EzyGold is the script you buy when you don't want an affiliate program, you want a downline. Two-tier, unilevel, forced matrix, 2-up, whatever structure you can draw on a napkin, it'll run. I bought it, ran a business on it, and it was both the most capable and the most difficult piece of affiliate software I've owned.
Here's the credential. Years ago I built a business opportunity called MLMzing.com, teaching marketing to people in network marketing, and EzyGold was the engine under it. It worked. It did high five figures. So when I tell you below that setup is hard, that's not a review-site complaint, it's a scar.
Current pricing, requirements and feature claims are from ezygold.com. My version was older; where I think something has changed, I say so.
Who it's for
Anyone building a program where affiliates recruit affiliates and get paid on what their recruits do. A straight MLM. A downline builder. A two-tier referral program you want to gamify, with ranks and leaderboards and people climbing. EzyGold's whole reason to exist is comp-plan flexibility, and nothing else in this directory comes close: unilevel to 25 levels deep, forced matrix up to 10 wide and 25 deep, and multiple X-Up plans on the top tiers.
People who want to own the software outright and never pay a subscription. The owned editions are one-time and come with lifetime updates.
Business-opportunity sellers, membership sites, and anyone whose product is the opportunity itself. That was me.
Who should skip it
Anyone who wants a normal single-tier affiliate program for a SaaS or a store. You're buying a Formula 1 car to go to the shops. Affonso, Rewardful or a WordPress plugin will do it in an afternoon.
Anyone without a server person. The requirements page says installation "requires at least basic web hosting knowledge and webmaster skills" and recommends hiring a technician. Believe it. More below.
Anyone on shared hosting from the big consumer brands. EzyGold itself says Ionos, SiteGround, Hostinger, Wix, iPage and others "don't work well." It wants cPanel or DirectAdmin on a Linux box you control.
Anyone who expects a refund if the install fails. The terms say no refunds "for any reason," and that includes a failed install.
Pricing, decoded
The product is called Nema now (it wasn't when I bought it), and it comes two ways: leased monthly, or owned outright.
Leased, billed monthly, stops working if you stop paying:
- Nema Startup, $38 a month. Up to 1,000 members, 5 pay plans, 10 programs, 10 ranking systems. Two support tickets a month.
- Nema Inspire, $98 a month. Unlimited members, 10 pay plans, 25 programs, 50 ranking systems.
- Nema Innovate, $128 a month. Unlimited everything, 50% off the Installation Plus service. This is the one they mark "most popular."
- Nema Advance, $348 a month. Adds multiple X-Up plans, unlimited downline builder, Auto Payout through Tremendous and Stripe, a free sub-licence, early access to features, and private shared hosting. Three tickets a month.
Owned, one-time, "lifetime free updates":
- Nema Pro, $950.
- Nema Premium, $1,650. Multiple X-Up plans, unlimited downline builder, Auto Payout.
The catch on the owned editions is support. You get two or four basic tickets a month, valid for two months from purchase. After that, support is paid, and I couldn't find the rate published. So "lifetime updates" is true, and "lifetime support" isn't a thing. Price in a support budget or a developer who knows the product.
The lease isn't rent-to-own. Twelve months of Nema Innovate is $1,536, more than Nema Pro, and at the end of it you own nothing. If you're going to run the program for more than nine months, buy it. If you're testing whether a downline builder is the right model for your business, lease Startup for three months and find out.
One domain per licence, and the "Powered by EzyGold" credit stays on your pages unless you buy credit removal (included on the leases; priced separately on owned).
Setup: 5 out of 5, and I mean it
This is the hard part, and it was hard when I did it, and the requirements page says it's still hard.
What the server needs: Linux and Apache with mod_rewrite, cron, PHP 8.2 with cURL, PDO, Intl, GD, mHash and zLib, allow_url_fopen on, open_basedir off, MySQL with strict mode off (or PostgreSQL), and the ionCube Loader installed, because the code is encoded. That last one is the gate. Plenty of hosts don't ship ionCube, and some won't install it.
Then the configuration. Every pay plan, rank, program and product is a screen of settings, and the settings interact. The flexibility that makes EzyGold worth buying is the same thing that makes it a week of work to configure, because there's no default comp plan to accept. You design it, then you encode it, then you test it with fake members until the money flows where you drew it.
Budget: a technician for the install (EzyGold sells Installation Plus for exactly this), and a week of your own evenings for the configuration. If you've never run a comp plan before, read about them first, because the software will faithfully execute a bad one.
A story that isn't EzyGold's fault
While I was running MLMzing, thirteen sales came in on one day, from nowhere, through my Authorize.net gateway. Then every one of them charged back. Every single one.
I still don't understand the scam. One theory, and I can't confirm it, is card testing: stolen cards tried against a live checkout to see which ones work, with my product as the test. Whoever did it made a very small amount of money, if any, and I got a whole lot of grief: the chargeback fees, the gateway's attention, and the cleanup. That's not an EzyGold problem; it's a running-your-own-checkout problem, and it's the thing a merchant of record like ClickBank is insulating you from, at a price. If you self-host your program and your checkout, you're the fraud department. Put velocity limits on your gateway before you launch, not after.
What it does well
Comp plans. I keep saying it because nothing else here does it. Two-tier with ranks and a leaderboard is the gamification play, and it works on people: the moment an affiliate can see that recruiting one more person moves them up a rank, you've turned a commission into a game. That's the same mechanic as a loyalty tier at an airline, and the psychology is Cialdini's commitment and consistency: once someone has publicly climbed to Silver, they'll do a surprising amount to not fall back to Bronze. EzyGold gives you the ranks, the thresholds and the downline view that make it visible.
Robust and reliable. Once mine was configured, it ran. It tracked, it calculated, it paid out what the plan said. I didn't lose commissions and I didn't lose members. For software this configurable, that's not a given.
Your server, your database. The members, the downline, the transaction history are all in a MySQL database you control. The code's encoded, so you can't read or modify it, but the data's yours in the plainest possible sense.
The bundled extras are more than you'd expect: a members' eStore, digital downloads, secure content areas, vendor stores so members can sell their own products inside your platform. If your business opportunity includes selling the members a toolkit, it's built in.
Lock-in: 2 out of 5
What gets you out: your database. Members, downline relationships and transactions are in your MySQL. No contract on owned editions. Nothing stops you exporting and leaving.
What keeps you in: the comp plan. If you've built a five-level unilevel with ranks, there is almost nowhere to take it. AffiliateWP does five levels on its Pro tier; most of this directory does one. So the data comes out, but the structure doesn't fit anywhere else, and you'd be flattening a downline, which is the fastest way to lose the people in it. Plus the encoded code: you can't fork it or patch it, so if EzyGold stopped updating, you'd be stuck on the last version. There's no public changelog, so I can't tell you how often it's maintained.
Two for the data, with the caveat that the model itself is the lock.
Gotchas
- Setup is a 5. The vendor says hire a technician. Hire one.
- ionCube required. Check your host before you buy, not after.
- No refunds, including on a failed install. It's in the terms.
- Owned support runs out after two months. Two or four tickets a month, then paid.
- Lease is not rent-to-own. Nema Innovate for a year costs more than owning Nema Pro.
- Consumer hosts won't work, by EzyGold's own list. cPanel or DirectAdmin on a server you control.
- MySQL strict mode off, open_basedir off. Two settings a security-minded host won't like.
- Encoded code, no changelog. You can't audit it and you can't see how often it's updated.
- "Powered by" credit stays unless you pay to remove it (included on leases).
- One domain per licence.
- The software will run a bad comp plan perfectly. Design the plan before you touch the settings.
- You're the fraud department. See the chargeback story.
Integrations
Payment processors for your members' stores and your own checkout: Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, Paystack, Payfast, PerfectMoney, NowPayments and CoinPayments. Auto Payout via Tremendous and Stripe on Nema Advance and Premium. Peppy.link for links. Tax forms: not documented; assume you're handling 1099s yourself.
Not supported: no WordPress plugin, no Shopify, no SaaS billing webhooks. EzyGold expects to be the platform, not an add-on to one.
If you're leaving
Dump the database. Members, sponsors, downline tree, transactions. Decide whether the new tool can represent your structure, because it probably can't, and if you're flattening to one or two tiers, model who loses income and tell them before they find out. Keep the old install running read-only until every commission in flight has been paid, because the calculations live in the encoded code and you won't be able to reproduce them elsewhere.
Verdict
My opinion, labelled as such, from having run a business on it: if you're building a downline, EzyGold is the tool, and the difficulty is the price of the flexibility. Nothing else here will do a 2-up or a forced matrix or a ranked two-tier with a leaderboard. It was robust, it was reliable, and it made me money. Buy Nema Pro rather than leasing if you're serious, hire the install, and give yourself a week for configuration.
If you're not building a downline, don't go near it. A single-tier program on Affonso or Rewardful is live in an afternoon, and if you want multi-tier inside WordPress without a server project, AffiliateWP does five levels. And whatever you run, if the checkout is yours, so is the fraud. Thirteen sales in a day from nowhere isn't a good day. Set the velocity limits first.
Last verified November 2, 2026. Plan names, prices and limits from ezygold.com/lease and ezygold.com/pricing. Requirements, hosting list and refund terms from ezygold.com/requirements and /terms. The author bought and ran an earlier version of EzyGold as the platform for his own business opportunity; the chargeback incident described involved his Authorize.net gateway, not EzyGold. Owned-edition support terms and the absence of a public changelog were checked on the verification date. Some links on this page are affiliate links.
