Loyalty Programs That Make Money Instead of Losing It

01 /The Concept

Kalder lets communities, retailers, sports clubs, and other organizations build loyalty programs for their customers.

Loyalty programs are standard practice for companies that want to retain customers – and most of those companies have simply accepted that these programs cost money: discounts given, free perks extended, margins compressed.

Kalder's pitch flips that assumption. Its loyalty programs don't cost money – they generate it. The startup claims that on a customer base of 50,000 people, a company or community can earn $250,000 per month through the platform.

Here's how the model works.

First, a company builds a partner network – businesses that benefit from having the company's customers spend money with them. These partners might sell adjacent products, offer complementary services, or simply be popular among that customer base.

Partners can be sourced directly, through a partner application form on the company's website, or by connecting with partners from other loyalty programs already in Kalder's ecosystem.

Once a partner network is assembled, the company invites its customers to link their bank cards to the Kalder-powered app. That app is fully white-labeled – the company brands it entirely as its own, so from the customer's perspective it looks and feels like the company's native product.

Whenever a customer pays for a purchase at any partner location using their linked card, the customer earns reward points – and the company earns a 5–10% commission on the transaction.

Customers can spend those points on further purchases at partner locations. According to Kalder, this kind of indirect incentive causes customers to spend an average of 3.6 times more at partner businesses – first from the drive to accumulate points, then from the desire to redeem them.

This benefits not just the partners but the company itself, since every purchase means another commission.

To make the incentive more explicit, companies can layer in gamification tools built into the Kalder platform. Gamification serves several purposes.

First, recruitment: companies can run in-app promotions exclusive to loyalty members, offer additional perks, and reward existing members for referring new ones.

Second, purchase volume: tiered membership levels tied to spending activity give higher-tier members better earn rates, exclusive benefits, and other perks – creating an ongoing reason to stay engaged.

Third, specific partner promotion: companies can run joint campaigns with individual partners, or reward customers for social actions like posts tagging a partner location. These activities can generate additional fees and points on top of the standard commission structure.

In the simplest case, launching a loyalty program requires no custom development – Kalder provides the app and member dashboard out of the box. Companies that want deeper integration can use the platform's API.

Kalder was founded in 2022 and raised a $3.5 million seed round shortly after launch. More than 100 companies, organizations, and sports clubs have now implemented Kalder loyalty programs. That growth trajectory just earned the startup a new $7 million round.

02 /Why It Matters

Kalder has built a remarkably tight business model. The pitch is unusually strong: "start earning on your loyalty program" lands with companies that already run one – and most of those programs lose money, since every discount and perk is a margin hit.

Incentives are also genuinely aligned. The company running the program and the partner network both have skin in the game: the company earns more commissions as members spend more at partners, and partners sell more in return. There's a compounding network effect on top of that: every new company that builds a loyalty program on Kalder doesn't just consume the existing partner network – it contributes new partners to it, making the platform more attractive for the next company.

Kalder also avoids the trap of trying to own the customer relationship. It distributes as a white-label product through partner companies who want to monetize their existing customer bases. Yes, this means sharing commission revenue – but the trade-off is scale, since every new program brings its own customer base onto the platform.

For comparison, consider Kudos ([covered here](/review/prijti-sjuda-mozhno-proshhe-i-bystree)), which built a similar card-linking model – asking users to connect their cards to "earn extra rewards on purchases you're already making." The difference: Kudos has to reward any purchase while only earning commissions on purchases made with its own partners, which it has to go out and acquire itself. Despite that friction, Kudos has attracted $17.2 million in investment, including $10.2 million in May. Next to that, Kalder's architecture looks considerably more elegant.

The broader trend here is "rewards for things people already do." Traditional advertising is getting more expensive and less effective, so sellers are looking for new channels to reach buyers who are already spending. Several startups are building in this direction.

EXO ([covered here](/review/nagrada-ili-reklama)) raised €1 million in its first round, rewarding users with points for gym visits – redeemable at sporting goods and nutrition partners.

Miles ([covered here](/review/ne-mili-za-dengi-a-dengi-za-mili)) raised $19.9 million for an app that rewards users for urban mobility, with points scaled by distance and mode of transport, redeemable at businesses along their regular routes.

Others have pushed the behavior threshold even lower: Matera rewards users for posting to social media ($3.6 million raised), while Filtroo – somehow – raised €1 million for rewarding users simply for reading, liking, and commenting on others' posts.

03 /Opportunities

The general direction: build products that reward users for things they already do. Revenue can come from subscriptions, commissions on purchases at partner businesses, or both. The key is identifying what to reward – choosing the behavior carefully defines the audience, which in turn defines which category of partners finds that audience valuable. The cleanest path is EXO's: collect gym-goers, attract sports and wellness brands.

What audience would you start building around, and which partners would you bring to them?

The more specific direction: replicate Kalder's loyalty program model. Loyalty programs are already familiar to both companies and consumers, which makes them easier to sell than something entirely novel. B2B distribution also makes growth more manageable than trying to build a million-person consumer audience from scratch. And the pitch – "turn your loyalty program into a revenue stream" – is a compelling angle that a meaningful share of companies will find hard to pass up.

Worth noting: the model may be especially attractive to communities and organizations that never had loyalty programs before, simply because they had nothing to reward members with and no appetite to lose money doing it.

Online communities currently monetizing through advertising are one example – they could assemble a partner network relevant to their community's topic. Even more niche: neighborhood homeowner associations, whose partners might be the shops and services nearest their building.

If a single homeowner association proves the model, the same playbook repeats identically across thousands of others. Suddenly you have a clear, systematic growth strategy.

The tightest entry point is probably communities with a pre-existing advertising revenue stream – newsletters, forums, niche media – that already reach a well-defined audience and already have relationships with category-relevant advertisers. Replacing that ad revenue with a commission-based loyalty model is often a better deal for everyone involved.