Affiliate marketing is often the highest-ROAS program for businesses. But the problem is that finding a platform that makes tracking, payouts, and attribution accurate without creating more work for your team can be hard work. That’s where Rewardful helps.
Is it right for your SaaS business? We’ll describe its features, pricing, and best use cases so you can make an informed choice.
Table of Contents
What Is Rewardful?
Rewardful is an affiliate and referral tracking platform that connects directly with your payment processor, such as Stripe. You can reward affiliates whenever a customer signs up or makes a payment.
Instead of taking a cut of every sale, Rewardful charges a flat monthly fee with 0% commission, which means you keep more of the revenue you earn. You also set the commission structure, decide how long referrals track, and create branded portals where affiliates can get their links.
The platform also includes:
- Two-way sync for accurate revenue and refund tracking
- Coupon code tracking
- Mass payouts through PayPal or Wise
When Is Rewardful Right for You?
Not every business needs a tool like Rewardful, and that’s something worth saying out loud. Our team has set up affiliate programs across SaaS, e-commerce, coaching, and online education. And we’ve found that the platform matters less than the fit between your business model and what the tool was designed for.
Rewardful is at its best when:
- You sell subscriptions or digital products
- You already have inbound traction and have something solid to promote
- You want simplicity over bells and whistles
- You want to help affiliates track their own performance
- You want to see everything about your affiliates in one place
Where it falls short is for teams that want deep CRM integration out of the box. Custom-built setups often work better for these cases.
This means that while Rewardful does a lot of things right and could be the right choice in some instances, we’ve sometimes steered our clients toward alternatives because their long-term needs would push past its limits. If you’re weighing that decision yourself, talk through your funnel pricing model and growth stage with an affiliate marketing agency that has seen both sides of the coin.
Rewardful Pricing and Plans
Pricing is one of the biggest factors when choosing an affiliate marketing platform. The good news is that Rewardful keeps its plans simple, so it can scale alongside your affiliate program. Here’s a breakdown:
| Plan | Price | Features | Best For |
| Starter | $49/month, 0% fee | – 1 campaign – Up to $7,500/month affiliate revenue | Pilot programs, like for the first 30-50 partners |
| Growth | $99/month | – Unlimited campaigns and team members – Up to $15,000/month affiliate revenue – Branded portal and custom domain | Most growing brands as it offers the best overall value |
| Enterprise | $149/month | – Over $15,000/month affiliate revenue – Higher volume capacity – Dedicated CSM – Phone support | Programs above $15,000/month in affiliate revenue |
All plans come with a five-step setup, URL parameter embedding, two-way Stripe sync, coupon tracking, mass payouts, automatic refunds, and a 14-day free trial. You can also get two months free if you sign up for annual billing.
How the Rewardful Setup Works
Once you sign up, here’s how you’ll set up Rewardful to make sure tracking and payouts run as they should from day one:
1. Connect Your Stripe Account
Rewardful monitors events like payments, refunds, or invoices inside Stripe. This means that any time a customer pays an invoice (subscription or one-time), Rewardful checks if that customer was referred by an affiliate and automatically generates a commission.
To enable this, you need to connect your Stripe account directly inside Rewardful. You can do this by clicking the “Connect with Stripe” button on the “Connect your Stripe account” screen that appears once you sign up. Here’s what you’ll see:
When you click on the button, it’ll take you to Stripe’s website, where you’ll give Rewardful permission to monitor your account. Once that’s done, you’ll be redirected to the campaign setup page.
2. Create Your First Campaign
Your affiliate program campaign will define who gets paid, how much, and for how long. Once you’ve been redirected, give your campaign a name, add your website URL, and settle on your commission.
You can choose between the following payment types:
- Commission type, which is percentage-based or flat fee
- Duration, which can be one-time, recurring until cancellation, or capped at a set number of months
- Attribution rules, like cookie window and first- or last-touch
3. Install Rewardful on Your Website
Once you’ve created your campaign, you’ll be prompted to install Rewardful on your website or Stripe checkout. This will make sure Rewardful can track and pass referral IDs correctly. You can do this in three ways:
- Paste the tracking script on your site
- Use Stripe Checkout’s client/server integration
- Stripe Payment Links (supported if you sell through simple hosted checkouts)
4. Customize Your Affiliate Portal
If your plan allows, you can add your brand’s logo, colors, and program guidelines to your Rewardful affiliate portal, so affiliates feel like they’re part of your ecosystem.
You may also have to decide if you want to auto-approve applications or tag affiliates by type (like partners, ambassadors, influencers) at this point.
5. Set Up Payouts and Test
Since Rewardful doesn’t handle money movement directly, you’ll configure payouts through PayPal or Wise. You can decide on a cadence, like monthly, bi-weekly, or custom, and set thresholds so you aren’t sending out $5 payments every few days.
This is also where your finance team will make sure Rewardful meets existing cash-flow practices.
6. Run a Full QA Test
You’re basically done at the previous step, but we recommend running a quality analysis (QA) test at least once before you start inviting affiliates to your program.
This helps your team find tracking gaps, confirm payouts are flowing correctly, and make sure the affiliate portal looks the way you want.
The best way to do this is to run through it as if you were an affiliate. This means you should click your referral link, buy something, and check your dashboard to see the full journey.
Our team at Vivian Agency does this same process for every client launch and every tool integrated into their affiliate pipeline. If you’d like an extra set of eyes, we can help run it for you as well.
Let Vivian Agency Handle Affiliate Campaign Design for You
While Rewardful gives you the tools, the real results come from the way your affiliate program is designed, tested, and managed.
At Vivian Agency, we’ve set up campaigns for many SaaS startups. We know how to:
- Set up commission structures so partners want to work with you
- Design onboarding flows that actually get used
- QA payouts so you aren’t troubleshooting on launch day
If you’d like to skip the trial and error, our team can help you get the most out of Rewardful (or any other tool). We’ve done this for over 50 brands, including Click & Grow, where our affiliate program design helped onboard 1,000+ partners.
Book a call with our team or send us a message to get started!
