It runs while you pay. It stops when you don't. Put your real monthly number in and watch it work — then turn it off and see what you have left.
100 businesses. Georgia. Your price never goes up.
Stop paying and the left column reads $0. Not a reduced number — zero, with nothing carried over, because you were renting the visibility. The right column doesn't move: nobody was paying for those customers, so there is no meter to switch off. That column is most of your business, and it's the only one you have never been able to count.
(The live version of this needs JavaScript. The argument doesn't.)
The only number here is the one you typed. We have no customers yet, so we have no data of our own — and we're not going to borrow anyone else's to fill the gap.
Nobody thinks their lease is an asset. Somehow the ad account gets treated differently — as an investment, a channel, a thing you're building. It isn't. It's rent, and the landlord evicts you the moment the card declines.
Six months of spend buys six months of visibility. Not five and a bit at the end, not a residual. Stop, and you are exactly where you started, minus the money. The word for a thing you pay for monthly that produces nothing you keep is not "marketing." It's a subscription.
"That's not growth. That's a subscription to demand."
The marketplace brings you a diner, takes a cut of the plate, and keeps the diner. Their name, their email, their order history — all of it sits on someone else's balance sheet. You rented the introduction and they kept the relationship.
Somebody stood in a kitchen and said you should try them. That customer arrived at no cost, pre-trusted, from someone you'd already served well. They don't disappear when the card declines, because nobody was paying in the first place.
"And it's the only part of your marketing you have never once been able to count."
The meter is the product. No payment, no visibility.
It can't be switched off. The conversation occurred.
The platform keeps the record. You rented the introduction.
Your list, your business, no cut of the transaction.
Scale gets more expensive, not less. The rate card doesn't care how long you've been paying.
The person who was recommended can recommend. That's the only thing on this page that compounds.
Dashboards, attribution, a receipt for every dollar. You know exactly what it cost.
Two people, a conversation, no record. Your biggest channel is the only one nobody built a meter for.
That last row is the whole company. Not "ads are bad" — we'll buy some ourselves and we'll say so when we do. The point is that you can price the bought column to the cent and you cannot count the earned one at all. So you manage the one you can see, and the bigger one runs unattended. Dealsby Referrals is the meter for the other column.
We sell two mechanisms and the category describes them as one. They aren't. Here it is on our own site, where you can hold us to it.
Output: a person who has never bought from you before. It's the only thing we sell that makes a business bigger, and it's the only number we ask to be judged on.
Output: a customer you already had, coming back — probably as they were going to anyway. What it honestly does is give people a reason to return, and get you a customer list instead of a drawer of receipts. Worth money. Not growth.
We're not asking you to take that on faith. Dowling & Uncles asked the question in the title of their paper — Do customer loyalty programs really work? (Sloan Management Review, 1997) — and found little evidence they shift buying behaviour. The Ehrenberg-Bass finding is the reason why: brands grow by reaching more buyers, and heavier repeat buying is a consequence of being big, not a route to it. Both papers, and the rest of what we're reading, are listed on themainstreetgap.com.
Every competitor claims both halves. We're claiming one, because one is what the evidence supports. If the rewards half is the part you actually wanted, the honest answer might be that you don't need us.
Every number we've ever published, its primary source, and the ten claims we've withdrawn — including a quote we wrongly attributed to a national magazine — are listed permanently on themainstreetgap.com.
Not thousands. One hundred — because the founder is giving every one of them his mobile number, and there are only so many hours in a week. Your price never goes up. What we want back isn't a testimonial: it's you telling us when it doesn't work.
Closes September 30, 2026 — full or not. Georgia · United States only · 18+ · From $59/mo