Affiliate Tracking Software: Your Checkout Decides Which One You Can Use

Where your sales already land decides which affiliate tracking software you can use, before price or features matter. On your own Stripe account, Endorsely is free until affiliates bring you $1,000 a month, and Rewardful starts at $49 a month. On Shopify or WooCommerce, GoAffPro is free under 100 orders a day.

Selling through a hosted checkout changes the answer. Systeme.io includes affiliate tracking on a free plan, Payhip on one that takes 5% per sale, and Podia and Gumroad build it in, so a third tool is often money spent twice. Every price below was read live at the vendor’s own pricing page, and every tool judged on what it can read a sale from.

You have someone willing to promote your product for a cut. Now you need to know who sent which buyer, and how much you owe them at the end of the month.

That sounds like a software problem, so you search, and every result hands you a ranked list of tools with feature scores next to them. Not one of those lists asks where your money arrives, which is what rules most of them out.

The question is whether the tool can see your sales at all. Answer that first and most of the list disappears. This post walks the real setups, what fits each, and the caps that bite first.

Key Takeaways

• Your checkout decides which tools can even read your sales, so pick your setup first and the tool second.
• Rewardful and FirstPromoter read sales only from Stripe, Paddle or Chargebee, so a Gumroad or PayPal sale is invisible to them.
• Payhip, Systeme.io, Podia and Gumroad all include affiliate tracking already, and 2 do it on a free plan, though Payhip takes 5% per sale.
• Kajabi has affiliate tracking on Growth and Pro only, and it is the one tool here that credits a code with no click at all.
• Entry plans meter different things, some your affiliate revenue and some your affiliate headcount, so cheapest depends on your numbers.

Start with what the tool can see

The tool has to be able to read your sales. That sounds obvious until you look at how narrow some of these tools are.

Rewardful is one of the first names you meet on this search, and its own pricing page settles it. Asked “I don’t use Stripe or Paddle. Can I still use Rewardful?” the answer is “Not at this time. We currently support only Stripe or Paddle”.

Rewardful’s own FAQ. If your money does not arrive through Stripe or Paddle, this tool cannot see your sales.

Paying commissions on sales you cannot see is a quiet money leak, and it is not the only one in a digital-product business. If you want the common ones laid out, the Online Selling Mistakes Challenge is a free 5-day email course that walks through them.

FirstPromoter works the same way. Its footer lists its billing integrations as Stripe, Chargebee and Paddle. PayPal shows up on that page, but only as a way to pay your affiliates, never as a place it can read a sale from.

These tools will happily pay an affiliate through PayPal. Very few of them can see that a customer paid you with it, and almost no roundup mentions the difference.

So the question worth answering first is where your money lands and what can read it. Everything below is organised around that.

The whole decision, drawn out. Find the branch that matches where your sales arrive today.

If your checkout already came with affiliate tracking

The ranking pages skip this group entirely. A lot of solo sellers are in it.

If you sell digital products through a hosted checkout, there is a good chance affiliate tracking is sitting in your dashboard already, switched off, waiting for you. Buying a separate $49 a month tool on top of it is a common and expensive mistake.

Payhip is the clearest case. Its pricing page has 3 plans and all 3 say “All features”, including the free one. Its own FAQ explains why: there is no feature-gating, and you get every feature “even on our free plan”.

Payhip’s plans. The free plan carries the same feature set as the $99 a month plan, affiliate tracking included.

Systeme.io does the same thing. Its affiliate page states that the feature is included on all plans including the free one, with no per-affiliate fee and no cut of affiliate revenue. The free plan limits you to affiliate programs on 1 product, and the $17 a month Startup plan removes that.

Podia and Gumroad both build it in too. Kajabi is the trap in this group, because its own documentation says affiliates are available with the Growth and Pro plans only, so on Kajabi Basic the feature exists in the product and not in your account. Payhip’s free tool has a catch of its own: it runs on a 30-day cookie, credits the last touch, and will not pay anyone for you. You get a monthly report with each affiliate’s PayPal address and you send the money yourself. Podia sets its attribution window to 15 days by default, which is short for anything with a slow sales cycle, and lets you set anything from 1 to 90 days.

Of the checkouts a solo seller is most likely to already be paying for, Systeme.io gives affiliate tracking away on a free plan that takes no cut of your sales and Payhip on one that takes 5%, Podia includes it on its paid plans and Gumroad inside its 10% cut, Kajabi gates it behind Growth, ThriveCart charges $295 a year extra, and Easy Digital Downloads has none of its own.

That last row is my own product, so take it with that in mind. CartMango has no affiliate system today. It is being built and is planned for September 2026, on the $30 a year Platinum plan. If affiliates are the reason you are shopping right now, one of the rows above it is your answer.

Fee structures differ a lot across these, and the affiliate feature is rarely the thing that should decide it. There is fuller cost math in the guide to what affiliate software costs and in the comparison of online stores for digital products.

If the money lands in your own Stripe account

Now the tools on page 1 make sense. Stripe is what almost all of them were built to read, and connecting one takes minutes rather than an afternoon, because the charge data is already in a shape they understand.

You connect the tool to Stripe, it watches for new charges, and it matches each one back to an affiliate. Setup is genuinely quick. Every one of these has a cap on it, and each vendor caps a different thing, so find your cap before you look at the interface.

Endorsely is free until affiliates bring in $1,000 a month, then $39 a month up to $5,000 and $99 a month up to $20,000. It reads Stripe or a manual API connection, tracks discount codes, and pays out through PayPal in bulk.

Rewardful and FirstPromoter both start at $49 a month. Rewardful’s Starter plan covers up to $7,500 a month of affiliate revenue. FirstPromoter’s Starter covers up to $5,000 a month, tops out at 1,000 affiliates and 3 campaigns, and costs $490 a year if you pay annually.

LeadDyno also starts at $49 a month, but it counts something different: 50 active affiliates, 1 commission plan, 1 affiliate group. Get to 51 affiliates and you are on the $129 a month plan, whatever your revenue is doing.

Trackdesk is in a different bracket. Its Business plan is $399 a month billed monthly, or $299 a month billed annually, and that buys 5 seats and 10 active offers.

At the entry level Endorsely is free, Rewardful, FirstPromoter and LeadDyno all cost $49 a month, and Trackdesk costs $299 a month on annual billing. The 3 priced at $49 are not comparable though: Rewardful and FirstPromoter meter your affiliate revenue, at $7,500 and $5,000 a month, while LeadDyno counts heads and stops at 50.

Every price above is the monthly rate unless the cell says otherwise. Compare like with like.

A warning that applies to this whole group. Add PayPal as a second way to pay you, which plenty of sellers do because a slice of buyers will not use a card, and a Stripe-only tool goes blind to every one of those orders.

It does not warn you. The commissions simply never appear, and your affiliate is the one who notices. Our breakdown of what PayPal charges sellers covers why so many sellers keep it switched on even with the fee.

If you sell from a store platform, not a payment link

Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace and BigCommerce sellers have their own set of options, and they work differently from the Stripe group.

These tools install into the store rather than connecting to a payment processor. That matters, because the store already knows about every order regardless of how the buyer paid, so the PayPal blind spot above does not apply in the same way.

GoAffPro has a genuinely free plan with unlimited affiliates, unlimited sales and unlimited revenue. The company suggests it for merchants under 100 orders a day. It also covers more store platforms than the other tools here, with apps for Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, Ecwid, Weebly, Magento and Square. What you give up on the free plan is the polish: the affiliate portal is the basic one, with GoAffPro’s own branding, and there is no payout scheduling. Its $49 a month Premium plan adds a branded portal, multi-level commissions and scheduled payouts.

Tapfiliate spans both worlds, plugging into Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento plus Stripe, which is unusual in this set. It starts at $89 a month, or $890 a year. It does not list Wix or Squarespace, so check yours is covered before you commit. Watch the Launch plan’s limits too: 50 affiliates, 5,000 clicks a month and 500 conversions a month, with overage at $1.50 per 1,000 clicks and $15 per 1,000 conversions.

If your store runs on WordPress, the plugin route is usually cheaper and gives you more control. That is a different set of tools with different tradeoffs, and it has its own guide on running an affiliate program on WordPress.

If PayPal is the only way you get paid

Plenty of solo sellers run on a PayPal button and nothing else.

If that is you, none of the paid tools above will work, and it is worth being blunt about it rather than letting you find out after the first invoice. Rewardful and FirstPromoter read Stripe and Paddle. LeadDyno reads Shopify and Stripe. GoAffPro and Tapfiliate read a store you do not have.

You have 2 honest routes. Move the selling side onto a checkout that takes PayPal and tracks affiliates itself, which is what Payhip and Systeme.io both do on a free plan. Check the cut before you move: Systeme.io takes 0% of your sales, Payhip takes 5%. Or run the program by hand: give each affiliate their own discount code, and reconcile the codes against your PayPal transactions once a month.

The manual route costs nothing and works fine at 3 or 4 affiliates. It stops being fun somewhere around 10, which is roughly the point at which moving the checkout pays for itself in time saved.

If your affiliates will hand out a code instead of a link

Code-based promotion sits alongside whichever situation above is yours, rather than replacing it. Work out your checkout first, then check whether the pick that came out of it can handle codes.

Some of the best promoters cannot use a link.

A podcaster reads your name out loud. A newsletter writer mentions you in a sentence. Someone hands out a card at a workshop.

In all 3 cases the listener types your web address from memory, arrives with no referral cookie attached, and buys. The affiliate gets nothing, and eventually stops mentioning you.

The fix is code-based attribution, where the affiliate gets their own discount code and the code carries the credit. Most tools here handle codes in some form. Rewardful includes coupon tracking on its Starter plan, FirstPromoter creates Stripe coupons automatically and gives each affiliate multiple codes, and Endorsely tracks discount codes even on its free tier.

On Stripe that works because a coupon and a code are 2 separate things. The coupon is the discount itself, the promotion code is the customer-facing text they type, and Stripe’s coupon docs confirm many codes can point at one coupon. So each affiliate gets a code of their own without you building a new discount every time.

Kajabi goes furthest. Its documentation is explicit that when an Affiliate Coupon code is used, the affiliate is credited “without needing to click a Share Link first”. No click anywhere in the chain.

Payhip and Gumroad are the other end of this. Both are link-based, so an affiliate has to get the buyer through their tracking URL for anything to register. That is a fair trade when the tracking costs you nothing on top, but it does rule out the podcast and newsletter promoters who are often the ones worth having.

Worth pairing this with the attribution window, because the 2 settings work together. A 15-day window like Podia’s default is tight for a podcast, where somebody might hear an episode and buy 3 weeks later.

FirstPromoter publishes its default openly at 60 days and says it can be changed. Payhip publishes 30 days. Most of the rest describe their window as customizable and never say what it starts at, so check it inside the account before you promise an affiliate anything.

The people who have run these programs warn about the upkeep more than the software. In the r/AffiliateMarket thread comparing these tools, a commenter put it this way: “Also worth checking how each tool handles refunds, proration, and multi-product catalogs, thats where the pain usually shows up for SaaS.”

Refunds catch people out. Pay a commission on a sale that later refunds, and the money is gone unless the tool claws it back.

Which affiliate tracking software fits your setup

The pick changes with every setup below: the built-in tool if you are on Payhip or Systeme.io, Endorsely or Rewardful on your own Stripe, GoAffPro on a store platform. Only the first of those costs nothing on top of what you already pay.

The bill that arrives when the program works

Every entry plan here has a number attached that raises your bill, and it is reached by succeeding.

Rewardful’s $49 plan stops at $7,500 a month of affiliate revenue. FirstPromoter’s stops at $5,000. LeadDyno’s stops at 50 people. Endorsely’s free tier ends at $1,000 a month.

So work out which ceiling your own numbers reach first, and price the plan above it too. That is the bill you will actually be paying 6 months in if this works.

Years ago I joined a few MLM companies and failed at every one of them. That was on me, not on them. I was naive enough to think joining was the job, and that downlines and money would show up on their own.

One of the first things my uplines had me do was write down 15 to 30 names I could think of, then ring each one to prospect them. I wrote the names down. I never called a single person, because the whole exercise made me feel gross and disingenuous.

An affiliate program is not that. Commission gets paid on a real sale to a real buyer, and nobody is recruiting anybody into a downline. What carries over is the part about people.

The lesson carries over. Tracking software counts the sales your affiliates bring, and finding people who want to bring them is a separate job that nothing here does for you. A short list of people who genuinely use what you sell will beat a long list of recruited strangers every time, and you can track 5 of those in a spreadsheet while you find out whether the idea works at all.

So the honest answer to “when do I buy affiliate tracking software” is: when people are already promoting you and counting them by hand has become annoying. Not before.

FAQ

What are the best affiliate tracking platforms?

There is no single best one, because they read sales from different places. For a seller on their own Stripe account, Endorsely, Rewardful and FirstPromoter all work and start between free and $49 a month. For a Shopify or WooCommerce store, GoAffPro and Tapfiliate. For anyone on a hosted checkout, the one already built into it.

Can affiliate sales be tracked if my customers pay through PayPal?

Not by most of the standalone tools. Rewardful supports Stripe and Paddle only, and FirstPromoter supports Stripe, Chargebee and Paddle. If PayPal is how you get paid, use a checkout with affiliate tracking built in, such as Payhip or Systeme.io, or a store app that reads orders instead of payments. Most tools here will send an affiliate their money through PayPal, which is a different job from tracking. Payhip is the exception: it reports what you owe and leaves you to pay it.

Is Systeme.io’s affiliate feature really free?

Yes, with a limit. Systeme.io states that affiliate management is included on all plans including the free one, with no per-affiliate fee and no cut of affiliate revenue. The free plan covers affiliate programs on 1 product and 2,000 contacts. The $17 a month Startup plan lifts both.

What is a normal affiliate cookie window?

Most tools sit between 30 and 60 days, and many let you change it. FirstPromoter defaults to 60 days. Payhip runs 30 days on a last-touch basis. Podia is unusually short at 15 days by default, adjustable from 1 to 90. Most vendors do not publish their default at all, so check it inside the account before you promise anything to an affiliate.

Does Kajabi’s affiliate tool cost extra?

Not as a separate charge, but it is only available on the Growth and Pro plans. On Kajabi Basic there is no affiliate feature to switch on, so the cost is a full plan upgrade rather than a tracking-tool subscription.

Do my affiliates have to disclose that they earn a commission?

In the US, yes. The FTC’s endorsement guides say the relationship has to be disclosed “clearly and conspicuously”, and suggest wording as plain as “I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.” Worth knowing that the label “affiliate link” on its own does not count, because the FTC says consumers may not understand what it means. Put the wording in your affiliate terms so nobody has to guess.

What about becoming an affiliate rather than running a program?

Different job, and this post does not cover it. Everything here is for the person paying commissions. If you landed here looking for programs to join, the numbers behind the industry are collected in our affiliate marketing data roundup instead.

What your checkout decides for you

Every choice above rests on the checkout that takes the money. It decides which affiliate tracking software can read your sales, which payment methods your buyers get, and how much of each sale reaches you. Sort the checkout out and the affiliate question gets a lot smaller.

CartMango is the checkout I built for solo digital sellers. Order bumps, protected file delivery and coupons are on every plan. Upsells, downsells and abandoned cart recovery start on the $20 a year plan. CartMango takes 0% of your sales on all of them, and it is free until October 2026, then from $10 a year.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

Related Reading

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• WordPress affiliate plugin: the plugin route, and which ones can genuinely send affiliates their money
• Shopping cart software: the 3 kinds it comes in and the 5 jobs each has to do
• Online store for digital products: 3 store types with the real fees on a $10 sale