Recommend: Affiliate Referral software for SaaS Stripe businesses (or a free startup idea)
Having built and purchased SaaS products for years I got used to there being multiple good solutions to everything I've ever really needed until this past week. We recently just got a sizeable referral partner and I've been trialing different Stripe-approved affiliate software providers (https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/referral-marketing) and they all seem to either be overly complicated or not have enough features.
I'd love a suggestion to a good affiliate referral tool, but in the meantime I'm just building it all on my own to handle my company's use case. But if there's anyone interested in diving deeper and looking to start something, here are some details that might give you a good idea. I need my referral software to:
- Integrate with Stripe, whenever a customer signs up with a certain metadata tag, associate it with a referral campaign I've created in the referral software.
E.g. Users who sign up for "cool" plan for $10/mo and were referred by Bob go into "cool-10" referral campaign. Bob is an affiliate who belongs to that campaign and I agree to give Bob 20% of all recurring subscriptions.
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Edit payouts by referral. E.g. Sally signs up for $10/mo under Bob's plan, but I want to give Bob 50% or 10% of her payments. Optionally, I can also turn off Sally's commissions to Bob at any time (e.g. after a year or so).
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Import existing referrals that have already joined but did so before I've signed up for my referral software.
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Optionally, a way to automatically reconcile and submit the commissions to your affiliate by PayPal.
For instance, if I owe $500 to 5 different providers, the referral software can just bill me $600 for that month which covers PayPal fees as well as the software's monthly revenue. But I get there might be a lot more accounting, tax, and fraud ramifications here so it's entirely understandable if this is not implemented, most of the providers don't do automatic payouts either.
This doesn't seem entirely complicated or customized to me, but the problem I'm facing with all of the options in the Stripe partner list above is:
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They aren't SaaS-focused. SaaS often seems like an afterthought, and they were originally meant for ecommerce referrals
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Their onboarding is agonizing. One of the providers I tried had a 29 minute onboarding that included something like 15 steps. Most of the providers require you to add some JS snippet to your <head> tag as well as your thank you page. All of this seems unnecessary (and probably a symptom of being ecommerce-first), especially if my app isn't entirely built in JS. Ideally the signups can just be tracked by reading new customers on Stripe as long as the proper metadata is sent and synced with the software provider.
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Critically, some tools don't seem to give me the flexibility to adjust affiliates individually.
Just make this dead simple and logical to set up while giving me the ability to override campaign defaults for individual affiliates if I need to. We currently have about $600-1000/mo in affiliate commissions we need to pay out every month and it's troublesome enough that I was willing to pay ~$70/mo for the right software, but so far everything has been a pretty big letdown.
You ever get something in the works? I'm facing the same issues 2 years later.
I created my own unfortunately but for our bare minimum use case it was fine. Just grab all charges from Stripe with the ref code (stored as metadata) and then do whatever calculation I want from there.
Yeah looks like we'll have to do the same. Any chance you could publish or share your code? Might help us speed things up.
Thanks