Tapfiliate Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

What is Tapfiliate?

Tapfiliate is an affiliate management platform that has similar issues as Rewardful and FirstPromoter, but they might just be one of the worst offenders. They all lack a good partner experience resulting in your affiliates not caring about your program. In fact, they will avoid logging in because they are juggling 30+ separate Tapfiliate accounts. You will be stuck chasing invoices, sending PayPal payments one by one, and drowning in hundreds of tiny transactions… all while your affiliates have zero idea which of their content is converting.

While It technically works for setting up an affiliate program quickly (great, you have a program). The problem is it's a half-baked solution that will directly impact your partners' willingness to promote you.

We're personally used Tapfiliate as an affiliate and immediately don't take the program seriously if the brand is using Tapfiliate because it just signals "we aren't really investing in our affiliate program, this is just something we're testing very in a very non-committal way".

Compared to tools like Dub Partners or PartnerStack, Tapfiliate feels a generation behind and will be the reason you go from thinking "affiliate is a growth channel" to instead "affiliate is a headache".

Who is Tapfiliate For?

Tapfiliate is all over the place with who they are building for. On one hand, they say SaaS companies but also ecommerce stores selling physical products, digital downloads, or subscriptions. Running a SaaS affiliate program is different from running one for physical products because the entire revenue model, customer journey, and reporting needs are completely different.

With SaaS, affiliates care about recurring revenue, not one-time payouts. You need to track trials, activations, upgrades, churn, lifetime value, and the specific content that drove each step. Affiliates expect transparency into which videos, posts, or links are generating recurring revenue over time.

Physical products are simpler: a customer buys once, you pay a percentage, done. No subscription lifecycle, no churn tracking, no multi-touch attribution, no recurring commission calculations.

So with that, Tapfiliate falls short on both sides and we wouldn't recommend it for either, but especially not SaaS products.

Tapfilate Key Features

Separate Login for Every Program

Tapfiliate does not have a unified affiliate dashboard, 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, 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.

Payout Handling (Not Really)

Unlike Dub Partners, and PartnerStack, Tapfiliate does not handle payouts yet. They just recently announced that they would bring payments in house with "Tapfiliate 2.0" which is "coming soon". But let's talk about this for a second because Tapfiliate was built in 2014! And they are JUST NOW adding the ability to manage payments? Likely because it's becoming tablestakes with any affiliate platform.

But just take that in, because is this the type of platform you are getting if you choose Tapfiliate. One that did not choose to build features that actually makes the lives of their customers easier.

But until they actually release automated payout handling, guess what? You're stuck manually managing payments. You will expect affiliate partners to invoice you each month. Good publishers and affiliates can work with 100+ partners, and trust us, if you're going to put admin overload on our plate, we won't like it. 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.

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. 

Weak Reporting & Analytics

I just have to say it: Tapfiliate has the worst dashboard we've ever seen as an affiliate platform. It's incredibly basic yet unintuitive. You really can't get any useful data from it.  Tapfiliate 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.

Outdated User Experience

Not only outdated, but it's like the team didn't even take the time to put care into the details... like making text fit into the right size box 😅 The entire product has this feel to it, making it unenjoyable to actually use.

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Tapfiliate Pricing

• Launch Tier: $89/mo
• Scale Tier: $199/mo
  

For these prices, there are much more modern affiliate platforms.

Final Verdict

Is Tapfiliate 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 Tapfiliate, 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.