Affiliate program terms

Version 1. Last updated 7 September 2026.

1. Who we are, and who you are

This program is run by James Barkway trading as AffiliateRail, a sole trader established in England and Wales. Office 4382, 182-184 High Street North, London, E6 2JA, United Kingdom. Email support@affiliaterail.com.

"We", "us" and "AffiliateRail" mean the operator. "You" and "partner" mean the person or company approved into this program. "The program" means the AffiliateRail Partners program. "A referred customer" means someone credited to you under clause 4. "A payment" means money a referred customer actually pays us for an AffiliateRail subscription.

This document covers your side of the program. Your use of AffiliateRail as a customer, if you are one, is covered by the terms of service. What we hold about you is in the privacy policy.

2. Joining, and being approved

1. You apply through the join page. We read every application and we decide who is approved. We can refuse anyone, and we do not have to give a reason. A refusal is not a judgement of your work.
2. You are approved as yourself or as your company. You are an independent contractor. Nothing here makes you our employee, our agent or our legal partner, and you cannot make promises or sign anything on our behalf.
3. You need one account. Running two to route referrals between them ends the partnership under clause 9.
4. Every AffiliateRail customer on the Launch or Grow plan is enrolled as a partner when they open their account, because the "Powered by AffiliateRail" line at the bottom of their own affiliate portal is their affiliate link. The same terms apply to them as to anyone else.

3. What you earn

1. 40% of every payment a customer you referred makes to us, for as long as their account is active. That includes their first payment and every renewal after it, with no end date and no step down.
2. A payment means a paid invoice. A trial is not one, because nothing was charged. Neither is an account we have comped, nor a charge that was later refunded.
3. Commission is worked out on what the customer actually paid us, after any discount they used and after any sales tax or VAT on the invoice. We do not pay commission on tax, because the tax was never our money.
4. Commission is in US dollars, because our prices are.
5. We do not pay commission on an Enterprise arrangement priced by agreement, unless we tell you in writing before the customer signs.

4. How you get credited

Attribution is the job of working out which partner gets paid for a sale. Here is how ours decides.

1. Your link sets a cookie window, which is the stretch of time after a click during which that person still counts as yours. Ours is 60 days.
2. The credit carries through the account they open, so someone who clicks in March and pays in May is still yours.
3. Where more than one partner touched the same person, the first qualifying click inside the window is the one we credit. Once a customer is attributed to you, they stay attributed to you.
4. We can only credit a click we can see. If someone clears their browser and arrives again by another route, there is nothing left for us to match, and we will not reconstruct it from memory or from a conversation.
5. Your portal shows every click, referral and customer with its status, in real time. If you think something has been credited wrongly, write to support@affiliaterail.com and we will look at the record with you.

5. The hold, refunds and clawbacks

1. A hold period is the stretch of time we sit on a commission before it can be paid. Ours is 30 days from the payment that earned it. It is 30 days because our own money-back guarantee is 30 days, so the hold outlasts the window in which the money can go back.
2. If the payment is refunded, the commission on it is voided. Your portal shows which payment and why.
3. A chargeback is a customer asking their bank to reverse a payment. It is treated the same as a refund.
4. If a commission has already been paid to you when the money goes back, it becomes a clawback, which is an amount taken back after it has been paid. We deduct it from your next payout. We will not ask you to send money back to us.
5. All four of those follow one principle. The commission follows the money.

6. How and when we pay you

1. We pay to your own PayPal or Wise account, whichever you give us, in US dollars.
2. We pay 15 days after the end of the month in which a commission became payable. A commission earned on 3 April clears its hold on 3 May, so it is paid on 15 June with everything else that matured in May.
3. The minimum payout is $20. A balance under that carries over to the next run and is paid when it passes $20.
4. We take 0% of your commission. PayPal and Wise charge their own fees on a payment they carry, and they set their own exchange rate. Those are theirs and we have no part of them.
5. You give us the account we pay into and you keep it current. We are not responsible for money that reaches the wrong place because the details you gave us were wrong.
6. A payout can be accepted and then fail. When one does, your portal shows the reason your provider gave, and we send it again once you have fixed it.
7. Before your first payout we may ask you for your name, address and country, so that our own records are complete. We do not run identity or credit checks on you.

7. Tax

1. What you earn here is your income and you declare it where you live. We do not deduct tax from it, and we do not file anything on your behalf.
2. We are a UK sole trader and we are not registered for UK VAT, so we add no VAT to what we pay you and we issue no VAT invoice.
3. If tax law where you are means we should be doing something differently, tell us and we will look at it. We are not tax advisers and nothing here is tax advice.

8. How you may promote us

Anywhere your audience is. Your own site, your newsletter, your videos, your posts, your courses, your client work, a talk you give. You may use our name, our logo and the material in your portal, as we supply them, to point people at us.

You may write what you actually think, including the parts you do not like. An honest review with your link under it is worth more to both of us than a press release.

9. What ends the partnership

Four rules. Each exists because there is a way to be paid for a customer who was coming anyway.

1. No bidding on our name. Brand bidding is running paid search ads on a company's own name, which intercepts people who were already looking for us. You may not buy ads on "AffiliateRail", our product name, misspellings of either, or our name paired with words like discount, coupon, promo or review. You may not point an ad straight at our site. Commissions from that traffic are reversed.
2. Coupon and deal sites need written approval first. Coupon, discount and cashback sites may not join without asking us. An approved one is credited through the code we give it, never through a last-second click.
3. No incentivised traffic. You may not offer money, rewards, points or entry into a draw in return for a click, a trial or a purchase. The people you send have to want the product.
4. No referring yourself. You cannot earn commission on your own account, your company's account, or an account you control. The software detects these and voids them without anyone having to notice.

Four more, which are the same principle applied elsewhere.

5. No unsolicited email or messages, and no bought lists. If you email your link, the people receiving it asked to hear from you.
6. No domain name, social handle, app or page that a reasonable person would read as ours.
7. No promising anyone what they will earn from us. You may quote our published prices and our published commission rate. Invented income claims are not allowed, in either direction.
8. Nothing unlawful, misleading, hateful or adult, and nothing that would embarrass a customer who found out how they got here.

Breaking any of the eight ends this agreement at once, and the commissions concerned are reversed.

10. Saying that it is an affiliate link

1. Wherever you post your link, say you may earn a commission from it. Put it close to the link and before someone clicks, in words a reader will understand.
2. In the United States the Federal Trade Commission requires a clear and conspicuous disclosure. Other countries have their own rules, and so does every platform you publish on. Follow whichever is strictest.
3. If we find a placement with no disclosure we will ask you to fix it. If it stays as it is, the partnership ends under clause 15.

11. Our name and our material

1. We own the AffiliateRail name, the logo, the site and everything in your portal. While this agreement runs you have our permission to use the name and the material we give you, as we give them to you, to promote us.
2. Do not redraw the logo, do not register our name as a domain, handle or trade mark anywhere, and do not present your own writing as ours.
3. That permission ends when this agreement does. Take the material down within a reasonable time.
4. What you write about us stays yours. We may quote it, with a link back, unless you tell us not to.

12. What you can see about our customers

1. Your portal shows your own referrals, and in places it names the business that became a customer. That is our customers' information as much as it is yours. Keep it to yourself.
2. Do not contact a referred customer about us, publish what your portal shows you, or use it for anything except checking your own commissions.
3. What we hold about you, and how to export or delete it, is in the privacy policy and on the data request page.

13. What we are not promising

1. No exclusivity, no territory, no minimum traffic and no guaranteed earnings. Nothing in this document says you will earn anything at all.
2. We can change AffiliateRail, its plans and its prices. That changes what a payment is worth, and so what your 40% of it is worth.
3. We aim for the tracking and the portal to be available at all times and we do not guarantee it. Where an incident loses a click, we rebuild what we can from our billing provider's own record afterwards.
4. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Subject to that, we are not liable to you for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or data, and our total liability to you at any time is limited to the commission we owe you at that moment.

14. Changing these terms

1. Every version of this document has a number and a date. This is version 1, 7 September 2026.
2. When we change it, the number changes, and your portal asks you to accept the new version before you carry on. The version you accepted is the one that applies to you until you accept the next one. Your acceptance is stamped with the version and the time.
3. If we ever lower the commission rate, the new rate applies from the day it takes effect and no earlier. A commission you have already earned is never taken back because the rate changed.

15. Ending it

1. Either of us can end this at any time by telling the other. You can close your partner account from your portal.
2. Commissions on payments made before that date are held and paid on the normal schedule in clause 6.
3. If you break clause 9 or clause 10, it ends at once and the commissions concerned are reversed. We will tell you which ones and why.
4. If your account has had no click, no referral and no balance for 12 months, we may close it. We email you first, and anything you are owed is paid.
5. If we close the whole program, we give 30 days' notice and pay every commission earned up to the end of that notice.

16. Law, and the rest

1. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales decide any dispute about them.
2. If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of the document still stands.
3. This document, together with the terms of service and the privacy policy, is the whole agreement between us about the program.
4. Questions about any of it go to support@affiliaterail.com, which reaches a person.

Version 1, in force from 7 September 2026. If you want the twelve-clause version of this document to adapt for your own program, it is on the blog as an affiliate program agreement template. That page is a draft to edit, and this one is the live agreement we run on ourselves.