Rewardful Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

What is Rewardful?

Rewardful is an affiliate and referral management platform focused on SaaS companies (typically using Stripe). They claim to help you track, manage, and "reward" affiliate partners for sending you new signups and sales.

In theory, they're hoping to help you streamline all the complex affiliate operations. But in practice, you quickly see where they're a bit half-baked, as things fall apart pretty quickly. So this review is going to focus more on why we believe Rewardful is not what it's marketing would otherwise tell you it is.

Who is Rewardful For?

Rewardful targets SaaS founders and marketers who want a quick, lightweight way to launch an affiliate program. And while they allow you to do just that, it starts to lead to more headaches than it does solve this for you as you begin scaling. So if you don't mind all of the headache involved with manually running payouts via PayPal/ACH, chasing up invoices from partners, oh, and sending 1099 Forms and W-8BEN Forms, and filing all of that at year-end. You may "think" you're saving money by handling payouts yourself, but you're not, and most people who go with Rewardful just end up using a separate payment platform (that doesn't integrate in all that well), just to handle payouts.

Rewardful Key Features

1. Separate Login for Every Program

Rewardful does not have a unified affiliate dashboard (baffling). Yes, every company's program is totally siloed, forcing your affiliate partners to create and remember separate logins for each software company they're promoting. If you work with dozens of partners (we work with 30+ on Rewardful alone), this is absolute sheer chaos. It is also a constant reminder that you are not where the majority of our other partners are, meaning you will be deprioritized, because we will rarely check your affiliate portal, and you won't be a focus of ours (and the other top affiliate partners/influencers/creators).

Verdict: An absolute nightmare for affiliate partners. A single login and dashboard should be absolutely table stakes now-a-days. This is insanely infururating.

2. No Payout Handling (Manual Everything)

Unlike Dub Partners, and PartnerStack, Rewardful does not handle payouts. What does this mean? Well... It means you're now expecting affiliate partners to invoice each company they work with individually. If that's not a headache enough for your partners (who would be better off spending their time creating more content), well, you now need to manually send out payments via PayPal/ACH/Wire transfer.

What this results in is sometimes hundreds of tiny transactions per month, and an incredible amount of admin on both sides. Oh! And don't forget to manually collect tax forms (W-9, 1099, W-8BEN, etc.) just to stay compliant.

The kicker? Even Rewardful (using their own platform for affiliate) uses a super outdated payout platform called Tipalti for payouts (not their advertised "one-click PayPal payout option" available on their enterprise tier). So, let me get this straight... Your own "payout solution" isn't even good enough to handle payouts for you, but it somehow is for your customers...? Something isn't quite right here...

Verdict: I cannot stress this enough... Your biggest affiliate partners will despise you and the platform. You're just wasting their time with busywork, all to "save money" on going with a proper affiliate management company that handles all of this admin automatically, like Dub Partners. Or just go with Rewardful if you don't value your partners' time along with your accounting team's time.

3. Weak Reporting & Analytics

Rewardful’s reporting is beyond barebones. You cannot see which YouTube videos, written content, or campaigns are actually driving conversions and revenue. That means both the affiliate partner, and you are totally flying blind with no way of knowing what is actually working.

Verdict: Why even partner with top influencers and content creators if you don't care about knowing what content is working and converting? You're hurting your partnership from day one.

Rewardful Pricing

When looking at Rewardful pricing, and comparing it (like I'm sure you are) to PartnerStack and others that handle payouts and the entire partnership management side of things, realize that all you're paying for is basic reward tracking with Rewardful. Everything else is manual and painful.

• Starter Tier: $49/mo (Up to $7,500/mo from affiliates)
• Growth Tier: $99/mo (Up to $15,000/mo from affiliates + custom rewards + custom domain)
  
• Enterprise Tier: $149/mo (Over $15,000/mo from affiliates + one-click PayPal Payouts: but don't let this fool you, not even they use their own payout integration, they are instead paying for their own custom-built integration with Tipalti to handle payouts for their own affiliate program)

Final Verdict

Is Rewardful worth it? If you care about attracting and keeping quality affiliates, then no, no it's not. It creates consistent unnecessary friction every step of the way, puts constant tedious manual work on your finance team and your affiliate partners. When we see a software partner signs up with Rewardful, we immediately think "gah, they aren't taking affiliate seriously, so we won't either, bummer."

If you want a platform that affiliates (like us) are actually excited to use and work with, just go with Dub Partners on day one. Otherwise you'll be switching to it next year when your annual contract is up anyway, so take the shortcut.