The Ecomm Analyst

Refersion is one of the older names in Shopify affiliate tracking and it still does the core job well. The reason people go looking for alternatives is usually the pricing structure rather than the product.

Refersion’s own pricing page lists a free Marketplace Listing, a Launch plan at $39 a month plus 3 percent of affiliate-driven sales, and a Growth plan at $199 a month plus 2 percent, with annual billing cutting those to $29 and $159. Scale is a flat monthly subscription for brands doing over $1M GMV a year, quoted by sales. Worth noting that almost every aggregator I checked had these numbers wrong, quoting anything from $99 to $249, so go to the source.

That percentage on top of the subscription is the thing to model out. At $50,000 a month in affiliate revenue on the Growth plan, the 2 percent is $1,000 on top of the $199. Here is what else is worth looking at, with pricing from each vendor’s own page or App Store listing.

1. UpPromote

The most common Refersion replacement for Shopify stores, and the closest match on features. There is a free plan that handles up to 200 referrals a month with unlimited affiliates, which is enough to run a small program indefinitely.

Growth is $29.99 a month plus 2 percent of successful referral sales and covers 300 referrals monthly. Professional is $89.99 plus 1.5 percent for 600 referrals, and Enterprise is $199.99 plus 1 percent with no referral cap. Annual billing saves 17 percent and every paid plan has a 14-day trial.

The referral caps are the thing to watch. One influencer having a good week can push you into the next tier, and the percentage never goes away entirely.

2. ThoughtMetric

Not an affiliate platform, and included because affiliate tracking and attribution are two different problems that people routinely conflate. Refersion tells you which affiliate got credit for an order. It does not tell you whether that order would have happened anyway, which is the question that matters when an affiliate’s discount code is also being handed out in your email flow.

ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, reports revenue by channel against ad spend and separates new customers from returning ones, so you can see whether affiliate-attributed orders are bringing you customers you did not already have. Pricing starts at $99 a month on a pageview basis, all features at every tier, with a 14-day free trial and around $83 a month on annual billing.

You would run it alongside an affiliate tool, not instead of one. It has no payout functionality and no affiliate portal.

3. Social Snowball

Built around creator and customer referral programs rather than traditional affiliates, and the automation is the selling point. Post-purchase enrolment turns customers into affiliates without an approval step, and Safelinks generate single-use codes to stop discount codes leaking onto coupon sites.

Pricing is custom on both tiers. The Snow Day plan starts at $249 a month plus 3 percent of affiliate-generated revenue. Blizzard starts at $899 a month with no commission fees at all, and adds TikTok Shop affiliate management, Creator Search, social listening, and a dedicated account manager.

The 3 percent is charged on affiliate-generated revenue, not on what you pay out, so it scales with your program’s success rather than your costs. If affiliate revenue is a meaningful share of the business, run the arithmetic on the flat tier before signing.

4. GoAffPro

The blunt option if the percentage fees are what drove you here. The Shopify App Store listing shows a free plan with unlimited affiliates, unlimited revenue, a branded affiliate portal, analytics, and automated referral tracking, with no cut of sales.

The Premium plan is $49 a month flat and adds multi-level structures, an affiliate portal on your own domain, bulk email, and advanced analytics. There is a 15-day free trial.

The interface is less polished than the others here and the creator discovery side barely exists. For a brand that already knows who its affiliates are and just needs reliable tracking and payouts, that trade is easy to make.

5. Tapfiliate

Worth a look if you are not exclusively on Shopify, since it covers WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Stripe, and subscription businesses with the same tooling. Commission structures are flexible, including recurring and lifetime commissions, which most Shopify-first apps handle poorly.

The Shopify App Store listing shows plans from $89 a month with a free trial available, and the model is a flat subscription with no percentage taken from affiliate sales. As with Refersion, third-party pricing pages disagree wildly on this one, so check the listing or their site directly before budgeting.

What I would actually do

Work out your affiliate revenue for the last twelve months, then price each option including the percentage. Below roughly $20,000 a month in affiliate revenue the percentage models are usually cheaper. Above that, flat fee platforms start winning, and the gap widens quickly.

The second thing, and the one more people get wrong, is not to treat affiliate platform revenue as incremental. Every one of these tools will credit a sale to a discount code, including sales from customers who were going to buy regardless and just searched for a code at checkout. That is a measurement problem no affiliate platform solves for you, and I went into it here: How do attribution tools handle discount and influencer codes?