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%, Rewardful at 3% on managed payouts, Tolt at 2% plus an invoice fee. 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.

A payout fee is a cut the platform takes of the money you send your partners, on top of your plan. A flat fee is the other way: a plan price that does not move whatever you pay out. The rest of the platforms here charge one and nothing else. That's the shape of this question. It decides your bill far more than the headline price does, and it's the part a pricing page is least likely to answer.

I read all thirteen pricing pages, and the help centres behind them, on 4 September 2026. 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. 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, run through the calculator rather than by hand, with automated payouts priced in on every platform that offers them.

Read the rows sideways rather than downwards. Consider the Dub row for instance: it triples while the subscription never changes. The flat rows barely move. The percentage rows roughly quintuple, and not one of them changed its prices to do it. That's the whole argument, and it's arithmetic rather than opinion.

One honest note about that table. The cheapest published number at every volume isn't ours. Partli is $29. 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, which is that AffiliateRail never holds the money. 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 while offering 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, which 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:

Its help centre then adds $8 an invoice by bank transfer, or 4% by card. A card-paying merchant is near 6% all in, and 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 until they ask. So the honest cell is "not published" rather than a zero. Partli prints a $0 platform fee on every tier, and 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, and a merchant who wants the platform to move the money is buying a service that costs the vendor something. It does mean a pricing page is an incomplete document here. The only comparison worth doing reads the help centre too, which is what the calculator is for. 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, $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. In other words, 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 an option, because relocating your entire billing 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 platform takes nothing. The rail you send money through still charges, and it charges you on any platform, so the number to compare between vendors is the platform's cut on top of the rail.

Three rails cover most small programs, and I read all three on the same day as the prices above. PayPal Payouts takes 2% of the amount, domestically and internationally, "not to exceed the maximum fee cap" set per currency. Wise Business is a one-off 50 GBP set-up fee, with sending and converting from 0.24%, varying by currency. And Payoneer charges certain US customers a flat 1.50 USD per payment up to 50,000 USD a month, then up to 0.5% above it.

So here's the honest sentence. A flat-fee platform reduces the platform's share to zero, and the rail's share is a cost you would carry regardless. What disappears is the second percentage stacked on the first.

It also changes who holds the money. A platform taking a percentage is usually moving that money itself, and the percentage pays for a job carrying real regulatory weight. That's why the ones doing it charge and the ones not doing it don't. AffiliateRail calls your own PayPal or Wise account with your own credentials, on a schedule. The money goes from you to your partner. Never through us. The custody page has the detail.

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, so a program paying 40% carries approximately twice the fee of one paying 20% on identical revenue. Then your monthly affiliate revenue, because banded plans step and metered plans don't. And whether you want the platform to move the money for you, because that's the feature the percentage charges for. If that answer is yes, a percentage may be the right deal.

There's a fourth thing, and it's the one founders find out late. Ask what happens when you cross a band. Some platforms move you up automatically, some pause features, and some charge an overage for every thousand over the ceiling. The calculator prices that overage 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 with every source and check date under it. Our row sits alongside the rest, and 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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