What does Rewardful do?

Tool: Rewardful

Their Pitch

All-in-one affiliate management software for SaaS.

It's affiliate tracking for SaaS companies that use Stripe. Finally handles the subscription billing mess that breaks other affiliate tools.

Deep Dive & Reality Check

+**Manually tracking affiliate commissions in spreadsheets for 4 hours every month** → Auto-calculates everything including prorated upgrades, trial conversions, and refund adjustments
+**Affiliate tools that think subscriptions are just repeated one-time sales** → Handles the complexity of recurring billing, downgrades, and cancellations properly
+**Reconciling Stripe data with affiliate payouts using vlookup formulas** → Two-way sync pulls sales data and pushes payouts back automatically
+Bulk PayPal payouts to hundreds of affiliates - no more individual transfers
+Fraud detection flags suspicious referral patterns before you pay out

>Your affiliate program is tracked in spreadsheets and you're tired of calculating prorated commissions at 2am
>You tried other affiliate tools but they broke on subscription upgrades and downgrades
>Your SaaS uses Stripe and you want affiliate tracking that doesn't require a computer science degree

-Companies not using Stripe - it literally won't work with other payment processors
-E-commerce businesses selling physical products - this is built for subscription software, not inventory
-Teams with fewer than 20 affiliates - you're paying $49/month for what free Stripe referral links could handle

*Stripe (the only payment processor this actually works with - no Square, no PayPal, just Stripe)
*PayPal (where you'll upload CSV files to actually send affiliate payments)
*Wise (alternative to PayPal for international affiliate payouts)
*Slack (where you'll get notifications about new referrals and commission disputes)
*Google Sheets (for analyzing affiliate performance data you export from Rewardful)
*Zapier (to connect affiliate signups to your CRM or email marketing)

!Revenue caps will bite you mid-growth - hit $10k monthly and tracking stops until you upgrade
!Payouts are still mostly manual CSV downloads to PayPal unless you're on expensive plans with beta features
!The 'automated' part is commission calculation - you're still approving and sending payments yourself

The only affiliate tool that actually understands recurring subscriptions instead of pretending e-commerce logic works for SaaS.