21 August 2026 · 9 min read

Setting up investment plans, tiers and return schedules

A plan is a small set of rules, and every one of them changes what you owe. It is worth understanding each field before you type numbers into it.

Anatomy of a plan

The field people misread is return percentage. It is almost always per interval. A plan at 2 percent daily for 30 days is not 2 percent, it is 60 percent before you account for the capital. Check which your software means before publishing anything, because the gap between those two readings is the whole business.

Capital returned is the other one worth being careful with. A plan that returns the deposit at the end owes far more than one where the deposit is consumed. Both models exist. Users read them very differently, so say clearly which yours is.

Choosing a payout interval

Shorter intervals feel more generous and create more work. Daily payouts mean daily processing, daily support questions, and a queue that never empties.

Longer intervals reduce all of that but feel slower to users, who often judge a platform by how soon they see something happen.

A common compromise is daily accrual with withdrawal on request, so the number moves every day while the actual payout happens when the user asks. It gives the feeling of daily returns without a daily payout run.

Compounding, and why it needs a cap

Compounding means returns are added to the invested amount rather than the withdrawable balance, so the next interval calculates on a larger base.

Users like it. It is also the fastest way for your liability to grow in a way that does not look alarming until it is. A plan compounding at a modest rate produces a very different number after sixty intervals than most people expect when they set it up.

If you offer compounding, do two things. Cap the number of intervals it can compound for, and model the total on paper before you publish it. Take the maximum investment, apply the percentage for the full duration with compounding, and look at the number you would owe on a single deposit. If that number is uncomfortable, the plan is wrong. The same plan worked through at four different intervals, simple against compounding, is in how are investment returns calculated across payout intervals?

How many tiers should you run?

Three or four is usually right. Enough that different deposit sizes have somewhere to go, few enough that a new user can read the page and choose.

Tiers normally differ by minimum amount and percentage: a lower entry with a lower return, a higher entry with a better one. That is a rational structure and users understand it without explanation.

What does not work is eight tiers with small differences. It looks like choice and reads as confusion, and it makes your own liability harder to hold in your head. If you cannot describe your plan structure in one sentence, it is too complicated.

Editing plans without breaking what is already running

Two rules, and good software enforces both for you.

Disable rather than delete: Retiring a plan should hide it from new investors while every existing investment continues on its original terms. Software that deletes the plan and orphans those investments will give you a very bad afternoon and a queue of angry users.

Edits must not apply retroactively: If you change a plan from 2 percent to 1.5 percent, investments opened yesterday keep 2 percent. Anything else means you changed a deal after somebody accepted it, and users notice immediately.

Test both before launch, on your own demo, with a test account. Create a plan, open an investment in it, then edit and disable the plan and see what happens to the investment. Five minutes now against a real incident later.

Mistakes that show up later

Setting the percentage before doing the arithmetic: Work out what the plan owes at maximum investment across its full duration first. The panel accepts any number you type; it will not warn you.

No maximum amount: One large deposit into an uncapped high return plan can represent more liability than everything else combined.

Launching with too many plans: Start with two or three. Adding a plan later is easy. Retiring one that people are already in is not.

Not writing down why each number was chosen: In three months you will want to change something and will not remember what the original reasoning was.

The arithmetic behind the percentage is covered separately in setting ROI percentages you can actually pay. For the screens themselves, see the admin panel page.

Common questions

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