Why Companies Send Gifts Through Nift Instead of Buying Another Ad

The average buy-now-pay-later user will spend more than $1,600 a year through those services by 2029, eMarketer forecasts, and the platforms collecting those payments have started treating their own checkout screens as media space. What increasingly fills that space is a gift rather than another ad.

Consumers encounter up to 400 ads per day by one industry count; a gift offered inside Klarna’s app draws a 30% click-through rate, Klarna told Retail Touchpoints. One of those channels competes with everything else in the feed. The other arrives as a present.

Behind the gifts sits Nift, built by Boston-based Nift Networks, which has ridden that gap into partnerships with Klarna, Afterpay, Zip, Cash App and, as of late 2025, Clearpay in the UK. Its software matches a partner’s customers with gifts funded by brands hunting for new buyers, and it delivers more than 50 million of those moments a month. That 400-ads figure is Nift’s own count, so the framing serves its pitch. Understanding why a company would pay to give strangers presents means following the money through all three sides of the exchange.

The economics of a thank-you 

Companies send gifts through Nift because a gift can cost less than the advertising it replaces. Liz Kressel, CEO of the digital consultancy Lizard Strategy, described the math to Modern Retail when Afterpay’s program launched: for the brands funding the gifts, “it’s lowering customer acquisition cost.” A brand that would have spent its budget bidding for attention spends it instead on a person already primed to say yes.

Nift CEO Elery Pfeffer frames the same trade against the dominant ad platforms. “Instead of spending most ad dollars on Meta, [brands] can give users a free or heavily discounted gift,” he told Retail Touchpoints.

Numbers available to test that framing come from the companies involved. Klarna reported a 40% gift-activation rate alongside its click-through figures, and Nift cites conversion rates up to 10% for post-checkout placements, per eMarketer. On the company’s own case-study ledger, wine retailer Wine Insiders grew new-customer volume 151% in six months, and participating restaurants average three Nift-driven customers per location per day.

Platforms sending the gifts have their own motive. A thank-you moment costs Klarna or a parking app nothing to host, hands its customers a gift, and produces revenue when a match connects. Timing does the rest of the work: Afterpay attaches gifts to a customer’s second on-time payment, and Klarna has mapped about 20 moments across its customer journey where a gift can land without interrupting anything.

How does Nift make money? 

Nift charges the brands, never the recipients. It runs a cost-per-click model with its commerce partners, per Retail Touchpoints, and describes its revenue to businesses as performance-based: brands pay when the matching works, and the platforms hosting the gifts share in the proceeds. Integration runs through a lightweight SDK or API, a setup the company tells prospective partners takes hours rather than weeks.

For consumers the answer is shorter. Selecting a gift costs nothing, and the company’s FAQ leaves no room for interpretation: “The brands featured on Nift fully fund all gifts offered to you.” A certificate may cover an item outright or a portion of a larger purchase, with terms shown before selection. Nift’s incentive tracks volume; gifts that go unclaimed earn nobody anything.

What brands work with Nift 

Nift’s network splits into two rosters. On one side sit the platforms that deliver gifts at their own thank-you moments:

• Payment and installment providers: Klarna, Afterpay, Zip, Cash App, Clearpay
• Consumer apps and services: ParkMobile, Life360, iHeartMedia, GasBuddy, Planet Fitness
• Retail and technology: Dell, Foot Locker

On the other side sit the gift funders, brands paying to be discovered. Nift’s Deloitte filing listed more than 10,000 companies using the platform, from Ticketmaster, Chewy and Fabletics to wine club Firstleaf, plus thousands of local restaurants inside a network of 15,000-plus businesses. To the brand side, Nift markets access to the customers already inside its partners’ apps.

Both rosters overlap by design. One company can host gifts for its own customers and fund gifts to someone else’s, which is how the network compounds: every new partner adds an audience, and every new brand adds inventory.

What the model has to prove 

Recent history gives the gifting model a graveyard to walk past. Affirm and Afterpay both shut down their in-house perk programs in 2024 over profitability concerns, eMarketer noted in covering the Zip deal. Running points and credits on thin fintech margins broke those programs. Nift’s structure shifts the cost onto brands with acquisition budgets to spend, a real difference, though the burden of proof still sits with the newer model.

A definitional question hangs over the category as well. Nift’s own marketing insists its placements are “not ads; they are personalized gifts,” and a skeptic can fairly ask whether a brand-funded offer with a conversion target is anything else. What separates the two in practice is consent and context: an ad interrupts, and a gift waits to be claimed. How long consumers keep honoring that distinction once every app has a gifting shelf is a question nobody’s data answers yet.

Measurement is the other open question. A brand knows exactly what a gift redemption cost; whether the redeemer comes back takes months to learn, and the most complete numbers so far come from Nift and its partners rather than independent audits. Klarna found that 70% of users who redeemed a gift said they plan to use the brand again, and 72% said the gift changed their view of the funding brand for the better. Those figures await outside verification.

As a channel, the thank-you gift now has scale, named partners and published conversion figures. What it lacks is independent evidence that gratitude converts better than attention. Some 50 million times a month, Nift is running that experiment.

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