What you actually earn on a recurring commission

A commission percentage on its own is close to meaningless. Ten percent of a $99 product pays $9.90. Fifty percent of a $12 product pays $6. The bigger percentage is the smaller cheque. So the only number worth comparing across programmes is dollars per customer per month.

The live numbers

Issara currently has one live opportunity: signing up Thai service businesses — massage shops, nail salons, barbers, Muay Thai gyms — to Toosabai, a booking system. The deal is 50% of every month that shop is billed, for as long as it keeps being billed.

Toosabai does not charge a flat subscription. A shop’s first 100 bookings each month are free. Only in a month where it goes past 100 does it pay ฿399, which Toosabai converts and reports as a flat $12. Your half is $6.

What that compounds to

The interesting property of a standing commission is that month two starts from where month one ended. If you sign up five consistently busy shops a month and none of them churn:

• Month 1 — 5 shops — $30/mo
• Month 3 — 15 shops — $90/mo
• Month 6 — 30 shops — $180/mo
• Month 12 — 60 shops — $360/mo
• Month 24 — 120 shops — $720/mo

That is the honest shape of it. It is not fast. What it is, is durable — the month-12 figure does not require you to keep doing month-1’s work.

How many customers your target really takes

Pick the monthly income you actually want — Issara calls it your freedom number — and divide by $6:

• $500/month — about 84 busy shops
• $1,000/month — about 167 busy shops
• $2,000/month — about 334 busy shops

Three hundred shops is a serious number and we would rather you see it now than four months in. It is reachable — Thailand has tens of thousands of small service businesses and most of them still run a paper book — but it is a real body of work, not a weekend.

Why the split is this generous

Fifty percent is unusual, and it is fair to be suspicious of it. The reason it works is that serving one shop costs under a dollar a month. Of $12 in revenue: $6 to the person who brought the customer, about $1 in cost, roughly $5 left over. It is affordable precisely because the underlying product is cheap to run.

It is also standing rather than tapering. Commission that expires after twelve months is not recurring income, it is a delayed one-off — and the whole promise here is a number you can actually live on.

What can reduce it

Two things, and both are worth knowing up front. A shop that stops crossing 100 bookings stops paying, so that month’s commission does not appear. And a refund cancels the commission for the month it applies to — not your whole history with that customer, just that period.

If the arithmetic above looks like work you would actually do, the playbook for signing up your first shop is the practical next step.