Dear Software Partners: Please Read This Before Starting an Affiliate Program

Dear Software Partners,

We’re the top affiliate partner for many modern SaaS companies and love sharing the best tools with our audience. But you know what often stops us?

Bad affiliate platforms.

Not bad products, bad tracking. Platforms that make it hard for us to do our job and promote your tool effectively.

What Makes an Affiliate Platform “Bad”?

Let’s break down the common traits:

• ‍Clunky Reporting: Reporting is brutal. We have to dig through multiple menus just to find conversion data.‍
• Unreliable Tracking: Many platforms don’t track clicks properly, which means a lot of our efforts go unrecognized. That’s discouraging. ‍For instance, there is one affiliate platform (ahem, Tapfiliate) that doesn’t even work when we log-in to our dashboard and have ad-block on. If our log-in attempts are being blocked, how do you think we can trust links are being tracked?‍
• Multiple Logins: We work with 160+ partners. If each one requires a separate login, that’s chaos. We also are more likely to forget that you exist as you're not where 80% of our partners are.‍
• Interface Bloat: Too many menus, too many options, too much fatigue. We go in, we're overwhelmed, and we're out.
• ‍Many Micro Payments: We don’t need 15 PayPal payments for random amounts every month. That’s just admin nightmare!

What Makes an Affiliate Platform “Good”?

Here’s what we want to see:

• Clean, Modern Reporting: Clicks, leads, conversions, and payouts all clearly visible to us.
• Deep UTM Tracking: We want to see which piece of content we created is converting best for you. Because you know why? We will do more of it! If we don’t have this data, we are both flying blind. ‍
• Unified Dashboard & Login: One login. One clean dashboard. All partners in one place. We will remember you exist!
• ‍Clean Payments. We only want to get paid once a month from you! That helps us see our realized revenue on in one chunk, and we appreciate it!
• Partner-Focused: Most platforms don't actually care about us (the one sending you traffic). No API for us to use for motivating the team via Slack alerts, piping you into our actual site infrastructure, nothing. This directly hurts you, you should want this for us.

Affiliate Marketing Has Evolved

Affiliate marketing used to have a bad rep. Not anymore.

There’s now a huge wave of high-quality creators and professionals who are eager to recommend tools they love. People buy from people, smart marketers know this. If you want folks on X, YouTube, or newsletters to talk about your product, you need to make it easy and rewarding for them to do so. Having a good affiliate marketing platform is the first step.

Platforms We Don't Recommend

If your program uses one of these platforms, we will immediately deprioritize working with your product:

• Impact
• Tapfiliate
• Cello
• Rewardful
• FirstPromoter
• Tolt
• Lemon Squeezy
• CJ
• FintelConnect
• Anything homegrown (seriously—don’t)

Platforms We Love

If you're on one of these platforms, we will immediately see a long-term relationship potential.

• Dub Partners. The best we’ve used! Modern, intuitive, and built for today’s creators. We can see exactly what content is converting—whether it’s from a YouTube card, description, article, or elsewhere. Partners using Dub instantly get our attention! If you go to Dub, please tell them we sent you 🙏 Also, Dub is affordable and great if you're just starting your program as it will scale with you.
• PartnerStack: Good platform with easy access to most of the data we need. While it doesn’t go as deep as Dub with UTM tracking, it’s reliable and gets the job done. As a heads-up, you're going to be in at 5–10X the cost with PartnerStack vs Dub Partners.

Final Thoughts

Don’t be fooled by platforms that claim to be “user-friendly” or "the most affordable". If you’re investing in an affiliate program, invest in a good platform. One that handles payouts for you (and not via PayPal or Wise). It’s the difference between a thriving partner ecosystem (and partners like us being excited to talk about your software) and an already-dead affiliate program.

The platform you select is more critical to your affiliate program's success than most companies realize.