Update #2 — Affiliates, a QR code on your share card, and a bug that was quietly breaking Dividend Health

A quick update on what's shipped since my last post.

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The main thing: affiliates

I added an affiliate programme to Income Refinery Pro. If you're a Pro user and you want to share it with your audience or friends, you can now sign up at the Lemon Squeezy affiliate hub, paste your referral link into Settings → Affiliates, and optionally set a discount code.

A few decisions behind how I built it:

I didn't hard-code the commission rate anywhere in the product. The settings panel just says: "Give your audience a discount code — they save on Pro, you earn a commission." No percentage. I made this choice because Lemon Squeezy lets me change the rate from the dashboard, and I didn't want copy in the app becoming stale or misleading. Small thing, but I'm glad I caught it before shipping.

The share card gets a referral QR code. Income Refinery Pro has a "Share Your Progress" feature — you can export a 1080×1080 image of your monthly income, FI milestone progress, and projected FI date to share wherever you want. When you have an affiliate link saved, a new checkbox appears: "Include my affiliate QR code — earn commission on referrals." Tick it, and a QR code for your affiliate URL is printed in the lower-left corner of the card, with your discount code shown right next to it.

The practical idea: your income milestone post becomes a referral tool without any extra steps. Post your progress, someone scans the QR, buys Pro, you earn.

Getting the QR code right took three attempts. First I tried lazy-loading a library from a CDN — worked in the browser but the async timing meant the QR rendered after the canvas snapshot, so downloaded cards came out blank. Then I wrote my own encoder from scratch. Passed ES5 validation, looked reasonable in the preview. Turned out it had 454 module-level errors — Google Lens could decode it, my phone's native scanner could not. Third attempt: I pulled qrcode-generator v1.4.4 from the npm registry (it's MIT, ~57KB) and embedded it directly in the HTML file. Synchronous, offline, no external dependencies. Scannable on the first try.

I also had to increase the cell size from ~3px to 5px per module and bake in a proper 4-module quiet zone. Hardware-level QR scanners are less forgiving than AI-assisted ones.

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A bug fix: Dividend Health was silently breaking on re-import

Income Refinery Pro has a Dividend Health Panel that tracks DPU (dividend per unit) trends — whether a holding is growing, flat, or has cut its dividend — based on historical payment events. The AI import prompt generates one row per dividend event per holding, which is what populates this.

A user reported that Dividend Health stopped showing data after re-importing their holdings spreadsheet. I traced it to two places:

1. The import commit function had two paths: "add new holding" and "update existing holding." The new-holding path correctly wrote dpuHistory, dpuTrend, and dpuTrendDetail onto the counter. The update path did not — it updated name, units, DPU, and months, then stopped. So every time someone re-imported to refresh their data, the trend fields got silently dropped from any holding that already existed.

2. The CSV parser was misreading a specific multi-row format where historical dividend events stored the DPU value in the Units column (because the DPU column was left blank on non-representative rows). The parser was collecting those rows as having units=0.03, amount=null — they passed the filter but produced zero events. The fix: when a row has an ex-date, no DPU, and a "units" value that's much smaller than the group's representative unit count, treat that units value as the event DPU. Threshold is < 10% of the rep unit count, capped at 1000.

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Where things stand

Still pre-Product Hunt launch — aiming for late July. No revenue yet. The product is live and free at incomerefinery.com, Pro is $49 one-time at the link in my profile.

Happy to answer questions on any of the above.