The mechanics, and what single-level means

Three rules, and they are locked in this product's design documents rather than being current settings that might be tuned later:

1. A flat percentage of each sale you make.
2. Single level only.
3. One product, one SKU — the guide is sold bundled, so there are no per-component splits to track.

1The worked example lives on the sales page

Don't take the arithmetic on trust and don't take it from prose. The sales page carries a remittance advice statement — §05, statement SU-AFF-0001 — that runs a single sale all the way through with every line left in:

• the list price ($149.99 — decided 2026-08-14)
• less card processing
• net collected
• the affiliate share
• the publisher share
• second-level / recruiting commission: $0.00 — "there is no such line"

Go and read it. It is the specification, not an illustration of one, and it's also what the real statement will look like when this is built.

Three things about that statement are worth pulling out here.

The split is calculated on net, not on list. Card processing comes out first, then the share is taken. This was modelled that way from the start, flagged in the project's own roadmap as confirm that's the intended structure, and confirmed as the real structure with the 2026-08-14 pricing decision — it is now settled, not just current design. Practically: 33% of the $149.99 list would be $49.50, but that is not your number; your number is 33% of what's left after the card fee, which the statement shows to the cent.

One field on it is still genuinely blank, and the statement says so on its face: the payout rail. The price and the split were blanks for most of this module's life and are now decided — §5's table is the record of what closed when, and of what's still open.

The last line is a line. A $0.00 entry for recruiting commission is not a formatting accident. It's there so that the absence is visible on every statement rather than being something you'd have to notice wasn't there.

2What "single level" actually means

You are paid for sales you make. That is the entire structure.

The word single-level is doing more work than it looks like, because the thing it rules out is the thing most people assume an affiliate programme is for. So, plainly — these are all disallowed:

• Recruiting other affiliates and earning from their sales. No override, no percentage of a second tier, no "team" volume.
• Sub-affiliates under your link. There is no mechanism for it and building one informally is a breach, not a workaround.
• Splitting your own commission with people who send you buyers. This one catches honest people, so it's worth being explicit: paying someone out of your share for referrals reconstructs a second level using your own money. The agreement you sign will govern the exact position; the honest guidance is don't, and the reason is the whole of the next part of this section.
• Selling a course, group, or coaching about becoming an affiliate of this. If anyone is earning from other people's participation rather than from product sales to actual readers, the structure has become the thing this programme was designed not to be.

This is disallowed, not merely absent. There is a difference between a feature nobody built yet and a rule, and this is a rule. It sits in the product's non-negotiables list — the short list of things that don't get revisited when someone has a clever idea — and it was on that list before there was a product to attach it to.

3Why — the honest version

There are two reasons usually given for this rule. One of them is much weaker than it looks, and this module is the wrong place to let that slide.

The weaker one: platform policy

This product's design documents inherit the single-level rule from a predecessor that shipped through the App Store, where it's recorded against App Store Review Guideline 3.2.2, the "unacceptable business models" section.

We checked the current text of 3.2.2 on 2026-08-14. It does not mention multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes, recruiting commissions, or affiliates at all. Its sub-items cover other ground entirely — ad manipulation, in-app fundraising, loan terms, forced ratings, and so on.

So citing 3.2.2 as the reason downlines are banned would be doing precisely what Module 4 spent a module telling you not to do: attaching an authoritative-sounding source to a claim it doesn't actually support. We're not going to teach you that standard in Module 4 and then breach it in Module 7.

What the guideline genuinely contributes is a habit, and that's how the blueprint frames it — platform-policy hygiene:

Whoever you distribute through decides which business models are allowed. They decide after you've built. There is no appeal that opens with "but it was already working."

A structure that would fail a platform's business-model review is one you don't build even when you aren't on that platform, because distribution changes and the structure is the expensive thing to unpick. That reasoning holds. The citation doesn't.

The stronger one: regulatory exposure

This is the actual reason.

The distinction regulators draw is not about how many levels you have — it's about what the money is paid for. The FTC's business guidance on multi-level marketing describes a pyramid scheme as one where participants pay money in return for the right to sell a product and the right to receive, for recruiting other participants, rewards that are unrelated to the sale of product to ultimate users.

The same guidance is blunt about the corollary, which is the part people underestimate: having a real product doesn't save you. A programme can sell a genuine, high-quality product and still be a pyramid scheme, and having some retail sales doesn't settle the question either. What gets examined is the behaviour the compensation plan actually incentivises.

A single-level programme paying a flat percentage on verified sales to real buyers is structurally the opposite arrangement: every dollar paid out is attached to a sale to someone who wanted the thing. There is no recruitment reward to be unrelated to anything.

That's the design intent, stated as design intent. It is not a legal opinion, ours or anyone's — this product's roadmap carries a real review of the affiliate structure against FTC and state-level regulation before any affiliate goes live, and the agreement you'll sign is part of that review. State law adds its own rules on chain-referral arrangements that vary by state and that a guide cannot summarise for you honestly.

(Retrieval note for anyone re-checking this: ftc.gov was unreachable from our verification environment on 2026-08-14, so the characterisation above came from a search summary of the FTC's published guidance rather than a direct read of the page. It is flagged in the register for re-verification against the primary source before publish. We'd rather tell you how thin the sourcing is than let it read as firmer than it was.)

4What this costs you, and why it's worth it

Straightforwardly: it caps this path. A single-level programme cannot compound. There's no version where you build a team and earn while asleep, and if that's what you came to this module for, it isn't here.

What you get instead is a commission you can explain to anyone — a client, a regulator, your accountant, the person you recommended it to — without any part of the explanation needing to be managed.

The interesting-looking version of this is interesting because it pays for recruitment. That's the same sentence as the reason it's a legal problem.

5In one table