Why we price by active partners, not affiliate revenue
Affiliatops team · · 4 min read
Affiliate software has to charge for something, and the choice shapes how customers feel about the product every month. A common model in our category is to price by the revenue your affiliates bring in, either as a percentage or as plan tiers that step up with it. Several of the tools we compare ourselves with work this way.
We went the other way. Affiliatops plans are a flat monthly price, and what moves you between them is how many active partners you have: up to 50 on Starter, up to 500 on Growth, unlimited on Scale. This post explains why, what exactly counts as an active partner, and the cases where this model is not the better deal.
Revenue pricing grows your bill when the program works
The point of an affiliate program is to bring in revenue. If the software bill is tied to that revenue, the bill goes up exactly when the program is doing what you built it to do. A partner who lands a big customer is good news for you and a price increase from your tooling in the same week.
That is not unfair in itself. The vendor’s argument is that you pay more when you get more value, and there is logic to it. Our problem with it is where the cost lands. Your partners already get a share of each referred payment through their commission. Revenue-based pricing adds a second share on top, paid to the software, on the same money. The more successful the program, the more of its revenue goes to people other than you.
We would rather your cost of running a program depend on how big the program is to manage, not on how well it performs. That is also why we don’t take transaction fees or a cut of the commissions you pay out.
A bill you can predict
The second reason is budgeting. Affiliate revenue is lumpy. One partner publishes a comparison post that ranks well, or a newsletter mentions you, and a month’s referred revenue doubles. Under revenue pricing, you find out what that month cost you after it happened.
Partner count moves slowly and you control it. You approve every partner, so you always know how close you are to your plan’s limit before you get there, and the admin shows a warning as you approach it. The price for a given plan is fixed for the period you pay for, with yearly billing charging ten months for twelve.
| Plan | Price | Active partners | Team members |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $19/month | Up to 50 | Up to 2 |
| Growth | $59/month | Up to 500 | Up to 5 |
| Scale | $99/month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Full details, including what each plan adds, are on the pricing page.
What counts as an active partner
An active partner is an approved partner in your workspace. Partners who applied but were never approved don’t count, and neither do partners you deactivated. Whether a partner sent a click this month doesn’t matter; approval is what counts.
We picked the definition you control directly over one based on activity, such as partners who drove a sale this month, because an activity-based count would bring back the problem we were avoiding: your bill would rise when partners start performing.
The limit is soft on purpose. When you reach it, nothing that affects money stops. Tracking, commissions and payouts keep running for every partner you already have. What pauses is approving new partners: applicants can still sign up through your join link and wait under Pending until you move up a plan or deactivate someone.
Where this model is worse for you
No pricing model is best for every program, and ours has real trade-offs.
- Programs with many low-activity partners pay for all of them. If you approve everyone who applies and most never send a click, those partners still count. The fix is to approve selectively or deactivate partners who have gone quiet, which is work you have to do.
- Programs that are just starting pay from day one. With revenue pricing, a program that has not referred anything yet may cost very little. With ours, a Starter plan costs $19 a month whether your partners have sold anything or not. The 14-day trial helps you get set up, but it doesn’t cover the months before a program takes off.
- Plans also differ by features, not only partner count. The Stripe integration, the server events API and SaaS metrics start on Growth, so a SaaS company with ten partners will usually still want Growth rather than Starter.
Where the model works best is a program with a manageable number of partners who each refer meaningful revenue, which describes most SaaS and store programs once they find their core partners. For a program with thousands of occasional partners and modest revenue, a revenue-based tool may cost less. Each of our comparisons shows what the other tool’s bill scales with and says when it is the better pick.
How to decide
The simplest check is to put your own numbers into both models. Take your expected referred revenue for the year and apply the other tool’s pricing to it, then compare that with the plan your approved partner count needs here. If you are not sure what that revenue will be, the affiliate commission calculator gives you lifetime value and expected commission per customer; multiply by the number of customers you expect partners to send.
Whichever you choose, choose it knowing what your bill will scale with. We think partner count is the fairer thing to charge for, and we have tried to be clear about when it isn’t.