This guide is for the other side of affiliate marketing: you sell a SaaS product or digital product, and you want to start paying other people to refer customers to you. The four tools below all track referrals and pay your affiliates — but they meter the bill in completely different ways, and that difference matters more than the feature lists.
Starter, for up to $7,500/mo in affiliate-attributed revenue. No transaction fee on any plan.
Starter, for up to $5,000/mo in affiliate-driven revenue. 14-day trial, no card required.
Launch, billed monthly ($74/mo billed annually). Flat fee — the price does not follow your sales.
Main platform pricing is not published — confirmed in a sales demo. A separate Spark entry point is $0/mo plus a fee on payouts (see detail section).
| Rewardful | FirstPromoter | Tapfiliate | PartnerStack | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | SaaS on Stripe launching a first program | Subscription businesses on varied billing providers | Sellers mixing online stores and subscriptions | B2B SaaS that wants partners recruited for them |
| How pricing is metered | Monthly revenue your affiliates generate | Monthly revenue your affiliates generate | Affiliates, clicks and conversions per month | Quote based on program size, features and support; Spark tier meters payouts instead |
| Published plans | Starter $49/mo (up to $7,500/mo affiliate revenue) · Growth $99/mo (up to $15,000) · Enterprise from $149/mo (entry tier up to $30,000) | Starter $49/mo (up to $5,000/mo affiliate revenue) · Business $99/mo (up to $15,000) · Enterprise from $149/mo (above $15,000) | Launch $89/mo, $74/mo billed annually · Scale $179/mo, $149/mo billed annually · Enterprise custom | Launch / Growth / Enterprise — no public prices. Spark: $0/mo plus 10% of the commissions you pay out |
| Fee on top of the subscription | 0% transaction fee on every plan. Optional Managed Payouts costs 3% of payouts if you let Rewardful send the money for you | No payout fee listed on the pricing page | No percentage of sales. Overage only: extra clicks and conversions beyond your plan are billed per 1,000 | Main platform: any payout fee is part of the quote — it is not published. Spark: 10% of commissions paid out |
| Billing / store integrations that drive tracking | Stripe and Paddle. If you bill anywhere else, this tool is not an option | Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly and Braintree | 30+ integrations including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Stripe, plus API and postback tracking | Partner links and deal registration with CRM integrations; tracking model differs from the billing-sync tools |
| Plan caps to watch | Starter: 1 campaign, 2 team members. Affiliates and visitors unlimited on all plans | Starter: 1,000 affiliates, 3 campaigns. Both caps lift on Business | Launch: 50 affiliates, 5,000 clicks and 500 conversions a month. Scale: 150 affiliates, 100,000 clicks, 10,000 conversions | No partner-count cap published; scope is set in the contract |
| Can it recruit affiliates for you? | No marketplace — you bring your own affiliates | No marketplace — you bring your own promoters | Recruitment tools to invite your own customers; no managed B2B partner network comparable to PartnerStack's marketplace | Yes — a marketplace of 100,000+ active B2B partners is the core selling point of the main platform. Note: Spark accounts cannot recruit from the network |
| Free trial | 14 days on all plans | 14 days, no credit card required | 14 days | No self-serve trial on the main platform — demo-led. Spark is self-serve |
| Trade-off to know | Success moves you up a tier automatically, and the billing-provider list stops at Stripe / Paddle (Paddle appears to mean Paddle Classic — check if you use Paddle Billing) | The entry revenue ceiling ($5,000/mo) is the lowest here, so a working program outgrows Starter quickly | Highest entry price, and the caps that bite are headcount and conversion counts, which are easy to misjudge before you launch | You cannot budget it from a web page: no published price, a sales cycle before you start, and a scale of platform most first programs do not need |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026 (Prices checked November 2026). Annual billing lowers several of these: Rewardful and FirstPromoter charge 10 months for a year, and Tapfiliate's annual rates are shown in the table. None of the figures above include the commissions you choose to pay your own affiliates, or your payment processor's fees — those are separate and usually larger. Plans change — always confirm the current price and limits on the vendor's site before you buy.
The headline monthly price is the least informative number on these pricing pages, because each tool raises it on a different trigger. The table below is simple arithmetic on the published prices above: monthly billing for 12 months, software fees only. It excludes the commissions you pay your affiliates (you set those, and you would owe them on any tool) and your payment processor's fees.
| Affiliate-driven revenue | Rewardful | FirstPromoter | Tapfiliate |
|---|---|---|---|
| $2,000/month (just launched) | Starter: $49 × 12 = $588/year | Starter: $49 × 12 = $588/year | Launch: $89 × 12 = $1,068/year ($888 billed annually), assuming an average referred order of $50 — about 40 conversions, inside the caps |
| $10,000/month (program is working) | Growth: $99 × 12 = $1,188/year — the $7,500 ceiling pushes you up | Business: $99 × 12 = $1,188/year — the $5,000 ceiling pushes you up | Still Launch: $1,068/year if you stay within 50 affiliates and 500 conversions (about 200 conversions at a $50 average) — revenue alone does not move this price |
| $40,000/month (scaling) | Enterprise starts at $149/mo but its entry tier covers up to $30,000 — so $1,788/year is a floor, not the total; the tier above is not published | Enterprise from $149/mo — again, $1,788/year is a floor | Scale: $179 × 12 = $2,148/year ($1,788 billed annually), assuming conversions stay within 10,000/month |
The percentage-fee fork. Among these four, the only published "low monthly price plus a percentage" offer is PartnerStack Spark: $0/month plus 10% of the commissions you pay out. Set that against a $49/month flat plan and the break-even is exact: 10% of payouts equals $49 when you pay out $490/month to affiliates. Below $490/month in payouts, Spark is the cheaper software bill; above it, the flat $49 plan is cheaper — and Spark also excludes recruiting from the PartnerStack network, so the comparison is never price alone. The same lens applies inside Rewardful: its optional Managed Payouts at 3% of payouts means fully automating $1,000/month of affiliate payouts costs $30/month on top of your plan, versus $0 if you send PayPal or Wise payouts yourself.
How to read a small program's real burden. At $500/month of affiliate-driven revenue, a $49 tool is already 9.8% of that revenue in software fees alone, before the commissions you set and processor fees. "Only $49 a month" is only cheap relative to a program that is already producing. Conversely, at launch the revenue ceilings of Rewardful and FirstPromoter are rarely the binding constraint — your billing provider and whether you can recruit anyone at all will decide things first.
Rewardful is affiliate and referral tracking built specifically around Stripe: connect your Stripe account and it follows referred customers through trials, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations and refunds, adjusting commissions to match, with a two-way sync that surfaces affiliate data inside Stripe itself. Paddle is the only other billing platform supported. Starter ($49/mo) covers up to $7,500/mo in affiliate-attributed revenue with unlimited affiliates but just 1 campaign and 2 team members. Growth ($99/mo) raises the ceiling to $15,000 and adds unlimited campaigns, a branded affiliate portal, custom domain and private campaigns. Enterprise (from $149/mo) starts at up to $30,000/mo on its entry tier. Every plan charges a 0% transaction fee, annual billing costs 10 months, and there is a 14-day trial. One caution from the vendor's own ecosystem: multiple sources describe the Paddle support as Paddle Classic only, so if you bill through Paddle Billing, verify before you commit.
FirstPromoter runs affiliate, referral and influencer programs for subscription businesses, and its defining choice is breadth of billing integrations: it reads billing events natively from Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly and Braintree, so commissions follow renewals, upgrades, refunds and cancellations in whichever system actually charges your customers. Commission structures are the most flexible of the self-serve three: percentage or flat, recurring or lifetime, tiered rates, multi-tier commissions up to three levels, and double-sided rewards. Starter ($49/mo) covers up to $5,000/mo in affiliate-driven revenue, 1,000 affiliates and 3 campaigns. Business ($99/mo) covers up to $15,000 and lifts the affiliate and campaign caps. Enterprise (from $149/mo) covers programs above that. The pricing page lists no fee on payouts, and the 14-day trial needs no card.
Tapfiliate is the generalist of the four: 30+ pre-built integrations (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Stripe and more) plus a JavaScript pixel, REST API and server-to-server postback tracking, so a store, a subscription product and a landing page can feed one affiliate program. Its pricing logic is also the odd one out — a flat subscription with no percentage of sales, where the tiers are fenced by usage instead of revenue. Launch ($89/mo, $74/mo billed annually) allows 50 affiliates, 1 program, 5,000 clicks and 500 conversions a month, with overage billed per extra 1,000 clicks or conversions. Scale ($179/mo, $149/mo billed annually) raises those to 150 affiliates, unlimited programs, 100,000 clicks and 10,000 conversions, and adds multi-level commissions and automated payouts. Enterprise is custom. High-ticket digital products, which generate few conversions per dollar of revenue, can stay on Launch far longer than the revenue figures alone would suggest.
PartnerStack is a partner relationship management platform for B2B software companies: affiliate, referral, reseller, co-sell and influencer programs in one system, with partner onboarding, enablement, lead and deal registration, CRM integrations and automated payouts. Its decisive difference from the other three is the Marketplace — a network of more than 100,000 active B2B partners (the vendor's own pages cite figures in the 117,000+ range) who can discover and apply to your program, instead of you recruiting every partner yourself. The trade is transparency and weight: the main platform's Launch, Growth and Enterprise plans publish no prices at all — pricing is based on program size, feature needs and support level, and is confirmed during a demo, with guided onboarding on every plan. Separately, Spark is a self-serve entry point at $0/month plus 10% of the commissions you pay out, with simple Stripe sale tracking — but Spark accounts explicitly cannot recruit from the PartnerStack network, so it is not a cheap way into the marketplace.
Tracking lives or dies on the connection to whatever charges your customers. Stripe-only narrows you to all four; Chargebee, Recurly or Braintree points to FirstPromoter; Shopify or WooCommerce orders point to Tapfiliate; anything outside a tool's list rules that tool out completely, however good its dashboard looks.
Rewardful, FirstPromoter and Tapfiliate are tracking and payout infrastructure: the partners have to come from your audience, customers and outreach. If your plan depends on a network finding partners for you, that is PartnerStack's marketplace — and the main reason to accept its quote-only pricing.
Run your expected affiliate revenue through each ladder before you compare: revenue-metered tools step up as you succeed, Tapfiliate steps up on headcount and conversions, and percentage offers step up with every payout. Then add the cost nobody lists first: the commissions you will set, which dwarf the software fee on any working program.
Use the 14-day trials to push a referred test customer through a trial period, an upgrade, a downgrade and a refund. That sequence — not the first click — is where affiliate tracking breaks, and it is exactly what the billing-synced tools claim to handle. PartnerStack's equivalent check happens in the demo: ask what the full first-year cost is, including any fee on payouts.
Three jobs: attributing a customer to the affiliate who referred them, calculating the commission you owe under the rules you set, and running the payouts and affiliate-facing portal. You are not paying for the commissions themselves — those are set by you and paid to your affiliates on top of the software fee, along with your payment processor's charges. None of these tools changes what your product earns; they administer the program you design.
With one partial exception, no — and any tool that implied otherwise would be overselling. Rewardful, FirstPromoter and Tapfiliate assume you recruit your own partners from your customers and audience. PartnerStack's marketplace is the exception: partners can discover your program there, though the vendor's own materials still frame results around active program management, not the listing alone. No tool on this page guarantees referred revenue.
Its pricing page states that pricing is based on partner program size, feature needs and level of support, with the final plan confirmed during a demo. That is why this guide lists it as quote-only rather than repeating third-party estimates as if they were vendor prices. PartnerStack does publish one price: Spark, its self-serve entry tier, is $0/month plus 10% of the commissions you pay out — but Spark cannot recruit from the PartnerStack network.
On published prices, Rewardful and FirstPromoter both start at $49/mo with 14-day trials, and that buys a real program if your billing setup fits. Spark's $0 subscription is cheaper still while your monthly payouts to affiliates stay under about $490 (where its 10% payout fee reaches $49), but it is a lighter tool with no network recruiting. The honest catch at this scale: the software fee is the small part — your time recruiting partners is the real cost of a first program.
Usually one of three things. Billing coverage: FirstPromoter adds Chargebee, Recurly and Braintree to Rewardful's Stripe/Paddle pair. Pricing meter: Tapfiliate charges by affiliates, clicks and conversions instead of affiliate revenue, so its bill does not rise when your referred sales do. Scope: PartnerStack adds a recruiting marketplace and reseller/co-sell programs, at quote-only pricing. If none of those is your reason for switching, the honest answer is that the tools overlap heavily and the switch may not change your results.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published specifications and pricing, not from running live programs on each platform. Where a judgment appears — for example, that a $49 fee is 9.8% of a $500/month program's referred revenue — it is arithmetic on published numbers, shown with its working so you can redo it with your own figures.