Most affiliate tracking tools charge brands somewhere between £50 and £300 a month from the day the programme opens. For a well-established brand with hundreds of active partners, that is a rounding error. For a new programme with a handful of partners and no sales yet, it is often the single biggest cost of running affiliate marketing at all, and it arrives before the first commission does.

I'm Maxime Yao, a final-year business student at the University of Exeter. My dissertation looks at what makes affiliate programmes grow, and I have spent the last few months reading programme terms and talking to affiliate managers. A few patterns came up again and again, and they shaped how I think affiliate software should be priced and built.

The "super affiliate" pattern

In almost every programme I looked at, a small group of partners drives most of the revenue. Some managers called them super affiliates; others just called them "the five people who matter". The long tail of partners is still useful, because today's small partner is sometimes next year's best one, but the economics of a programme are decided by a few relationships.

That has two consequences. First, a programme's value is lumpy and slow to arrive: you can spend months recruiting before one partner takes off. Second, anything that helps your best partners bring in other good partners is worth far more than another dashboard feature.

Why flat monthly pricing hurts new programmes

A flat subscription makes sense for the vendor: it is predictable revenue. For the brand, it means paying the same amount in the month when nothing happens as in the month when a partner sends fifty sales. Several managers told me they had shut down or paused programmes in the first six months, not because affiliate marketing failed, but because they could not justify the software bill while waiting for partners to ramp up.

The alternative is pricing that scales with results. If the software takes a small percentage of what you actually pay your partners, then a programme with no affiliate sales has no bill, and the cost only grows when the programme is already earning money. The incentives also line up better: the vendor only does well when your partners do.

Three things to check when choosing affiliate software

1. Pricing that scales with outcomes. Look at what you would pay in a month with zero affiliate sales. If the answer is more than zero, ask whether that cost is justified for your stage. Watch for per-seat or per-partner fees too, because they punish you for recruiting widely.

2. Fraud and attribution checks. The most common problems managers described were partners bidding on the brand's own name in search ads, discount codes leaking onto coupon sites, and bot or automated clicks inflating numbers. Good software should reject sales that come from brand-bidding or leaked codes, and flag suspicious click patterns before you pay out, not after.

3. Clean payouts. Paying partners is where many programmes create friction. Partners in different countries want to be paid in different ways. Being able to export payouts for PayPal, Wise, Revolut, Airwallex, UK bank transfers or US ACH saves hours each month and avoids awkward chasing.

Letting affiliates recruit affiliates, carefully

One idea that kept coming up was letting partners recruit other partners. Done badly, this becomes a pyramid scheme, with multiple layers of overrides and more focus on recruiting than selling. Done carefully, it is simply a referral programme for your referral programme: a partner who brings in another good partner earns a small override on that partner's commissions.

The guard rails matter. Keep it to two levels, never three. Let the brand set the override. Make sure every sale still has to come from a real customer through a real customer link. That way the incentive is to bring in partners who actually sell, rather than to stack layers.

What I built

These lessons are why I built ViralPayouts, affiliate software with no monthly fee. Brands pay 3.5% of what they pay their partners, so no affiliate sales means no bill. Every partner gets a customer link and a recruit link, with recruiter overrides limited to two levels. Fraud checks reject brand-bidding and leaked-code sales and flag bot clicks. Payouts export to PayPal, Wise, Revolut, Airwallex, UK banks or US ACH.

It connects to the platforms most small brands already use, including Stripe, Shopify, Whop, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and RevenueCat, and you can import an existing programme from Rewardful, FirstPromoter, Tapfiliate, PartnerStack or Impact. There is also a free test network with test money, so you can run the whole flow, from click to payout, before inviting real partners.

What I would like to learn from you

ViralPayouts is early, and my dissertation research is ongoing. If you run an affiliate or referral programme, I would value blunt feedback. What made you choose your current tool? What would make you switch? And if you have ever paused a programme because of software costs, I would especially like to hear what happened.

You can try ViralPayouts free at https://viralpayouts.com, and the founder story is on DEV: https://dev.to/maximeyao/im-a-student-writing-my-dissertation-on-affiliate-programmes-so-i-built-the-software-i-wished-1jo2