Trust
Who holds the money
Published 1 September 2026. Every figure on this page was checked against the linked source on that date.
In plain English
When you pay your affiliates through most platforms, your money passes through the platform on the way. That transit is where the fees live, and where the delays live, and it is the one thing no vendor's website talks about. AffiliateRail runs your payouts through your own PayPal and Wise accounts, with your credentials, so your money never passes through us at all. We take 0% of every payout, and this page explains why that number is a fact about the architecture rather than a promotional price.
The question nobody asks until it matters
Affiliate software has one job that involves real money: your affiliates earned commissions, and now someone has to move that money from your account to theirs. Every platform in this category offers to help with that step. Almost none of them say, anywhere on their site, who is actually holding the money while it happens.
It matters for three reasons. Whoever holds the money can charge a percentage of it. Whoever holds the money controls when it arrives. And whoever holds the money is the party your affiliates depend on when something goes wrong, whether or not they have ever heard of them.
What custodial means
A custodial payout works like this: the platform totals what you owe, invoices you for it, collects your payment, and then sends your affiliates their money from the platform's side. For the days between your payment and theirs, the platform is holding your affiliates' earnings. You have paid; they have not been paid.
That structure has real costs attached, because moving other people's money is regulated, operationally heavy work, and platforms price it accordingly. It also puts a second company between you and the people you owe: their timelines, their payment methods, their right to review or delay a batch.
The alternative most vendors offer is a file: export a CSV of what you owe, upload it to PayPal yourself, and the platform's involvement ends at the spreadsheet.
What the category actually does
This is what each platform's own published material says, checked on 1 September 2026. Prices and terms change; the source for each claim is linked so you can check it yourself.
| Platform | Who holds the money | What the transit costs |
|---|---|---|
| Tolt | Tolt, on auto payouts. You pay a Tolt invoice; Tolt then disburses to your partners (their help centre). | A 2% processing fee on auto payouts (pricing page), plus $8 per invoice paid by bank transfer or 4% paid by card (help centre). |
| Rewardful | Rewardful, on Managed Payouts. You make one payment to Rewardful, Rewardful distributes it, and affiliates withdraw from their Rewardful dashboard (their help centre). | A flat 3% processing fee on each payout, paid by the merchant. Affiliates may pay withdrawal fees on top, depending on their chosen method (same source). |
| Affonso | Affonso, on Managed Payouts (Growth and Elite plans). A monthly invoice on NET 7 terms; payouts to your affiliates begin after your invoice is paid (their help centre). | A $25 service fee per invoice (waived on Elite), $0.50 per affiliate beyond 25 in a month, and a payment surcharge of 3.25% via Stripe or 2.8% via Revolut (same source). |
| Tapfiliate | Nobody, because you do the work. Settling balances generates a payout file you run through PayPal mass payments yourself, or you automate through a separate Trolley account (their help centre). | No platform cut, because the platform's involvement ends at the file. |
| AffiliateRail | Nobody, and it is still automated. Scheduled payouts run through your own PayPal Business, Wise Business or Payoneer account, with your credentials, on your NET terms. The money moves from you to your affiliate directly. | 0% of every payout. Your rail's own transfer fees still apply, because they are your rail's fees, not ours. |
Put numbers on it. A merchant sending $8,000 to 40 partners in a month pays $240 in processing on Rewardful's Managed Payouts, $168 on Tolt's auto payouts if the invoice is paid by bank transfer, and $292.50 on Affonso's Managed Payouts via Stripe ($25 service fee, $7.50 for the 15 affiliates beyond 25, and $260 of surcharge). On AffiliateRail the platform's share of that $8,000 is $0, this month and every month.
So the category splits in two. One side holds your money and charges for the transit. The other side hands you a file and wishes you luck. What did not exist before AffiliateRail is the combination: payouts that run themselves, on a schedule, with nobody in the middle.
How AffiliateRail pays your affiliates
You connect your own PayPal Business or Wise Business account to your program, with credentials that stay yours and are encrypted per program. We compute the ledger, apply your holding period, batch what has matured by your NET terms, and then call your rail with your token to send your money to your affiliates. At no point does a payment touch an AffiliateRail account, because there is no AffiliateRail account for it to touch.
We never touch the money, so there is nothing to take a cut of, delay, or lose. That is not a policy we could change next year. It is how the software is built.
Three consequences fall out of that architecture, and each one is checkable:
- 0% of payouts is structural. A platform that holds money can always change the number. A platform that never receives it cannot charge a percentage of it, at any price point, under any future pricing page.
- Your affiliates are paid by you, from an account with your name on it, which is what their bank statement and their tax records will say. They never open an account with a payment intermediary they did not choose, and they never do an identity check with us.
- There is no pot of other people's money here to freeze, lose or mismanage. Most of the damage an affiliate platform can do is damage to money in its custody; there is none in ours. The security page covers what that means in practice.
What this means when an AI agent holds your API key
More of this category's work is done by agents every month, through APIs and MCP servers, and an agent is only as safe as the most damaging thing its credentials permit. Here the architecture does the safety work: an agent holding an AffiliateRail token cannot move money, because we never hold any. There is no platform balance to drain and no platform-side transfer for a confused or compromised agent to trigger. Payouts execute only through your own rail's credentials, which live encrypted on your program and are never handed to a model. A custodial platform cannot offer that property without rebuilding itself. The MCP documentation covers what an agent can and cannot do, tool by tool.
Signed on the way out, verifiable on arrival
The same discipline applies to the events we send you. Every webhook AffiliateRail delivers carries a timestamped HMAC signature (the Rail-Signature header), so you can verify that a payload came from us and was not replayed from last week. Signatures include the timestamp inside the signed content, stale deliveries fail verification, and secrets rotate with a grace window so rotation is never an outage. The verification snippet is one line in most languages and lives in the documentation.
What non-custodial does not mean
Honesty cuts both ways, so here is the other side. Non-custodial does not mean free: PayPal and Wise charge their own transfer fees, and those are yours, exactly as they would be if you paid manually. It does not mean no responsibility: you are the payer of record, which is the honest legal position for a merchant paying their own partners, and it is why tax forms and payout records in AffiliateRail are built around you as the payer. And it does not remove the need to fund your own account before a payout runs. What it removes is the middleman, the middleman's percentage, and the days your affiliates spend waiting on a company they never chose.
If you want to see what the difference costs at your volume, run your own numbers. If you are on one of these platforms now, the switch guides for Tolt, FirstPromoter and Affonso cover what carries over and how long it takes.
All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. Comparisons are based on publicly available information as of 1 September 2026. If a linked source has changed since, tell us at support@affiliaterail.com and we will correct this page.