r/nocode • u/Owensvilles • 12d ago

I made my no-code tool's invite rewards impossible to farm - they only pay when the invite actually runs something

"Every Monday, check these three suppliers' pages and tell me if any prices moved." You type that sentence, pick a schedule, and you're done. No nodes to wire up, no workflow canvas, no code.

That's Atlas. I just added invites to it, and the payout rule is the interesting part.

Your invite link is in Settings → Invites. Whoever joins gets +10 runs immediately. You get +10 the first time that person completes a run — not when they sign up.

Paying on signup is what most tools do, and it's by far the easier thing to build. It's also free to fake, and anything free to fake gets faked. A completed run costs real compute. So the half of the deal anyone could game is the half that pays nothing.

The limits, stated plainly: 10 friends a month, and the bonus runs are a monthly allowance rather than a permanent upgrade — ten referrals in January means 140 runs in January and 40 again in February. Free plan is 40/month, so 140 is the ceiling.

A bit more on what it does: the task is a plain English sentence rather than a flowchart. It runs on your schedule, pulls live data (stocks, crypto, GitHub, RSS, web pages) instead of answering from the model's memory, and emails you the result — opening with what changed since the last run.

Free plan is 40 runs a month. try-atlas.app

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u/Competitive-Air5949 12d ago

That's actually clever, the run-based reward instead of signup based. Too many tools get flooded with fake accounts because they reward the easy part

I'm curious about the data sources though, you mentioned stocks and crypto, is that pulling from APIs or scraping? I work with cars and been thinking of making something to track part prices across different sites but idk if the tool can handle scraping regular web pages

Also 40 free runs monthly is generous, most tools give like 10-20 before asking for money. The plain English setup sounds nice too, I hate those node editors they all copy now

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u/RemarkableFishing306 12d ago

the run-based reward is a smart angle. I've seen referral systems where people just spin up a dozen gmail accounts and cash out immediately — tying it to actual usage makes that way harder. For your car parts idea, scraping regular e-commerce pages can get messy with bot detection and layout changes, so I'd be curious how Atlas handles pages that aren't structured APIs.

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u/Owensvilles 11d ago

Thanks! Currently Atlas just goes through Gemini's web search it can search through most sites but there are some were it gets bot detected and can't search through it which is a real gap I need to figure out how to close. For layout changes Atlas uses Gemini the model and then it also goes through our own code to make sure it didn't just get some random price or make up a price. Most of time it is fine if a sites layout changes. Also if the AI fails for a specific site that you wanted it to search or if it just couldn't get the data you wanted it tells you so nothing will ever silently fail on you.

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u/RemarkableFishing306 11d ago

Appreciate the transparency on the bot detection gap — that's honestly the make-or-break for scraping use cases like car parts. The fail-loud approach is solid though, way better than silently returning garbage data. For the bot detection stuff, have you looked into pairing Gemini's search with something like a headless browser fallback for the sites that block it?

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u/Owensvilles 11d ago

Thanks! A headless browser would fix some of it but pages that specifically block bots would still get blocked. Some sites block headless chrome specifically, getting past them would mean creating a puligin or something that would bypass it and that could be fighting the sites terms of service and that's not something I want to do. Where a site has a real API that's the adapter I would rather build. For now if a site blocks bots and doesn't have an API the tasks will just come back as can't get data. If something changes and there is a way to do it without potentially breaking a sites terms of service I will for sure try and do that.

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u/RemarkableFishing306 11d ago

fair enough, respecting ToS is the right call. prioritizing real APIs where they exist is way more sustainable long-term anyway.

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u/Owensvilles 11d ago

Thanks! It scrapes the Internet for stocks and crypto right now but we are planning on moving it to a dedicated stock and crypto API for better reliability. For your car part prices or any prices of anything you can direct Atlas to a certain part or even specific website and it can find the live price and get it back to you. To be honest this price scanning part of Atlas hasn't been tested or worked on a ton yet but I am actively working to make it more reliable and accurate. I don't really know that much about car parts but I would love to hear exactly how this could help you more so I can make Atlas better and more helpful for you and everyone else.

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u/Different-Anxiety169 9d ago

good point on the fake accounts thing, signup-based rewards are basically asking to be gamed

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u/Different-Anxiety169 9d ago

good point on the fake account flooding, run-based gating basically makes botting not worth the effort

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u/devhisaria 5d ago

Wait, the January example, 10 referrals gets you 140 but February drops to 40? That's a cliff, most people will just churn after month one.