Introducing Beacon: Design Any Incentive Program with AI

Every conversation we have about Siren starts in a different place.

Last week it was someone who runs an art marketplace and wanted to pay royalties to artists every time a print sold. The week before that, an agency owner trying to figure out DoorDash-style subcontractor payments. Before that, a course platform where instructors needed to earn revenue on their own courses while external promoters earned affiliate commissions on the whole catalog. The specifics change every time, but the underlying need is always the same: “I have a way I want to pay people, and I need software that doesn’t fight me on it.”

Every single one of these is possible in Siren. That’s the whole point of the product. Siren isn’t a traditional affiliate plugin with one program and a commission rate. It’s a toolkit for building any incentive-driven system you can think of, using combinations of programs, program groups, and distributors. The architecture is deliberately flexible, because real businesses don’t fit into templates. We wrote about this when we introduced multiple programs as a core design pattern, and it’s become the thing that sets Siren apart.

But flexibility creates its own problem. The building blocks exist, and they’re powerful, but knowing which ones to combine and how to configure them takes experience. Do you need one program or three? Should those programs live in a group? Do you need a distributor running on a monthly schedule, or is per-transaction payout enough? People don’t want to become Siren experts. They want their program running.

We kept hearing the same follow-up question: “Okay, so Siren can do this. But how do I actually set it up?”

What Is Beacon?

That question is exactly why Beacon exists.

Beacon is an AI assistant that knows Siren inside and out. Every feature, every configuration pattern, every recipe we’ve ever published, and every strategy we’ve discussed on the Partnership podcast. It connects to AI tools you already use (Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, Cursor) through something called MCP, or Model Context Protocol. Think of MCP as a standard way for AI assistants to plug into specialized knowledge and tools. Your AI assistant gets access to everything Beacon knows, and that’s a lot.

It’s free for everyone. You don’t need a Siren license. You don’t need to sign up for anything. Just connect the server and start asking questions.

Describe what you want in plain language and Beacon helps you design it. Not generic advice, not a link to a docs page you have to interpret on your own. An actual program configuration, tailored to your business, built from a real understanding of how Siren’s pieces fit together.

But knowing documentation is table stakes. What makes Beacon different is what it can build.

How Does a Conversation Become a Working Program?

Say you run an online course platform. You want to pay instructors a royalty whenever their course sells, and you also want an affiliate program so external promoters can earn commissions on any course. Two different programs, two different incentive structures, two different groups of people getting paid.

You describe this to your AI assistant with Beacon connected. Beacon knows that the instructor royalty needs to track which collaborator owns the course that sold, while the affiliate program needs to track who referred the customer. It knows these should probably live in a program group so they don’t double-pay on the same transaction, because without a group, both programs could fire on the same sale, paying an instructor and an affiliate for what should be a single conversion. It knows how to set the commission structures, the tracking rules, the payout conditions.

From that conversation, Beacon generates a recipe. A recipe is a complete, ready-to-install configuration that creates all of the programs, groups, and commission structures in one step. No piecing things together manually. You review what Beacon proposed, click install, and your Siren installation has both programs running, configured correctly, and ready for collaborators to start earning.

The recipe library already has over 30 pre-built configurations, and the range is deliberately wide. The simplest is a basic affiliate program that gets you running in minutes. From there, things get more interesting. The course creator royalty program handles exactly the instructor scenario I just described, while the full sales funnel program goes further by combining lead generation and sales conversion into a multi-component setup with its own program group and distributor. Some recipes cover entirely different use cases, like a coupon-based influencer program built around social media promotion, or a refer-a-friend program designed for customer-to-customer referrals rather than traditional affiliate marketing.

The recipe library covers common patterns. But the real power is when you need something that isn’t common at all.

What About the Programs Nobody’s Built Before?

Remember the car dealership wanting monthly sales bonuses? Or the co-founders who needed to split profits based on each person’s contribution? Or the mouse mat artist wanting royalties per print sold? These aren’t in any template library anywhere. They’re genuinely novel configurations, and they’re also exactly the kind of programs people come to Siren to build.

Beacon doesn’t just search a recipe database. It understands Siren’s building blocks at a deep level, starting with programs and the conditions that determine when collaborators earn rewards. That understanding extends to incentive resolvers (the logic that calculates who gets paid and how much), to program groups that prevent conflicts when multiple programs could fire on the same transaction, and to distributors that track aggregate performance over time and schedule payouts on a recurring basis. Beacon sees the whole system, not just the pieces.

So when you describe something Beacon hasn’t seen before, it can reason about which components to combine and generate a brand new recipe from scratch. Take the car dealership. Monthly sales bonuses sound simple enough, but implementing them means understanding that you need a distributor tracking aggregate sales over time, not a standard per-transaction program. The payout should only go to whoever sold the most that month, which means the program structure has to rank competitors against each other. Beacon knows that. It also knows that the co-founders splitting profits need a completely different approach, one where revenue is divided proportionally based on each person’s measurable contribution rather than awarded to a single winner. And the mouse mat artist? That’s a product royalty tied to individual designs, so every print sold automatically pays its creator without anyone manually tracking which art belongs to whom.

These are three very different businesses with three very different incentive structures. None of them require writing code or understanding Siren’s internals. You describe the outcome you want, and Beacon translates it into the right combination of programs, groups, and distributors.

This is the extension of Siren’s original promise. We didn’t just build a flexible system. We built an AI that understands the flexibility and can put it to work on your behalf. It’s the same kind of program design thinking we’ve written about before, where you split customer journeys into distinct roles and let programs collaborate instead of competing. Beacon takes that strategic layer and makes it accessible to everyone, not just the people who’ve read every blog post and docs page we’ve ever published.

Partnership Software Should Work This Way

The whole point of Siren has always been that you shouldn’t be locked into someone else’s idea of what an affiliate program looks like. Most affiliate plugins give you one program, one commission structure, and a handful of settings. If your business doesn’t fit that mold (and most interesting businesses don’t), you’re stuck. You end up hacking around limitations or just settling for a program that doesn’t actually reflect how your business works. We built Siren to be the opposite of that, and we said so from the very beginning.

Beacon is the natural next step. If the software is flexible enough to build anything, the guidance should be flexible enough to help you build anything.

“Siren was always about giving people the pieces to build whatever program their business actually needs. Beacon closes the loop. Now you don’t have to figure out which pieces go where on your own, you just describe what you’re trying to do and the system helps you get there. That’s what I wanted this to be from day one.”

— Alex Standiford

How Do You Connect Beacon?

Getting started takes about two minutes. Add this server URL to any MCP-compatible AI assistant:

https://beacon.sirenaffiliates.com/beacon/v1/mcp

That works with Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains IDEs, and anything else that supports MCP. We’ve written a full step-by-step setup guide if you want the details.

Once you’re connected, try asking something like: “I want to create a tiered affiliate program where top performers earn higher commissions. What’s the best way to set this up in Siren?” Beacon will walk you through the design, explain why it’s recommending specific components, and generate a recipe you can install directly. You can also ask it to explain existing recipes, compare different program structures, or help you decide whether a distributor makes sense for your use case.

The recipe library is growing, and Beacon’s knowledge base is expanding with new documentation and community patterns all the time. But don’t wait for us to build your specific use case. Connect Beacon now, tell it what you’re trying to build, and let it meet you where you are.

If you’ve been sitting on a program idea because you weren’t sure how to configure it, that’s exactly the conversation Beacon was built for. The whole point is that you don’t have to figure this out alone anymore.