All offers / Everyday services / Tello
Examined Jul 27, 2026 Paid in account credit You are paid first Tello pays you $10 as soon as your order goes through. Your friend waits three months.
Your $10 lands as soon as your order completes; the $10 for the person whose link you used lands three months later, which makes their reward a bet on you staying. Tello's headline, "both win $10," is true as far as it goes. What it leaves out is the currency: these are Tello Dollars, account credit and not money, each worth $1 against a Tello bill and nothing anywhere else, so they cannot be cashed out and they cannot be spent outside Tello.
What pays what
| You, creating an account through the link and placing a successful order | $10 now |
|---|---|
| The customer whose link you used | $10 after 3 months |
| How many people they can refer | No limit stated |
| Creating the account without using the specific link | $0 |
| Cashing Tello Dollars out, or spending them elsewhere | Not possible |
| Using $10 against a larger invoice | Blocked, no partial payments |
| If you leave before month three | Referrer gets $0 |
Do this, in this order
- Get the link from someone already on Tello. Existing customers find it by logging into their Tello account and opening their referral link from the dashboard. There is no public code, so this has to come from a person.
- Create the account through that link, not just with the person's name. Both sides are credited only when the new account is created using the specific referral link. Signing up separately and mentioning a friend afterwards does not attach anything.
- Place a successful order. Your $10 triggers when the order goes through, not at account creation, so the credit follows the first real purchase.
- Tell whoever referred you about the three month wait. They are not being paid alongside you; they collect only once you have been with Tello for three months.
- Let the balance build until it can pay a full invoice. Because partial payments are not allowed, credit sitting below your invoice total is unusable.
- Keep the account from going quiet. Tello has published that Tello Dollars expire if no activity is registered on the account for six months, with activity meaning a call or an order placed. We could read that rule in Tello's own material but not on a current, dated terms page, so treat six months as strongly indicated rather than nailed down, and do not let credit sit idle on the strength of it.
What Tello does not publish, and why we are saying so
Most programs on this site have a dated terms document you can hold them to. Tello's referral rules are thinner than that.
There is no dated terms page for the referral program that we could read. The figures above come from Tello's own referral program page and its own published material on Tello Dollars, examined July 24, 2026. What does not exist, as far as we can find, is a versioned terms document with an effective date, which means there is no way to detect a quiet change.
The exclusions are unpublished, not absent. We could not find plan eligibility limits, a port-in requirement, a rule about former customers, a one-per-household rule, or geographic limits stated anywhere reachable. That is not the same as Tello having none. Read it as "Tello does not publish them" and ask support before you build a plan around an assumption.
Whether your $10 survives an early cancellation is unstated. For the referrer the question is moot, since nothing is paid before month three. For you, Tello does not say what happens to an already issued $10 if you leave quickly.
Tello's own blog is out of date on this. Posts on Tello's blog dated back to 2018 describe the reward as instant for both sides with no three month wait. They are readable, they are Tello's, and they are wrong about the current program. If you see the wait denied somewhere, that is almost certainly the source.
There is no stated cap and no stated end date. Tello says you can refer as many friends as you like, and publishes no closing date.
Is it worth your time?
Take the link if you were signing up anyway, because it costs nothing and going in bare pays nothing. Beyond that, be realistic about what $10 of locked credit is worth to you: it only spends at Tello, it will not part-pay a bill, and it may sit untouched for a while before it can do anything at all. What makes this program more likeable than most is the direction of the favor. Almost every referral scheme pays the recruiter first and makes the newcomer wait; Tello does the opposite, and the person who sent you the link is the one carrying three months of risk.
