I get an email from FirstPromoter on the first of every month. I'm not a customer. I'm an affiliate for Coupler.io, whose program runs on it, and the email is FirstPromoter telling me how I did last month. Clicks, referrals, customers, earnings. One click, zero everything else, and a line that reads "Last month was a bit slow on the referral side. Let's work together to turn things around."
No other program I'm in does that. Affonso, Tolt and Rewardful all email me when a commission lands. Only FirstPromoter emails me when nothing does. I'll come back to why that matters, because it's the most interesting thing about the product and nobody mentions it.
I haven't run a merchant account on FirstPromoter. What follows is the affiliate side from my own inbox, their pricing and feature comparison pages, their docs and help centre, and the reviews.
Who it's for
SaaS companies on Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, Recurly or Braintree with a developer on hand and a program they expect to grow past a few thousand a month, who want multi-tier commissions, a full export, and an affiliate portal that does some of the nagging for them.
FirstPromoter has been around since 2017, which in this category makes it a veteran. The integration list is one of the longest in the SaaS bracket: Kajabi, ThriveCart, Thinkific, ClickFunnels, Kartra, SamCart, Ghost and HighLevel alongside the billing platforms. If your stack is unusual, it's probably on the list.
Who should skip it
Anyone who wants a free plan. There was one. It went away around February 2026.
Anyone without a developer. The integrations are webhook-based, and the consistent complaint across years of reviews is that setup is hard without one. More below.
Anyone who needs payouts handled from day one. Managed payouts exist, but they're gated to the upper Enterprise tiers and come with conditions.
Anyone under about $5,000 a month in affiliate revenue who's price-sensitive. At that size Affonso is €15 and Reditus and Tolt are cheaper too. FirstPromoter's $49 buys you a bigger tool than you need.
Pricing, decoded
- Starter: $49/month or $490 a year. Up to $5,000 a month in affiliate revenue, 1,000 affiliates, 3 campaigns, one website.
- Business: $99/month or $990 a year. Up to $15,000 a month, unlimited affiliates and campaigns, 2 websites, custom dashboard domain, one-click PayPal payouts, EU self-billed invoices, embedded dashboard.
- Enterprise: $149/month or $1,490 a year. Above $15,000 a month, 3 websites, white-label, SSO and audit logs, post-back URLs, and the managed payouts.
14-day trial. 0% transaction fee on all plans. Yearly saves you two months.
The revenue cap is the thing to understand. Like Rewardful, FirstPromoter prices on how much your affiliates sell, not on how many you have or what you pay them. At $10,000 a month in affiliate sales you're on Business. At $20,000 you're on Enterprise. So the sticker price is $49 and the price for a program that works is $99 to $149, which is the same shape as Rewardful and Tolt. None of the three is cheap once you're successful, and the gap between them is small enough that the feature list should decide it.
One more number. The founder sold the company to a private equity firm. I couldn't pin down when. The free plan disappeared this year and the pricing has been in flux, which is what tends to happen after a PE buyer arrives. Screenshot your plan terms when you sign up.
What it does well
Multi-tier, up to three levels. That's rare in the SaaS bracket. Rewardful, Tolt and Affonso are single-tier. If you want affiliates to recruit affiliates, this is one of the few polished options that isn't a self-hosted script or an MLM-flavoured tool.
Export is full. There's a one-click export for finance and an API endpoint that dumps every referral to CSV. GoHighLevel and FG Funnels both publish "switch from FirstPromoter" guides, which tells you the data comes out cleanly enough that competitors built importers for it.
And the affiliate-side nudge. The feature table calls it "inactivity nudges," part of the email automation on every plan, alongside welcome sequences, commission alerts and broadcasts. Here's the one I get, in full, with the program name swapped out:
Your Monthly Performance Update
Clicks: 1. Referrals: 0. Customers: 0. Earnings: $0.
Last month was a bit slow on the referral side. Let's work together to turn things around.
[Log in to see your reports]
FirstPromoter sends this to every affiliate automatically, and the middle line changes depending on whether the month was good or bad. It's not sophisticated. But think about what it does. An affiliate who signed up, posted one link, and forgot about you now gets a monthly reminder that the program exists, with a login button. For an active affiliate it's a scoreboard. For a dormant one it's a tap on the shoulder.
Does it work? For me, the Coupler.io email hasn't turned me into a top affiliate, so I'd be careful about expecting it to revive the dead. What it does is keep the live ones live, and it does that for free, without you writing a single email. Every other tool I'm in as an affiliate emails me only when I earn something, which means the affiliates who most need a nudge are the ones who never hear from it.
Setup, which is the sore spot
FirstPromoter tracks through your billing platform's webhooks and a tracking script on your site. That's the right architecture for SaaS, because the sale is attributed to the Stripe or Paddle customer and survives whatever happens to cookies. It's also the reason the setup reviews are what they are.
Capterra, across several years: "hard to get it setup without a developer." One reviewer nearly cancelled over the Chargebee integration. A Trustpilot reviewer couldn't get click tracking to work in the trial and was told to contact their hosting company. These are old reviews, and the product has had years to improve, but the pattern is consistent and the architecture hasn't changed.
Budget a developer afternoon, not a founder afternoon. If you're on Stripe with a standard checkout it'll be shorter. If you're on Chargebee or Paddle Classic, read the docs first.
Paddle specifically: FirstPromoter ignores VAT-only refunds and zero-value transactions, and the "exclude Paddle fees from commission" toggle doesn't recalculate commissions already paid. Small things, but they'll show up in your reconciliation.
Payouts
Standard is you pay. Export the owed commissions, run mass pay through PayPal, Wise, Stripe, bank transfer or crypto, mark as paid. That's every plan. One-click PayPal payouts from inside the dashboard need Business and a PayPal Business account with the Payouts API.
Managed payouts, where FirstPromoter pays affiliates and handles W-9, W-8BEN and 1099s, run through a third party called Dots. They're available on the higher Enterprise tiers only, for SaaS businesses only, after an account review. One payout run a month. Affiliates wait 7 to 10 days for the money. No refunds once a payout is sent. Crypto, adult and firearms excluded.
So the tax-form handling that makes Reditus and Rewardful's managed payouts attractive is here too, but at a price point and with conditions that most of the people reading this won't meet. Below Enterprise, tax forms are your problem.
Lock-in: 2 out of 5
What gets you out: full CSV export of affiliates and referrals, an API that does the same, and the existence of third-party import guides. No contract beyond the billing period you chose. Payouts run through your own PayPal or Wise, so there's no vendor-held balance unless you're on managed payouts.
What keeps you in: tracking links are on your own domain on every plan, which is good news for ad blockers and bad news for leaving, because the links still route through FirstPromoter's tracking and die when the account does. The affiliate dashboard is on their domain unless you're on Business or above. Either way your affiliates' logins go with it. Three-level commission structures don't map onto single-tier tools, so if you've built a multi-tier program the move is to another multi-tier tool or a flattening.
One of the easier exits in this category.
Gotchas
- No free plan anymore. Removed early 2026. Old reviews mentioning one are stale.
- Revenue caps, not affiliate caps. $5,000 a month on Starter. Grow and you're paying $99, then $149.
- Setup needs a developer, by the reviews' consistent account.
- Managed payouts are Enterprise-only, SaaS-only, with an account review. Don't plan around them on Starter.
- Custom dashboard domain is Business and up. Tracking links are on your domain from Starter; the portal your affiliates log into isn't.
- Promoter-only non-monetary rewards, white-label and SSO are Enterprise. If you need to reward an affiliate without discounting the customer, that's $149.
- Paddle edge cases. VAT-only refunds and zero-value transactions are ignored; the fee-exclusion toggle isn't retroactive.
- Private equity owns it now. The free plan went away after. Expect the pricing to keep moving.
- A competitor claims their cookie approach loses 30 to 50% of Safari and Firefox conversions. The source is a rival founder and I couldn't verify it. Links on your own domain with no redirects, which every plan has, should mitigate it. Noting it, not endorsing it.
Integrations
Stripe (with historical import when you migrate), Paddle (Classic and Billing), Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly. Kajabi, ThriveCart, Thinkific, ClickFunnels, SamCart, Kartra, Ghost, HighLevel. Zapier, Make and Albato. There's also an MCP server in beta on every plan, so you can connect the account to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it questions. Tolt and Systeme.io are the only others in this directory with one.
Not supported natively: Shopify, WooCommerce, Lemon Squeezy, Polar. Physical-goods stores should look elsewhere.
If you're leaving
Export affiliates and referrals from the dashboard, or hit the API export endpoint and keep the CSV. Build the new program first. Every link is about to break, whatever plan you're on, so email affiliates their new links before you cancel. If you've got multi-tier commissions, decide whether the new tool supports them or whether you're flattening to a single rate, and tell the affiliates who'll lose their downline before they find out from a smaller payout.
Verdict
FirstPromoter is a mature, developer-friendly tool for SaaS programs that are going to grow, with the longest integration list in its bracket, real multi-tier, and an honest export. The affiliate-side nudge email is a small thing that none of its cheaper rivals do, and if you've ever watched a program go quiet, you'll understand why I keep bringing it up.
Against Rewardful and Tolt at the same price, pick FirstPromoter if you need three tiers or one of the niche integrations. Pick Tolt if you want the quickest setup. Pick Rewardful if you're plain Stripe and want the biggest community of people who've already done what you're doing. Against Affonso at €15, pick FirstPromoter only once you've outgrown it, because until then you're paying three times as much for capacity you aren't using.
Last verified November 1, 2026. Pricing and plan features from firstpromoter.com/pricing. Managed payout terms from help.firstpromoter.com. Export and Paddle details from docs.firstpromoter.com. Monthly affiliate email quoted from the author's own Coupler.io affiliate account, November 2026. Reviews referenced from Capterra and Trustpilot.
