Affiliate software for a subscription business is a tracking and payout system that reads your billing platform, so the partner who sent a customer earns on that customer’s renewals, gets adjusted when they upgrade, and loses the commission when a charge is refunded. A tool that only records the first checkout is a one-time sales tracker, and on a recurring product it will underpay your partners or overpay them within a couple of billing cycles.
Your billing platform already records every one of those moments. Stripe, for example, sends an invoice.paid event every time a subscription renews and a charge.refunded event when a subscription charge is refunded. Recurly, Chargebee, Paddle and Braintree publish their own versions of the same signals. Good affiliate software for SaaS and subscription ecommerce listens to those events and turns each one into a commission, a correction or a clawback, without anyone exporting a spreadsheet at the end of the month.
When that connection works, you stop paying for customers who churned during a trial, and partners can see each commission tied to a real invoice, which makes payout questions much quicker to answer. This guide is for subscription box sellers, membership sites, SaaS teams and app developers who bill on a schedule and want an affiliate program that follows the money.
Below you’ll find a comparison table first, then six tools reviewed one by one, from Stripe affiliate software for small budgets to options built for app store subscriptions and merchant-of-record platforms.
How the shortlist compares on billing and price
The “Works with” column is the one to read first. If your billing system isn’t on a tool’s list, you’ll be wiring events in through an API or a no-code connector, and that’s where recurring commissions usually break.
“Works with” also means different things for different tools. A native integration usually reads renewals, plan changes and refunds straight from the billing account. A connection through an API means your developer sends those events, and any event they forget to send never reaches the partner’s balance. During a trial, ask each vendor which billing events they read: a new subscription, a renewal, an upgrade or downgrade, a refund and a cancellation should all be on the list.
| Tool | Works with | Free trial or plan | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|
| FirstPromoter | Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly, Braintree, plus a tracking API | 14-day free trial | From $49/month |
| Reditus | Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, other processors via API | 14-day free trial | From 99/month billed yearly |
| Insert Affiliate | App Store, Google Play, RevenueCat, Adapty, Apphud, Iaptic | Free plan (2 affiliates) | From £20/month plus 10% of affiliate revenue |
| Easy Affiliate | WordPress with MemberPress, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, PayPal | 14-day money-back guarantee | From $99.60 for the first year |
| PromoteKit | Stripe (including Stripe-based Webflow, Memberstack, Outseta and MemberSpace setups) | Free plan (3 referrals) | From $29/month |
| Affonso | Stripe, Paddle Billing, Polar, Creem, Dodo Payments | 14-day free trial | From €15/month billed yearly |
Pricing as of October 2026, taken from each vendor’s own pricing page. Plans change often, so check the live page before you budget.
1. FirstPromoter (best for Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly or Braintree billing)
FirstPromoter suits subscription businesses whose recurring revenue already runs through one of the big billing platforms. It has native integrations with Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly and Braintree, and all five track renewals, so each partner commission is created from an actual invoice. Those integrations are included on every plan, and the setup is a 15-minute job with no engineering required. If your stack is a SaaS app on Chargebee or a subscription box on Recurly, connecting the billing account is most of the setup.
What does it handle well?
The reward settings cover most recurring setups. A reward can be one-time, recurring or lifetime, and you can limit it to the first charge, the first few charges or the first few months. Two-level rates are possible too, such as a higher percentage in year one and a lower one after that. Rates can also be set per product or plan, and on Stripe, Paddle and Chargebee the billing interval is read automatically, so monthly and annual plans can pay differently without extra setup.
Refunds are handled from the same data. When a referred customer is refunded, the commission is clawed back from the partner’s next unpaid payout, and partial refunds prorate percentage commissions. Partners can be credited through a referral link, a coupon code or a direct URL, and all three feed one record.
If you bill through Stripe, affiliate tracking built for Stripe businesses reads subscription events directly, so commissions follow every renewal without manual work, and past Stripe billing can be imported to credit partners for customers they referred before the program existed.
What are the trade-offs?
There is no Shopify or Magento integration. A store on either platform would have to report signups, sales and refunds from its own backend through the tracking API, which is a developer job. The Starter plan also has ceilings: up to $5,000 a month in affiliate revenue and 1,000 affiliates, so a fast-growing program will move to Business sooner than the price list suggests. Braintree refunds are the exception to automatic clawbacks and need to be adjusted by hand.
Pricing starts at $49/month for Starter, $99/month for Business and $149+/month for Enterprise, with a 14-day free trial.
2. Reditus (best for B2B SaaS billing through Chargebee or Paddle)
Which subscription setups is it built for?
Reditus suits B2B software companies. It has dedicated Stripe, Paddle and Chargebee connections, and any other payment processor can send data through its API. Stripe coupon tracking is included on every plan, along with webhooks and API access from the entry tier.
Its plans are sized by annual recurring revenue rather than by affiliate count. Growth allows unlimited affiliates and advocates up to $60K of ARR, Scale Up goes to $360K, and Enterprise has no cap. For a subscription company that already reports in ARR, that makes it easy to see which tier you belong on.
What does it handle well?
Its unusual feature is help with recruiting. Reditus has an AI search over its affiliate database: Growth gets one search a month and limited access to the database, while Scale Up opens the full database with five searches a month. Scale Up and Enterprise customers can also list their program in its marketplace, where affiliates can find and apply to it. Affiliate payouts are automated on every plan, and affiliates don’t pay anything to join.
What are the trade-offs?
The marketplace listing is only on Scale Up, which is an annual contract at 399/month. Payout fees apply on every plan: 5% on card payouts or 2% via invoice. A subscription business close to the $60K ARR ceiling will be looking at the Scale Up price within a year. The pricing page doesn’t show a currency, and Reditus’s own help center and older search snippets quote different Growth prices, so confirm the number with them before you sign. Annual plans also lock you into a 12-month term, while monthly Growth can be cancelled at any time.
Pricing starts at 99/month billed yearly or 149 month to month for Growth, with a 14-day free trial.
3. Insert Affiliate (best for mobile app subscriptions)
Which subscription setups is it built for?
Insert Affiliate is built for subscriptions sold inside iOS and Android apps. It verifies in-app purchases through RevenueCat, Adapty, Iaptic or Apphud, or directly with the App Store and Google Play, and ships SDKs for Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Flutter, Unity and JavaScript. Deep links can come from AppsFlyer, Branch or its own link service.
What does it handle well?
You choose per affiliate whether they earn on the first purchase only or on the first purchase and every renewal, which matters for the health, fitness and productivity apps it lists as typical customers, since they mostly sell monthly or annual plans. Payouts go out in one click through Stripe or can be paid elsewhere and marked as paid, and self-billing invoices are generated for you. Insert Affiliate adds no markup to those payouts; Stripe’s standard processing fee comes out of the affiliate’s payment.
Plans also scale by the number of apps and team members. Starter covers one app and two team members, Growth covers three apps and five people and adds custom branding and advanced commission rules, and Enterprise has unlimited apps plus creator discovery and a custom domain. There’s no long-term contract on any tier.
What are the trade-offs?
Paid plans take a share of affiliate-driven revenue on top of the monthly fee: 10% on Starter, 8% on Growth and 7.5% on Enterprise. Affiliate numbers are capped too, at 5 on Starter, 25 on Growth and 100 on Enterprise, so it fits a hand-picked creator roster better than an open program. It’s built for in-app billing, so a business that also sells web subscriptions will need a second system for those.
Pricing starts with a free plan for up to 2 affiliates and 100 transactions, then £20/month plus 10% of affiliate transaction revenue on Starter.
4. Easy Affiliate (best for WordPress membership and WooCommerce subscription sites)
Which subscription setups is it built for?
Easy Affiliate is a WordPress plugin from the team behind MemberPress, and it runs the whole affiliate program on your own site. It tracks recurring commissions with MemberPress, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads and PayPal subscribe buttons, and even the Basic plan tracks rebills through WooCommerce Subscriptions. MemberMouse and WishList Member are supported as well.
What does it handle well?
It charges no transaction fees and no monthly fees on top of the licence. Suspicious affiliate activity triggers an alert, so you can review it and reject the commission before payout. Affiliates are paid through PayPal one-click payouts or a PayPal mass payment file.
The plan tiers are mostly about how many sites you run and which marketing tools you connect. Basic covers one site, Plus three and Pro five. GetResponse works on every plan, ConvertKit and Mailchimp on Plus and Pro, and ActiveCampaign, Formidable Forms and WPForms on Pro only. For an agency or a store owner with a few WordPress membership sites, the Plus or Pro licence keeps every program on the same plugin.
What are the trade-offs?
It only works on WordPress, and its pricing page doesn’t list a direct Stripe Billing connection, so a SaaS or headless store billing through Stripe is better served elsewhere. Payouts run through PayPal. The listed prices are introductory, and annual renewals are charged at full price, which raises Basic from $99.60 to $249 a year. Being self-hosted also means the tracking runs on your own WordPress hosting, so plugin updates and server load are yours to look after.
Pricing starts at $99.60 for the first year on Basic (one site), $149.60 on Plus and $199.60 on Pro, with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
5. PromoteKit (best for small Stripe businesses on a tight budget)
Which subscription setups is it built for?
PromoteKit requires Stripe and nothing else. That includes sites whose subscriptions run through Stripe behind Webflow, Memberstack, Outseta or MemberSpace, so a small membership or course site built on one of those can use it.
What does it handle well?
Recurring commissions are on every plan, including the free one, and affiliates earn on each payment up to the limit you set for the campaign. Pro removes the referral cap and adds product or plan-based commissions, commission tiers, webhooks, the API and self-referral fraud detection. Affiliates can be paid through PayPal and Wise, and Pro adds one-click global payouts through Stripe to more than 100 countries in USD. You can also pay any other way and mark the payout as complete.
The free plan includes unlimited affiliates and team members, one campaign and up to three referrals. That’s enough to set up the portal, invite your first partners and confirm that a Stripe renewal shows up as a commission before you pay anything. Pro adds currency conversion, approval-required campaigns, a custom portal domain and removal of PromoteKit branding.
What are the trade-offs?
If you bill through anything other than Stripe, it won’t work; Paddle and Lemon Squeezy don’t appear on its pricing page at all. Pro covers up to $10,000 a month in affiliate revenue, and above that you’re on a custom Enterprise quote. The global payout option adds a 5% fee for bank accounts or 8% for cards on top of the payout total.
Pricing starts with a free plan for up to 3 referrals, then $29/month for Pro, with 25% off on yearly billing.
6. Affonso (best for merchant-of-record billing like Polar, Creem or Dodo)
Which subscription setups is it built for?
Affonso connects to Stripe and Paddle Billing, plus three newer merchant-of-record platforms: Polar, Creem and Dodo Payments. That suits a small digital product business that sells through one of those platforms so it doesn’t have to handle sales tax itself. It also offers an API, webhooks, an SDK and a CLI on every plan, with API limits that rise from 300 requests a minute on Launch to 1,200 on Elite.
What does it handle well?
Recurring commissions are included from the cheapest plan, and affiliates and referrals are unlimited across the listed tiers. Each plan comes with affiliate discovery credits to help you find partners, and Growth and above add managed payouts and an email finder.
Team access grows with the plan, from one seat on Launch to five on Growth and unlimited seats on Elite, and Growth adds Segment and MCP connections. Eligible early-stage startups get 50% off in the first year, 25% in the second and 10% in the third.
What are the trade-offs?
Plans are capped by the revenue your partners bring in: $1,000 a month on Launch, $10,000 on Growth and $30,000 on Elite. On Launch, ten partners each bringing in $100 a month would already reach the ceiling. Chargebee, Recurly and Braintree aren’t on its integration list. It’s billed in euros, and the pricing page notes that managed payout fees may apply without listing the amounts.
Pricing starts at €15/month billed yearly (€19 monthly) for Launch, €29/month for Growth and €79/month for Elite, with a 14-day free trial.
Where this leaves a subscription seller
Pick by billing system first and price second. If the tool can’t read your renewals and refunds, every other feature is working from guesses. Failed renewals are part of that: Recurly’s churn benchmarks put involuntary churn, meaning failed payments, at 1.38% for ecommerce subscriptions against 4.25% total churn, so roughly a third of that churn comes from cards that didn’t go through. An affiliate tool that doesn’t see those failed renewals keeps paying commission on customers you’ve already lost. Once billing is covered, settle the commission rules: decide whether partners earn for twelve months or for the customer’s lifetime before you launch, because changing it later means renegotiating with every affiliate who joined under the old terms.
Matched to billing systems, the choice narrows quickly. Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly or Braintree billing points to FirstPromoter, or to Reditus for B2B teams that want recruiting help. App store subscriptions point to Insert Affiliate, WordPress memberships to Easy Affiliate, a Stripe-only startup on a small budget to PromoteKit, and Polar, Creem or Dodo sellers to Affonso. Run a test referral, a renewal and a refund through your shortlisted tool during its trial, and check that all three show up correctly before you invite a single partner.
