Wafer sells model inference, so developer sign-ups are the business. A two-week Reddit retargeting campaign this August delivered 1,335 of them at $0.88 each — and OpenRouter's public chart shows tokens processed through Wafer climbing to fifteen times the pre-campaign baseline before the flight even ended.
Client Stats
$0.88
cost per sign-up
1,335
sign-ups in two weeks
15x
daily tokens processed on OpenRouter
$0.04
cost per click
Wafer sells AI compute — hosted inference for open models. The buyers are developers, and developers live on Reddit. They also run ad blockers, distrust marketing, and have seen every GPU-cloud pitch twice.
Wafer already had a Reddit footprint from months of organic work. The question was whether paid could turn that familiarity into accounts without the usual developer-tool acquisition costs — cold campaigns for dev products routinely price a sign-up in the tens of dollars.
The campaign ran August 8–22. Reddit’s pixel tracked 1,335 sign-ups — 1,270 from clicks, 65 from views — against $1,178.35 in spend: $0.88 per account. The dashboard:
But sign-ups are just Reddit’s attribution. The real effect shows up on a public chart nobody can massage: tokens processed through Wafer on OpenRouter. Through August 12 — the day the ads started delivering — Wafer’s baseline sat around 4–5B tokens a day. August 13: 9.9B. August 18: 41B. August 21: 74.1B, roughly fifteen times the pre-campaign baseline, and still climbing.
The multiplier is the sequence. Months of organic threads made Wafer a name developers had already seen in rooms they trust, and retargeting those same readers is why a click cost four cents and a sign-up cost under a dollar. Run the ads first and you pay dev-tool prices. Run them second and the usage curve bends.
All the upsides of having a working Reddit marketing strategy
that is not the end of the strategy. It is the start of it.
is usually one door over from the room with your industry's name on it.
you own stays indexed. You stop paying us, it keeps ranking.
Iuliia ShnaiAug 19, 2026
Papermark
Reddit is doing so much for us in search. Papermark is now the top recommendation on Reddit in our category, and that matters.
Imran
@isb
Paul picks a CPM number and then creates a reddit campaign to hit that. Like Chappelle writes jokes.
Aug 20, 2026
134 referrals
to MessageDesk from Reddit in 90 days. The same volume ChatGPT sent them.
166K views
from a single organic post for a rug brand. 67 upvotes, 52 comments.
HanafiJul 27, 2026
Inflow
Great results so far. The subreddit AEO work especially attracts the leads we love: qualified, not problematic, and with money.
KyleMay 19, 2026
MessageDesk
Love it, this is great. More I say. Real, traceable Reddit users became leads and booked meetings.
“Most agencies do a bit of everything for everyone. Paul picked the hardest channel on the internet and built real credibility on it. That's why I advise Spacestation.”
Gregory Kennedy
VibeYourSaaS
JamesAug 18, 2026
Ethos
Love it. Our AI citations have been rising steadily since June and the growth curve looks good. Even in negative threads about us there's now organic fightback.
JeremyMay 29, 2026
EcomCPA
Amazing, great job. We now hold multiple first-page Google spots for the exact terms our buyers search, from international tax to Shopify accountant.
#1
The top Reddit recommendation in its category, and climbing search because of it.
ShivamMay 18, 2026
Founder, Floqer
Reddit is looking good. I'm impressed by the work these guys have been doing. My only question was how we could press even harder.
J.P. MohlerAug 5, 2026
CPO & Co-founder, General Legal
We told Paul we only care about one thing: General Legal coming up when someone searches AI law firm. Now the top cited source in those AI answers is a Reddit thread his team made.
John Wright
@johnwrightai
Thanks Paul, launched it at an affiliate conference today day 1 and the response is overwhelming.
May 19, 2026
Miguel Castillo-ClarkMay 27, 2026
1v1Me
The AMA they ran with our pro player crushed my expectations. Ads, our subreddit, AI citations, they handle all of it.
Grant WalkerMar 5, 2026
Argo IQ
Super impressed with what they've built. A very cool project.
Free auditNot a generic audit. Your actual numbers: where you get mentioned, where your three closest competitors get mentioned instead, and what your own analytics say about traffic you are already losing.
