Terms of service

Last updated 28 September 2026

1. Who we are

AffiliateRail is operated 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" means the person or company with an account. "Your program" means an affiliate or referral program you run using the service. "Your partners" means the affiliates in it.

2. What these terms cover

Your use of AffiliateRail. Opening an account means you accept them. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm you are allowed to.

Two other documents form part of these terms: the data processing agreement, which governs the personal data we handle for you, and the refund policy. The privacy policy covers the data we hold about you in our own right.

3. Your account

1. You need a working email address. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your credentials to yourself and turn on two-factor authentication.
2. You may invite colleagues up to your plan's limit. What they do counts as yours.
3. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has got in.

4. The free trial

1. Every plan starts with 14 days free and no card. If you never add a card, there is nothing to charge and nothing to cancel.
2. If you pick a plan during the trial, we save your card and take the first payment on the day the trial ends, never before. We email you seven days before that payment. Cancel before then and you pay nothing.
3. You get the whole plan during the trial, not a cut-down version.
4. At the end of the trial, add a card to carry on. Do nothing and the account stops taking new activity rather than billing you. Your data stays for 30 days so you can come back or export it.

5. Plans, prices and renewal

1. Prices are in US dollars. Founding prices are $29, $59 and $99 a month for Launch, Grow and Scale, against usual prices of $59, $89 and $179. Yearly is ten times the monthly price, so $290, $590 and $990 at founding prices, which is two months free.
2. A founding price is locked for as long as your subscription runs without a break. Cancel and come back later and the price then is the price you get.
3. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period, monthly or yearly, until you cancel. We email you before a yearly renewal.
4. Changing plan. An upgrade takes effect at once, with the difference charged pro rata. A downgrade takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for.
5. Changing how often you pay. Monthly to yearly takes effect at once. Yearly to monthly takes effect at your renewal date, because doing it immediately would mean refunding most of a year.
6. Price changes. At least 30 days' notice by email. A founding price is protected from increases while it is active.
7. Plan limits are enforced by the service, not suggested by it. Each plan has a monthly revenue band, and going over it does not stop tracking, commissions or payouts. What it does is stop you adding new partners and new commission rules, after a week's grace, and we email you before and after you cross it.
8. Failed payments. We retry, and email you each time. If it has not gone through after the retries, the account moves to the free plan's limits rather than being deleted.

6. Tax

1. Prices exclude any VAT or sales tax that applies to you. Any tax due is added at checkout and shown before you pay.
2. We are not registered for UK VAT and charge no UK VAT. There is no VAT number, and we will not put a made-up one on an invoice.
3. If you are a business in the EU with a valid VAT number, and that number validates against the EU's VIES service at checkout, the reverse charge applies: we charge no VAT and you account for it yourself.
4. If your VAT number does not validate, or you do not have one, EU law treats you as a consumer and VAT is charged at your own country's rate. That is the rule whether you trade as a company or not, and it is not something we can waive.
5. Outside the UK and the EU, the sale is an export of digital services and outside the scope of UK VAT.
6. We handle our own tax. We do not handle yours, and nothing in the service should be read as doing so.

7. The service

Software for running an affiliate or referral program: tracking referred visitors and customers through your billing provider, calculating commissions under rules you set, giving your partners a portal, and preparing and, on eligible plans, triggering payouts.

• Your program, your rules. You set the commission rates, the holding period, the minimum payout, who is approved and what your partners are told. We provide defaults. The terms you offer your partners are between you and them, and we are not a party to them.
• Your partners are your responsibility. Approving someone, refusing them, suspending them and paying them are all your decisions. We give you the tools and the evidence.
• Third-party services. Stripe, Paddle, PayPal, Wise and Payoneer are independent services with their own terms. We are not responsible for their availability, their fees or their decisions.
• RecruitAffiliates.ai. These terms cover AffiliateRail only. RecruitAffiliates.ai has its own terms at recruitaffiliates.ai/terms.

8. Payouts are non-custodial

1. Payouts are made from your own PayPal, Wise or Payoneer account, using credentials you connect. We calculate what is owed and instruct your provider.
2. We never receive, hold, control or transmit your funds or your partners' funds. The money goes from your account to theirs. We take no percentage of it.
3. You are the payer of record. Everything that follows from that is yours: what you owe, whether to pay it, disputes with a partner about an amount, and any reporting obligation.
4. We store your payout method credentials encrypted and use them only to carry out payouts you have set up. You can revoke them at any time, from your account or from the provider.
5. A payout method can accept an instruction and fail afterwards. We do not treat acceptance as payment. A failed payout is shown with the provider's reason and can be sent again.

9. Tax forms and reporting

1. On eligible plans we collect W-9, W-8BEN and W-8BEN-E forms from your partners, store them encrypted, and export them to you. We never file anything, never check a taxpayer number against any authority, and never run identity checks.
2. Because you paid your partners directly from your own account, any obligation to collect tax information, to report a payment or to withhold is yours.
3. We give you the data in a shape your accountant can use, including how each payment was sent, because that can change which report applies. We do not tell you which form to file. Getting that wrong on your behalf could cause the same payment to be reported twice.
4. Tax features in the product are administrative and informational. They are not tax advice and we are not tax advisers. Take the export to a qualified professional.

10. Acceptable use

You must not use AffiliateRail to promote anything unlawful, to send unsolicited email, to track people without the notices and permissions your own jurisdiction requires, to defraud partners or customers, to misrepresent what a partner will earn, or to interfere with the service or with other users.

We may suspend an account that does, and we will contact you first where that is practical and safe.

11. Email you send through us

You can attach your own sending domain and email your partners through the service. One account sending spam puts every other customer's email at risk, so there are limits, they are enforced by the software, and they are these:

• A daily sending limit per program, sized to your plan: 500 messages a day on a trial, 2,000 on Launch, 10,000 on Grow, 50,000 on Scale. Reaching it pauses that day's sending, not your account.
• A spam complaint rate above 0.30%, measured over a rolling 7 days and only once at least 500 messages have been delivered, pauses your outbound sending automatically. The minimum volume is there so a single complaint on a handful of emails never pauses anyone.
• A pause stops campaigns and sequences. It does not stop the emails your program has to send: approvals, payout notices, and anything to do with an account.
• We email you when it happens, with the numbers and what to do about it. Fix the cause and tell us and we lift it.

These figures can change as the service grows. Where a change makes a limit tighter, we give notice under clause 18.

12. Your data

1. Your program's data is yours. Your partners, your customers, your ledger. We hold it for you and we do not sell it, use it to train an AI model, or build a product from it.
2. Where we process personal data about your partners or your customers, you are the controller and we are the processor. The data processing agreement sets out what that means, and it is in force from the day you open an account. Nothing needs signing.
3. Our sub-processors are published at affiliaterail.com/subprocessors and we give 30 days' notice before adding one, which you may object to.
4. How long each kind of record is kept, and which records outlive a deletion request because the law requires it, is in the retention schedule described in the agreement.
5. You can export or delete any one partner or customer at any time from Settings, then Data requests, and you can export your whole program.
6. What we hold about you, as our customer, is covered by the privacy policy.

13. Security

We take the measures set out in the data processing agreement and described plainly on the security page. We are not SOC2 certified and we do not claim to be.

If you find a vulnerability, email security@affiliaterail.com. You get a reply within two working days.

14. Availability and support

1. We aim for the service to be available at all times and we do not guarantee uninterrupted operation. We give reasonable notice of planned maintenance.
2. Support is by email at support@affiliaterail.com, answered within two working days and usually sooner. There is no phone line and no chat widget, so the reply comes from someone who can fix the thing you wrote in about.
3. Tracking, commissions and payouts keep working during an incident wherever they can. If they cannot, the ledger is rebuilt from your billing provider's own events afterwards.

15. Intellectual property

We own the AffiliateRail software and brand. You own your data, your program and your own brand as it appears in your partner portal. You give us the licence we need to run the service for you, including displaying your logo and your program's name to your partners, and nothing beyond that.

You may not copy, resell or reverse engineer the service, or use it to build a competing product.

16. Liability

Nothing in these terms 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 for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or data, or for indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in that period.

In particular, and because it is the thing people ask about: we are not liable for a payment you make to a partner. You decide who is approved, what they earn and when they are paid. We are not liable for a decision made by your payment provider, your billing provider, or a tax authority.

17. Ending it

1. You can cancel at any time, from your account. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, so you keep the access you have paid for and are not billed again.
2. Refunds are in the refund policy. In short: a full refund if you ask within 30 days of your first payment.
3. We may end your account for a material breach of these terms that you have not fixed after being asked, or immediately where the breach is unlawful or puts other customers at risk.
4. If we discontinue the service we give you at least 90 days' notice, refund any prepaid fees for the unused period, and keep the export working to the last day.
5. When an account closes you have 30 days to export before the program's personal data is deleted, under clause 8 of the data processing agreement.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Where a change is material we email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. Carrying on after that date means you accept it; if you do not, cancel before it and we refund the unused part of the period you have paid for.

19. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. This does not affect rights you have under the law of your own country that cannot be excluded.

Talk to us first. Most things that look like a dispute are a misunderstanding about a number, and we can usually show you where the number came from.

20. Contact

James Barkway trading as AffiliateRail
Office 4382, 182-184 High Street North, London, E6 2JA, United Kingdom
support@affiliaterail.com