Copy a referral link on your phone without breaking it

To copy a Starlink referral link on a phone without breaking it, press and hold the link itself (not the words around it) until a menu appears, then choose the copy option, usually labelled “Copy Link” on iPhone or “Copy link address” in Chrome on Android. Avoid dragging selection handles across the text: that’s how people cut off the code or pick up a trailing period or quote mark. After pasting, check the end of the link. It should finish with ?referral=RC- and the code (sometimes followed by &utm_… tags), and nothing else.

Why phone selection breaks links

A Starlink referral link is long. On a narrow screen it wraps across two or three lines, and the code sits at the very end. When you select it by hand:

• The selection stops short. Phones try to guess word boundaries, and a link is full of slashes, dots and hyphens. It’s easy to end up with …/residential?refer and nothing after it.
• The selection runs long. The link often sits inside a sentence: Here's my link: https://… . A hand selection can grab the full stop, a closing quote or a bracket. Some browsers tolerate that; for a referral code, a stray character on the end could mean the code doesn’t match.
• The link is split by a line break. In some messages and emails, a long link is broken over two lines. Selecting one line gets half.

The press-and-hold menu avoids all three because it copies the link’s actual address, not the visible text.

Copying on iPhone

1. Find the link in Messages, Mail, WhatsApp or wherever it arrived. It’s usually blue or underlined, or shown as a preview card.
2. Touch and hold the link until a menu or page preview appears. (In Safari, touching and holding a link shows a preview of the page along with a menu.)
3. Choose the copy option, typically “Copy Link”. Some apps use “Copy” or put it under a share button. Wording varies by app and iOS version.
4. Don’t tap “Open” yet unless you’re opening it in the browser you’ll order in.

If the link shows as a preview card (a box with a picture and title), touch and hold the card; the same menu usually appears.

If the message contains only the bare RC-… code and no link, there’s nothing to copy that will work: ask the sender for the full link. See someone texted you just the RC- code.

Copying on Android

1. Find the link in Messages, Gmail, WhatsApp or similar.
2. Press and hold the link until a menu pops up.
3. Choose the copy option. In Chrome this is usually “Copy link address”; in many messaging apps it’s “Copy link” or “Copy”. Wording varies by app, phone maker and Android version.
4. If the app only offers “Copy text” for the whole message, paste it into a note first and then copy just the link from there (press and hold the link in the note).

Copying from an app’s built-in browser

If you tapped the link and it opened inside a messaging or social app (you’ll see the app’s own toolbar rather than Safari or Chrome), you’re in an in-app browser. It can work, but it’s a separate browser from the one you’ll probably pay in, and it’s easy to lose track of.

Look for a menu (often ⋯ or a share icon) with “Open in browser”, “Open in Safari” or “Copy link”. Use it to move to your normal browser. Then check the address bar there still has the referral part.

Copying from the address bar

Once a referral link is open in your normal browser and the address bar shows the full link, that’s the cleanest copy you can get:

1. Tap the address bar. The full address appears, often already selected.
2. If it isn’t selected, use “Select All” from the menu, then “Copy”. (Some browsers also offer a copy button right in the address bar menu.)

This is a good way to save a clean copy for later, or to forward to someone you’re helping.

Checking what you copied

Paste the link somewhere you can read it: a note, a message to yourself, or our link and code checker, which runs in your browser and doesn’t send what you paste anywhere. Then check:

If anything’s wrong, go back to the original message and copy again using press-and-hold. Don’t fix it by hand: retyping is where characters go wrong, and Starlink doesn’t say whether a hand-assembled link counts the same as the one the customer copied from their account. See anatomy of a referral link for what each part does.

Then open it in the right place

1. Paste the link into the address bar of the browser you’ll order in, and go.
2. Check the address bar after the page loads. The referral part should still be there.
3. Stay in that tab through the order screens. Starlink doesn’t document whether a referral survives switching browsers, devices or moving into the Starlink app.
4. Before paying, look for “Referral Code Applied” on the order page, which a third-party walkthrough reports when the referral is attached. If you can’t see it, work through the six-question flowchart.

For a new customer, a working referral gives one free month of service on the eligible plan you choose, credited to the second bill.

Saving the link for later

If you’re not ready to order today, keep a clean copy of the link somewhere it won’t get changed:

• A message to yourself (text or email), with the link on its own line and nothing after it.
• A plain note. Some notes apps turn links into rich previews or tidy them up; after saving, tap the link once to check it still opens the full address with ?referral=RC-….
• A browser bookmark, made while the full referral link is open in the address bar. Check the saved address afterwards; most browsers save it exactly.

Avoid saving it as a screenshot. You can’t open a picture, and text recognition from images is another place for a character to slip.

When you come back to order, open the saved link fresh in the browser you’ll pay in. Don’t rely on starlink.com remembering an earlier visit; Starlink doesn’t document whether it does.

Sending a link cleanly (for the person sharing)

If you’re the one sharing your referral, a few habits save your friend from every problem on this page:

1. Copy the link from the Referrals section of your Starlink account, using the copy option there.
2. Paste it into the message on its own line, with nothing straight after it: no full stop, no closing bracket, no emoji touching the last character.
3. Don’t shorten it or rewrite it. Send the full starlink.com address.
4. If you also send the RC- code for reference, put the link first and make clear the link is what to open.

Troubleshooting: symptom, cause, fix

Common mistakes

• Copying just the code. It has nowhere to go without the link.
• Copying a screenshot. You can’t paste a picture into an address bar. Some phones can extract text from images, but that’s another place for characters to go wrong.
• Letting autocorrect touch it. If you paste a link into a message and keep typing, some keyboards “correct” parts of it. Paste it on its own.
• Shortening it to make it neat. Some shorteners and apps drop the part after ?. See shortened referral links.

What to do next

Copy the link with press-and-hold, paste it into the link and code checker, then follow the where-to-enter walkthrough in the same browser.