Why We Charge Zero Transaction Fees

The dominant affiliate platforms — Impact, ShareASale, PartnerStack — were all built in an era when SaaS pricing norms hadn't fully formed. They borrowed a model from traditional advertising networks: take a cut of whatever revenue flows through the platform. It felt natural at the time.

Today that model is a silent tax on your affiliate channel. Impact charges around 2.5% on revenue driven through its platform. ShareASale's fees can reach 20% of commissions paid. PartnerStack takes a percentage on every closed deal. The more your affiliate program succeeds, the more you pay.

That creates a perverse incentive. It discourages businesses from running larger affiliate programs or offering higher commissions, because every dollar paid to an affiliate also triggers a platform fee. You end up optimizing your affiliate program around the platform's cut rather than around partner motivation.

When we built Referly, we decided the pricing model should align with the way founders actually think about affiliate programs. You want a reliable, low-cost acquisition channel. You want to pay affiliates generously so they stay motivated. You don't want to feel like you're handing a percentage of every sale to a software vendor indefinitely.

A flat monthly fee — starting at $39/mo on our Starter plan — means the cost of running your affiliate program is predictable and fixed. Whether you drive $500 or $50,000 in affiliate revenue this month, your platform cost stays the same. That predictability changes how you think about scale.

It also lets you offer better commissions. If you're not bleeding 2.5–20% to a platform, you can pass more of the economics to your affiliates. Better commissions attract better affiliates. Better affiliates drive more revenue. The math compounds in your favor instead of against you.

Impact is the enterprise standard — powerful, customizable, and expensive. Beyond the percentage fee on tracked revenue, implementation costs and minimum commitments put it out of reach for most early-stage teams. It's built for companies with dedicated partnership managers and six-figure marketing budgets.

ShareASale is older and simpler, but its fee structure includes a 20% override on commissions paid plus a $550 network access fee. For a $1,000 month of affiliate payouts, you're handing over $200 to the platform on top of the commissions themselves.

PartnerStack targets B2B SaaS specifically and has a clean partner portal, but pricing is opaque and percentage-based at scale. Many founders report paying 2–5% on revenue, which compounds quickly once a channel starts working.

Referly handles click tracking, affiliate onboarding, a merchant dashboard, an affiliate portal, commission management, and Stripe payouts with plans starting at $39/mo. The percentage we charge on transactions is exactly 0%.

We're building Referly for the same kinds of companies we came from: SaaS teams and ecommerce founders who want to launch an affiliate channel without a procurement process or a six-month integration project. Those companies are price-sensitive. They're running lean. They want to try something, see if it works, and scale it if it does.

A percentage-based pricing model would have made that bet harder to take. If every test costs a percentage of whatever you earn, the risk calculation changes. With a flat fee, the risk is capped and the upside is entirely yours.

We think that's the right trade-off. Not for every business, but for the ones we're trying to serve.