Herd
Herd vs Cello — honest version

The referral tool you use
before you need Cello.

Cello is a real company building a real thing. They're great. They're also priced, shaped, and sold for a specific stage of B2B SaaS — the stage after you've proven referrals work. Herd is for the stage before that.

Pick Herd if
  • You're between $0 and $15M ARR.
  • You're on Stripe Billing today.
  • You want to be live this week, not next quarter.
  • A $49/mo minimum before you've shipped a single reward feels wrong.
  • You'd rather pay a % of referred revenue than a flat fee that hits your credit card whether the program works or not.
  • You don't have 5 days of SDK integration work in your sprint.
Pick Cello if
  • You're past $15M ARR and referrals are already a real channel.
  • You have a dedicated growth hire who lives inside your referral program.
  • You need SSO, SOC 2, custom DPAs, and a procurement cycle.
  • Multi-currency automated payouts across 40+ countries are table stakes.
  • Your CFO wants predictable flat-fee pricing, not a revenue share.
  • You can afford a 5-day SDK build because the program clears that cost in a week.
The stage is the question

Most referral tools pretend to serve every stage.
We don't.

Herd builds for one scaling phase well: roughly $0 to $15M ARR, on Stripe, founder or early growth hire running the program. Cello builds for the phase after that — PLG-stage teams with partnerships leads, multi-currency payout needs, and procurement cycles.

Trying to be both is how companies lose both. So we're honest: if the Herd one-liner ("free until $1K/mo, then a rate that bends down as you scale — 10% → 5% → 2% → flat contract") doesn't match your shape anymore, Cello is the next tool. We will actively say so on a call.

Graduated customers aren't churn. They're proof the product worked. Some of the best case studies we'll ever have are going to end with "Herd took us from $1M to $12M. We're now on Cello." That's not a failure mode — that's the shape of doing this well.

One honest line

If you're reading this,
you're probably a Herd customer.

People comparing Herd and Cello are almost always somewhere in the $0–15M ARR band trying to figure out what referral tool to start with. You start with Herd. When you outgrow us, we'll tell you.

At a glance
  • Starts atFree
  • Setup~5 minutes
  • Fit$0–$15M ARR
  • Sold viaSelf-serve, no demo
  • GraduationClean handoff to Cello when ready