test referral codes

What testing means

For every brand on Referral Plug, founder Seb Place personally:

• Reads the official referral terms to highlight minimum spend, contract length, eligibility windows or other conditions that affect whether the offer is worth taking.
• Confirms the link resolves correctly and lands on the brand’s sign-up flow with the referral attribution applied.
• Verifies rewards via genuine new sign-ups by friends, family or household members who choose the brand on their own merits, and tracks how long the reward takes to land (bill credit, cash bonus, free share, points or gift card).

What I don’t do: open an account using my own referral link. Self-referral is against the terms of most refer-a-friend programmes.

The result of that testing is what you see on each referral page: the reward amount, the time-to-receive estimate, the eligibility notes, and the referral link itself.

How I rate a referral

Every active referral page carries a rating out of 5. It rates the deal, not the company: the size of the reward against what you have to do to earn it, how long the money takes to arrive, and whether I have seen it arrive. The Trustpilot score on the same page rates the company, and the two disagree often. Bitrefill is the clearest case, a service I rate 4.4 in my own review with the worst effort-to-reward ratio on this site behind it.

The number is my judgement, not a formula. There are no weights to look up because I don’t think a weight I invented would tell you anything. What the number means:

• 5 is a deal I’d take without thinking about it: a large reward, few conditions attached, and I’ve watched it pay out.
• 4 is worth taking, with one condition you should know about before you start.
• 3 is real money where the conditions do most of the work: a spending threshold, a contract, or a wait measured in months.

Nothing below 3 is published. A scheme worse than that comes off the site rather than getting a low score, which is the same trade as the 24-hour takedown below.

How often I re-test

Referral schemes change. Brands rotate codes, raise or lower rewards, tighten eligibility, or end campaigns without notice. To keep guides accurate:

• Weekly re-checks. Every active referral gets two things each week. First, an automated URL health check fetches the link to confirm it still resolves. Second, Seb personally re-checks the referral: he clicks the link to confirm it still lands on the brand’s sign-up flow with the referral attribution applied, checks that the currently-advertised reward still matches the guide, and confirms the scheme is still running. The reward is checked against the brand’s own published terms, the same source recorded for each brand and re-read every month.
• Quarterly full re-tests. Every 90 days, each brand goes deeper than the weekly check: the full referral terms, reward structure and sign-up flow are re-checked end to end against the published guide, not just the headline reward and link.
• Each referral page shows its last-tested date. The “Last tested” line on every page reflects the most recent verification, not just a content edit.

What triggers an out-of-cycle re-test

• A reader reports the reward didn’t arrive or the link is broken (you can email [email protected]).
• The brand publicly changes its referral programme: new reward amount, new terms, paused scheme.
• The weekly URL health check flags an unexpected redirect or error response.
• A regulator or trade body (Ofgem, FCA, ASA) publishes guidance that affects how the brand’s offer works.

What happens when a link breaks

Broken or expired referral links are removed within 24 hours of detection. If the brand has paused its referral scheme entirely, the referral page is updated with a clear notice and the link is withdrawn until the scheme returns. If the brand has rotated to a new link, the page is updated with the new link and re-verified before republishing.

A page is never left up with a stale or untested link to preserve its search ranking. That is the trade this site is built to lose.

Who does the testing

All testing is done by Referral Plug founder Seb Place. There is no editorial team, no outsourced reviewer pool and no sponsored sign-offs. If a referral page has a “Last tested” date, that date reflects the day Seb Place personally re-checked the link.

Why this matters

Most UK comparison sites publish referral programmes without ever opening an account, signing up, or verifying that the reward arrives. The result is broken links, stale rewards and disappointed readers. Referral Plug exists to do the opposite: every link on the site has been used by a real person, on a real account, and verified to actually pay out.

If you find a referral here that doesn’t work as described, tell me. That is a failure of this methodology, and it is the one piece of feedback I always act on.