How to start a SaaS affiliate program in one week

A SaaS affiliate program is an agreement where partners send you customers and you pay them a share of what those customers pay you. The short version of this guide: pick a commission that follows the subscription, track sales at the invoice level, recruit 20 partners who already talk to your buyers, and pay monthly from your own PayPal or Wise account.

Day 1: decide what you pay

For subscriptions the commission should follow the subscription. The most common structure among SaaS programs is a percentage of each payment for a fixed number of months, often 20% for 12 months. Add a small first-payment bounty (for example $10) if you want partners to feel the first conversion immediately.

• Recurring percentage: 20% to 30% of each payment for 12 months is the normal range. Lifetime recurring is generous but hard to reverse later.
• First-payment bounty: $10 to $50, paid only when the customer actually pays, never on free trials.
• Tiers: a bonus at 10 paid customers and a higher percentage at 50 gives your best partners a reason to keep going.
• Hold period: 30 days covers most refund windows. Commission becomes payable after it.

Day 2: connect tracking

Tracking has two halves. A script on your site reads the partner's link parameter and stores a first-party cookie on your own domain. Your checkout passes the click id to Stripe as the client reference. From then on every invoice.paid event for that customer produces a commission record, and every refund produces a negative one.

Coupon codes are the second path. Each partner gets a personal promotion code in your Stripe account; a checkout that uses the code is attributed to that partner even without a cookie. Codes catch the audience that hears about you in a video and types your name into Google later.

Day 3 to 5: recruit the first 20 partners

1. List the people who already send you customers: newsletters that mentioned you, YouTubers who reviewed a competitor, communities where your buyers ask questions.
2. Import them as prospects and send a short personal email from your own mailbox. Lead with what they get, in numbers.
3. Publish your program in a marketplace so partners who are looking for programs can find you.
4. Approve applications within a day. A partner who waits a week stops caring.

Twenty active partners is the point where a program starts producing a predictable share of revenue. Most programs find that five of the twenty produce most of the sales.

Day 6: set up payouts

Do not hold partner money on a platform. The standard practice, used by Rewardful, FirstPromoter and RelayWonder, is monthly batches: the platform totals what each partner is owed after the hold period, you export a PayPal or Wise mass-payout file, you pay from your own business account, and you mark the batch paid. Set a minimum payout, usually $50, so you are not sending hundreds of tiny transfers.

Day 7: write the terms partners read

Partners decide in seconds. State the commission in one line, the cookie window in days, the hold period, the minimum payout, and what is not allowed (bidding on your brand name, self-referrals, coupon sites if you exclude them). Machine-readable terms matter too: AI assistants increasingly compare programs on behalf of creators.