Why our partner pages publish no margin percentages
We publish every customer price, to the cent. The one number our partner site deliberately leaves out is the partner margin — because a margin that works in one market is unsellable in the next, and a published one would be wrong in ten of eleven territories.
· 3 min read
If you know how Rutba prices things, this looks like a contradiction. We publish every customer price on rutba.io, per unit and per month, with the arithmetic shown. And yet the partner site, which argues at length for being precise about what is true, contains no margin percentage anywhere.
That is on purpose, and the reason is that a partner margin is not one number. Publishing it as if it were would be the least precise thing on the site.
A margin that works in one market is unsellable in another
The partner programme is appointing in eleven territories, from the United Kingdom and Ireland to Latin America and the Caribbean. The margin a partner needs in each is set by things that genuinely differ between them:
- Local pricing. A price that is ordinary in one market is a luxury in another, and the partner’s margin has to work at the price customers there will actually pay.
- Taxes — on the software, on the services, and on cross-border licensing.
- Competition. Where a strong local product exists, the margin has to fund winning against it.
- Cost of sale — how long a deal takes to close, and what it costs to support a customer there.
Pick one percentage and put it on a web page, and it is too thin to be worth a partner’s time in some markets and more generous than the business can sustain in others. It would be right, at best, in one territory — and read as a promise in all eleven.
A single published margin would be accurate in one territory and read as a promise in all eleven.
What we do instead
Tell us your market and the lines you want to sell, and you have concrete numbers before the second call. Not a range, not "competitive", not a tier table with the interesting row blank — the actual terms for your market, in writing, as part of the application.
What the site does publish is the structure of how each track earns, because structure is the same everywhere:
| Track | How you earn |
|---|---|
| Referral | A fee on the revenue the customer actually pays — for as long as they pay |
| Reseller | Partner pricing; you set your own price and keep the difference |
| Implementation | Partner pricing on licences, plus all of your own services revenue |
| Country distributor | Distributor pricing, plus margin on every sub-partner beneath you |
Why this is consistent with publishing customer prices
A customer price is one number that is true for every customer who buys that plan, so we publish it. A partner margin is a number that is true for one market at a time, so we give it to the partner in that market. The rule underneath both is the same: never publish a number that is not true for the person reading it.
Get the numbers for your market
Register your interest, name your market and your lines, and we will come back with terms.
partners.rutba.io
