Flat-fee affiliate software for SaaS: who takes a cut of payouts

By Jimi Barkway · Published 4 September 2026 · Part of the comparison pages

Which affiliate platforms charge a percentage of payouts?

In shortFive of the thirteen checked here take a published cut of your payouts. Dub at 5%, and Rewardful at 3% on managed payouts. Tolt at 2% plus an invoice fee, and Reditus at 5% by card or 2% by invoice. And Affonso through three separate charges. Two more run a managed payout route and publish no fee anywhere.

Two terms, because everything below turns on the difference. A payout fee is a slice the platform takes out of the money you send your partners. It is charged on top of your monthly plan. A flat fee is the opposite: one plan price that never moves, however much you pay out. The rest of the platforms here charge that and nothing else. Which of the two you are on decides your bill far more than the headline price does. It is the part a pricing page is least likely to tell you.

I read all thirteen pricing pages on 4 September 2026, and the help centres behind them. Every figure above came off the vendor's own page that day. Prices here move often, so the calculator carries the check date beside each row. If this table and that page ever disagree, trust the calculator, because it's the one that gets rebuilt.

Why a percentage costs more than it looks

In shortBecause it grows with your success and the subscription doesn't. A percentage is a charge on the thing you're trying to increase. So the better the program works, the bigger the share it takes.

Let's say you pay a 25% commission and you pay twenty affiliates a month. Here's the arithmetic at three volumes. It was run through the calculator rather than by hand. Automated payouts are priced in on every platform that offers them.

Read that table across rather than down. Look at the Dub row, for instance: it more than quintuples across the three columns, and the subscription itself never changes. The flat rows barely move at all. Not one of the percentage rows put its prices up to do that, which is the whole argument. It is arithmetic rather than opinion.

One honest note about that table. The cheapest published number at every volume isn't ours: Partli is $29 and Komissio is $49. Both are flat, and neither publishes a payout fee. So the claim here is narrower than "cheapest". It's $29 founding and $59 list, 0% of payouts, and a structural reason the 0% holds. That reason is that AffiliateRail never holds the money, so there's nothing to take a percentage of.

Where the fee is printed, and where it is not

In shortTwo platforms print a zero on the pricing page and charge on a help page. Two more publish no payout fee anywhere. Both offer a managed payout route. Nothing is hidden, exactly. It's on a different page from the one you're comparing.

Rewardful's pricing page says "0% transaction fee" on the plan. That is true of the plan. The help centre article on Managed Payouts carries the 3%. Tolt's pricing page lists 2% on auto payouts, in its own words: The Rewardful pricing page has the whole ladder. The Tolt pricing page has the bands in full.

Its help centre then adds $8 an invoice by bank transfer, or 4% by card, so a card-paying merchant is near 6% all in. No single page says that. Affonso's page says "no transaction fees" beside three charges spread over three help pages.

Then the quieter version. FirstPromoter and Trackdesk publish no payout fee at all, and both offer a managed or assisted payout route. A merchant reading either pricing page has no way to know what that route costs, not until they ask. So the honest cell is "not published" rather than a zero. Partli prints a $0 platform fee on every tier. Its docs describe $4 a month per paid partner above a limit no page states.

None of that makes any of them a bad tool. Every one is a real product with real customers. A merchant who wants the platform to move the money is purchasing a genuine service, which costs the vendor something to provide. It does mean a pricing page is an incomplete document here, so the only comparison worth doing reads the help centre too. That is what the calculator is for, and it is also why every row carries the date it was read.

What about platforms that bundle affiliates into billing?

In shortMerchant of record means the company that sells to your customer on paper and carries the tax liability. Lemon Squeezy and Polar are both that. They include affiliate tooling, and they charge a percentage of all your revenue. That's a different bill from a payout fee. So it sits outside the table. If you already sell through either one, you already have affiliates.

Lemon Squeezy has no monthly fee and takes 5% plus 50 cents per transaction. Polar is free to start at the same rate, then $20 a month at 3.8% plus 40 cents. Then $100 a month at 3.6% plus 35 cents, and $400 a month at 3.4% plus 30 cents. International adds 1.5%. Both handle sales tax as the seller of record, which is a real job and part of what the percentage buys.

Those numbers sit in prose rather than the table for one reason. They apply to every sale you make, not to the share an affiliate brought. A 5% merchant-of-record fee and a 5% payout fee are the same words on two different bills. Side by side they'd look like arithmetic. They aren't.

The practical reading is straightforward. Already on one of them? Use what you have before buying a second tool. On Stripe or Paddle? Then neither is genuinely an option. Moving your entire billing arrangement to change your affiliate software is the tail wagging the dog.

Does a flat fee mean the payout itself is free?

In shortNo. It means the software takes nothing. Whoever actually moves the money still charges you. They charge you the same on any platform. So the number worth comparing between vendors is what the software adds on top of that.

Three of them cover most small programs. I read all three on the same day as the prices above. PayPal Payouts takes 2% of the amount, at home and abroad, "not to exceed the maximum fee cap" set for each currency. Wise Business charges a one-off 50 GBP set-up fee, then from 0.24% to send and convert, depending on the currency. And Payoneer charges some US customers a flat 1.50 USD per payment up to 50,000 USD a month. Then up to 0.5% above that.

So here is the honest version. A flat-fee platform takes its own share down to zero. The sending fee is one you would pay whatever software you used. What goes away is the second percentage stacked on top of the first.

It also changes who is holding your money. A platform taking a percentage is usually moving that money itself, which is a job that carries real legal weight. The percentage is what pays for it. That is why the ones doing it charge and the ones not doing it do not. AffiliateRail logs into your own PayPal or Wise account, with your own credentials, on a schedule you set. The money goes from you straight to your partner. It never goes through AffiliateRail. The custody page has the detail. The Payoneer article prices that route on a batch of thirty.

So which one is cheapest for you

In shortAt every volume above, the cheapest published total is a flat-fee platform, and the gap widens as the program grows. Which one is cheapest for you comes down to three things no table can know.

Your commission rate, first. A payout fee is a percentage of a percentage. It comes out of the commission rather than the sale. So a program paying 40% pays roughly twice the fee of one paying 20% on the same revenue. Then how much your affiliates bring in each month. Some plans jump to a new price at set thresholds. Others charge by usage. And finally, whether you want the platform to move the money for you at all. That is the service the percentage is buying. If the answer is yes, a percentage may well be the right deal.

There is a fourth thing. It is the one founders find out too late. Ask what happens when you go past the limit on your plan. Some platforms move you up a tier automatically. Some switch features off. Some charge you extra for every thousand dollars above the ceiling. The calculator prices that extra charge wherever a vendor publishes one.

Do the comparison on your own numbers, not on a table anyone wrote. This one included. The calculator takes your revenue, your commission rate and how many affiliates you pay, then prints the whole bill on all thirteen. Every source and check date sits under it. Our row sits alongside the rest. The rows that come out cheaper are left where they land. Two minutes.

One last thing before you sign anything. An entry price is a price today, not a promise about next year. One platform above has moved its entry price from $0 to $29 to $49 to $69 since 2023. A structural zero and a promotional zero look identical on a pricing page, so ask any vendor a different question. What would have to change for this fee to appear?

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