By Harold Phillips | April 25, 2026
My partner noticed before I did.
I was looking at my Oxio account sometime in late 2023 (I think I was troubleshooting a billing question, something boring) and the referral count was sitting there in the corner of the screen. 214. I said it out loud without meaning to, and my partner looked up from across the room and said, "Wait, you have 214 referrals?"
I did.
I genuinely did not know.
Here's the thing about Oxio: I switched to them in 2021 because I was tired of paying $75 a month for internet that occasionally just… stopped. Shaw had been my ISP through my previous apartment, and when I moved to Leslieville and found out Rogers was the main option, I started looking for alternatives out of stubbornness as much as anything else. I'd been hearing about smaller internet providers for a while (the kind that ride on the big carriers' infrastructure but charge a fraction of the price), and Oxio kept coming up. Quebec-based. Good reviews. Cheaper by about $30 a month for comparable speeds.
I signed up using someone else's referral link, got a credit off my first month, and that was that.
The referral program was in the back of my mind. Oxio gives you a code, you share it, someone signs up, you both get a bill credit. Fairly standard. I added it to my email signature for a while, just a line at the bottom, nothing aggressive. I mentioned it to coworkers when the topic came up. A few times I posted about it on Reddit when someone in a Toronto sub asked for internet recommendations. I wasn't running a campaign. I was just answering questions I actually knew the answer to.
The thing I keep trying to explain to people is that I didn't have a goal. There was no moment where I sat down and thought, "I'm going to collect 200 referrals." It would have felt embarrassing to even think in those terms. I'm an IT project manager. I spend enough time tracking KPIs at work. I wasn't going to come home and set referral targets for my internet provider.
So the credits just… accumulated. Silently. In the background of my actual life.
I think there were a few reasons the number got as high as it did. Oxio's pricing was genuinely good, especially in 2021 and 2022 when a lot of people were suddenly working from home and realizing their $100-a-month Rogers plan was a rip-off. I happened to be on Reddit a fair amount during that period: remote work, less going out, lots of time online. And I have a very IT-project-manager-brain habit of actually answering people's questions thoroughly when they ask for tech recommendations. I can't help it. Someone asks "is Oxio legit?" and I write four paragraphs.
My partner calls this a character flaw. They're not entirely wrong.
I should be honest about the math here because I think people sometimes imagine a more dramatic version than the reality.
Oxio's referral credits aren't enormous. The amounts have shifted over the years. I'm honestly not certain what the current offer is, and I'd encourage you to check the site directly rather than trust whatever I say here, because it's changed at least twice since I signed up. But even at a modest per-referral credit, 214 referrals adds up to a lot of months of free internet. When I finally sat down and looked at it properly, I'd received more in credits than I'd paid in bills over the same period. My effective internet cost for roughly two years was close to zero.
I find this kind of hard to believe even now, and I was there for it.
There's a version of this story that makes me sound like some kind of system-optimizing genius, and I want to be clear that version isn't true. I didn't crack anything. I didn't find a loophole. I just used a good product, was mildly enthusiastic about it online, and the program was generous enough that the math worked out in a way that surprised me.
The more interesting question — the one I've been turning over ever since — is what exactly I did that other people didn't. Because plenty of people use Oxio and don't end up with 200 referrals. Most people, probably. So what was different?
Honestly, I think it was just persistence without pressure. I kept the code accessible. I answered questions when people asked. I didn't lead with the referral. I led with the recommendation, and the referral was a footnote. And I did that consistently for a couple of years without ever really thinking about it. No campaign, no strategy, no tracking spreadsheet (shocking, I know, given the spreadsheet I now maintain for this).
That low-key consistency seems to matter more than any particular technique. I've seen people share referral codes in a way that reads as desperate, and it puts everyone off. The code I shared wasn't a pitch. It was more like: "Here's the thing I use, here's why I like it, and if you want to try it, this gets you a discount." That's it. That's actually it.
The Beans footnote on this story: I came home one afternoon to find him sitting directly on the laptop keyboard in a way that had somehow, through sheer cat physics, opened three browser tabs and navigated to my Oxio account settings. I don't know if he was checking my credit balance or just trying to cancel my service out of spite. It's genuinely impossible to know.
My internet bill right now is about $12 a month. I have credits that should last another year or so at the current rate. Eventually they'll run out, and I'll go back to paying full price, which is still cheaper than Rogers. But for now I'm essentially paying a toonie every few days for 500 Mbps internet in Toronto.
I would have found this unbelievable in 2020. I find it only slightly less unbelievable now.
If you're curious about Oxio, I've got a referral link, and you'll see the disclosure at the bottom. But honestly, the point of this post isn't really about Oxio specifically. It's more that I've been thinking lately about how the most effective version of any referral strategy is the one where you stop thinking of it as a strategy. You recommend the thing because the thing is good. The credits follow. Not always, not at this scale, but more than you'd expect.
My partner is still annoyed that I didn't notice for two years.
Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.