How to run an affiliate program for your SaaS: every decision, in order

By Jimi Barkway · Published 7 September 2026 · Part of the blog

How do you run an affiliate program for a SaaS product?

In shortYou make eight decisions, in order. Whether to run one at all. What you pay and for how long. Which software. How the sale is tracked. What the rules say. Where the first partners come from. How they get paid. What you read each month. This page is the sequence. Each step says what the decision is, gives the figure most programs settle on, and links the page that answers it in full.

The research method was simple. Every figure below is already published on this site, from a dataset or a vendor's own page, with the date it was read. Nothing here is new evidence. What is new is the sequence. I found that founders do not get stuck on any single question. They get stuck because nobody tells them which question comes first. So they start with the software, which is decision three. They choose it before they know what they are paying anyone.

Three definitions before the sequence. An affiliate program is an arrangement where someone sends you customers and you pay them a share of what those customers pay you. Activation is the share of approved partners who ever send you a single person. And a holding period is how long a commission waits before you pay it, so a refund can cancel it first. Those three decide most of what follows.

Decisions one and two: should you run one, and what should you pay?

In shortRun one if people already recommend you without being asked. Then pay 25% of the sale for 12 months, because that is the middle of 358 public programs. Set a 30-day holding period, which 184 of them use. Those three numbers are a defensible starting point, and you can change any of them later.

The initial decision is the one most guides skip. An affiliate program multiplies word of mouth. No word of mouth, no multiplier. If there is none, it multiplies nothing, and you have bought software to watch an empty dashboard. The first module of the manual asks four questions and is allowed to tell you no. The payback article does the same job with arithmetic, working out the month the program covers its own cost.

Then the commission rate. Let's say your subscription is $50 a month, billed monthly to every customer who stays. At 25% for 12 months a partner earns $12.50 a month and $150 over the year. That is the centre of the dataset, and the article on what programs pay has the whole distribution. The commission module covers how to choose a number that is not the median. If you would rather reward customers than recruit partners, the referral comparison sets the two side by side on cost and paperwork.

Decision three: which software, and what will it really cost?

In shortEntry plans on the twenty platforms this site prices run from $0 to $90 a month. A payout fee is a cut the platform takes from the money on its way to your partner, on top of the monthly price. It runs from 0% to 10%. That fee matters more than the plan as soon as you pay real money out. Decide the rate first, then the software, because the rate decides which fee you can live with.

The subscription price is the smallest of four costs. By a distance. There is the commission itself, the software, what PayPal or Wise charge, and your own hours. The cost article prices all four on one program. The calculator does it on your numbers, and the pricing models page explains why two platforms with the same sticker price bill differently.

Then narrow by the capability you actually need. Whether the tool pays on every renewal is on the recurring commissions page. Whether it puts the partner portal on your own domain is on the white-label page. Whether it pays partners without you clicking anything is on the automatic payouts page. Whether your money stops at the platform on the way is on the custody page.

Decisions four and five: tracking, and what you put in writing

In shortTracking is a script that remembers the referral and a webhook that reports the sale. A webhook is a message your billing system sends the moment something happens, such as an invoice being paid. The default window is 60 days on most platforms. The rules you write matter more than the tracking, because the rules are what a partner argues with you about.

On the technical side, choose the documentation for your billing system. There is one for Stripe, one for Paddle and one for Chargebee. If you are on Next.js, the Next.js article covers the parts that break. The cookie-duration page has every vendor's default, and the cookieless article covers what happens in browsers that throw the cookie away.

On the written side, four things need deciding before anyone joins. All four are short. The holding period. What happens on a refund. Who is not allowed in. And when you pay. The agreement article turns those into clauses. The rules module is the plain-English version. In the United States you file a 1099 for a partner paid $2,000 or more in a year. The tax-forms article explains it. The fraud module covers saying no.

Decisions six and seven: finding partners, and paying them

In shortThis is where programs die. Of every 100 approved partners, 15 ever refer anyone and 6 bring a paying customer. So the objective is not registering people. It is finding the few who will actually send someone, and answering their questions fast enough that they start in the first week.

Partners ask two questions first. Always the same two. How much do I earn, and when am I paid. Across 200 public program pages, 108 of the FAQ questions counted are about those two. So your program page answers them in the first three lines, which the landing-page article demonstrates from the data. Where to find the people in the first place is the first-ten module and the article on where affiliates come from.

Speed determines the remainder. It really does. Of the partners who ever refer, a quarter do it within eight hours of joining and half within seven days. The onboarding article turns that into five messages with a date on each. Then the money. The payouts module covers the monthly run, and there is a page each for PayPal, Wise, Payoneer and Stripe Connect.

Decision eight: what do you read each month?

In shortThree numbers, and no more. How many approved partners have ever referred anyone, which the dataset says is about 15 in 100. How many brought a paying customer, which is about 6. And what the program cost you against what it earned. Everything else is decoration in the opening year.

For example, imagine you approve forty partners in your first month. By the eighth day, about three of the six who will ever refer have done so. By day 49 the count is close to final. The remaining thirty-four are the ones the data says never begin, whatever you send them next. A sixth email changes nothing. That is the activation module in one paragraph, and the numbers module has the rest.

After the opening year the job changes from recruiting to retaining. The steady-state module covers what a running program needs each month, which is less than you would think. If you already run a program somewhere else and want to move it, the migration article covers moving without breaking links that partners have already published.

A word on this site's own product, with its trade-offs. AffiliateRail is $29 a month founding to $10,000 of monthly affiliate revenue, then $59 to $20,000. It takes 0% of every payout and pays partners from your own PayPal or Wise, automated from the $59 plan. The branded portal is on every plan. It reads Stripe and Paddle Billing, so a Chargebee or Recurly merchant needs one of the others on the comparison pages above. Fourteen days, no card.

Every figure on this page comes from the pages it links to, each of which names its source and the date it was read. The dataset behind the program numbers is published in full. Programs change, so check the figure on the page that owns it before you quote it.

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