Kartra

Kartra's help centre says it plainly: "Kartra does not provide banking services and cannot send money to your affiliates." Read that twice before you count the affiliate feature as a reason to pay $229 a month, because what Kartra gives you is a tracking system and a list of who's owed what. The paying is yours.

The other thing to know is that Kartra runs its own affiliate program on PartnerStack, not on Kartra. When the chef eats at the restaurant across the street, it tells you something about the kitchen.

I haven't run a program on Kartra. This is a research listing, from kartra.com's pricing and feature pages and the Kartra support centre. Third-party claims are marked.

Disclosure: the Kartra link on this page is my affiliate link. Kartra pays me if you sign up through it. That hasn't changed a word of what follows, including the bit about its own program running on PartnerStack, and you can go to kartra.com directly if you'd rather.

The history

Kartra launched in 2018 from Genesis Digital in Las Vegas, the company behind WebinarJam and EverWebinar, founded by Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime (third-party on the founders). Filsaime is a name that runs through this directory: he also founded PayDotCom, the marketplace that shut down in December 2022, and later left Genesis to start Groove. So Kartra comes from the internet-marketing launch world, built by people who sold through affiliates for a living, and the affiliate feature shows it: JV brokers with a second-tier cut, payment milestones, per-lead commissions. It's a launch-marketer's feature set, which is both its strength and the reason a normal business will find it over-engineered in some places and missing the basics in others.

Who it's for

Course creators, coaches and info-product sellers already on Kartra Growth or Professional who want affiliates and JV partners tracked inside the same platform as their funnels, email and checkout.

Launch-style businesses that need JV brokers paid a cut of their recruits' sales, commissions on opt-ins as well as purchases, and milestone payouts (40% now, 60% after the refund window). Those are launch mechanics, and Kartra has them.

Who should skip it

Anyone on Essentials or Starter. The affiliate feature starts at Growth, $229 a month. Essentials at $59 also carries a 5% transaction fee, so the cheap plan is cheap only until you sell something.

Anyone who expected the platform to pay affiliates. It can't, with one narrow exception below.

Anyone who ever wants to delete an affiliate. You can't. Declined ones stay too.

Anyone who needs to know the cookie length before signing. It isn't published anywhere I could find.

Anyone selling outside Kartra's checkout. The program tracks Kartra sales only.

Pricing, decoded

• Essentials: $59 a month. 5% transaction fee. No affiliates.
• Starter: $119. No affiliates.
• Growth: $229 a month, or $189 on annual. Affiliates included.
• Professional: $549, or $429 annual. Affiliates included.
• Enterprise: custom.
• 14-day trial, no free plan.

So the price of the affiliate feature, if that's what you're upgrading for, is $110 a month over Starter, or $1,320 a year. That buys FirstPromoter at $49 twice over, with a Kartra integration, real payouts and a full export. If you're on Growth for the other reasons (more contacts, more domains, the higher limits), the affiliate feature is free and the comparison is moot. If you're on Starter and affiliates are the trigger, the built-in is the expensive route.

The 5% transaction fee on Essentials is a different trap and a familiar one: a $59 plan that takes 5% of a $10,000 month is a $559 plan.

Payouts: the part to understand

Kartra tracks what each affiliate is owed and gives you a CSV of due affiliates. You pay them outside Kartra, through PayPal, Wise, your bank, whatever, and come back to mark them paid. Every plan. That's the "cannot send money" sentence from the help centre in practice.

The exception is PayPal Adaptive "Instant Payments": the sale is split at the point of purchase, with the affiliate's cut going straight to their PayPal. It works only on one-time PayPal purchases. Not subscriptions, not payment plans, not order bumps, and you can't combine it with milestone payouts. Refunds on instant-paid commissions are hard to claw back, because the money already left. It's a launch-week tool, not a program-running tool.

Tax: you can require affiliates to upload tax documents, and they can. Kartra issues no 1099s. The documents sit there for you to use.

What it does well

The launch mechanics. JV brokers earning a second-tier cut on the affiliates they bring, commissions per opt-in as well as per sale, multiple commission tiers (standard versus VIP affiliates), per-product and per-price-point rates, and milestone payouts that hold part of the commission past the refund window. ThriveCart is the only other built-in with this much structure, and ThriveCart can pay.

The affiliate marketplace. Affiliates get one Kartra login that works across any Kartra vendor, and your program is discoverable to them. That's a small recruitment channel the standalone tools don't have.

Everything in one place. If your funnels, email, checkout and membership are already Kartra, the affiliate tracking shares their data without a webhook in sight.

Lock-in: 3 out of 5

What gets you out: the due-affiliates CSV, transaction exports, and monthly billing.

What keeps you in: affiliates can never be deleted, so your affiliate list is a permanent record inside Kartra whether you want it or not. The universal affiliate login means the affiliates are Kartra's users, as with ThriveCart. Tracking only works on Kartra checkouts, so leaving Kartra means leaving the program, and the JV-broker and milestone structures have almost nowhere to migrate. Drop below Growth and the program is gone.

Three. The export is partial, the affiliates are permanent, and the structure is Kartra-shaped.

Gotchas

• Kartra can't pay your affiliates. Its own words. CSV out, pay elsewhere, mark paid.
• Growth or nothing. $229 a month. Essentials and Starter have no affiliates, and Essentials takes 5% of sales.
• Affiliates can never be deleted, declined ones included.
• Cookie length unpublished. Ask before you sign and get the answer in writing.
• Instant Payments are one-time PayPal only. No subscriptions, plans or bumps, no milestones alongside, and refunds are hard to recover.
• No 1099s. Tax docs collected, nothing issued.
• Kartra's own affiliate program runs on PartnerStack, up to 40% recurring for 12 months. Draw your own conclusion.
• Tracks Kartra checkouts only.
• Setup is global terms, a questionnaire, minimums, then a per-product affiliate tab. Three out of five; it's spread across settings pages.

Integrations

Kartra's own checkout, funnels, email and memberships. Affiliate tracking: Kartra's only. FirstPromoter has a native Kartra integration if you want a tool that pays and exports on top.

Not supported: any non-Kartra checkout, tax-form issuance, affiliate deletion.

If you're leaving

Export the due-affiliates CSV and the transaction history for every period you'll need to reconcile. Pay out everything owed before you downgrade, because once the feature is off you've lost the view of the balances. Copy your affiliate list with contact details, since the records stay in Kartra but you won't be able to see them. Rebuild JV-broker and milestone structures by hand on the new tool, or flatten them and tell the brokers first. Email affiliates their new links before the Kartra ones stop working.

If that list reads like a month of your life, migrating a program without losing the affiliates is a service I offer.

Verdict

My opinion, labelled as such: if you're a launch-style seller already paying for Kartra Growth, the affiliate feature is a capable tracking layer with JV mechanics most tools don't have, and it costs you nothing extra. Use it, run the payouts yourself through PayPal or Wise, and keep a clean CSV.

If you're on Starter and affiliates are the reason to upgrade, don't. $110 a month more for a system that can't pay anyone is the wrong deal. FirstPromoter integrates with Kartra, pays and exports for $49. If you're not on Kartra yet and the affiliate program matters, ThriveCart has the same launch mechanics and sends the money, Kajabi runs scheduled payouts, and Systeme.io includes a simpler program for free. Kartra built its affiliate feature for people like its founders. It runs its own program somewhere else.

Last verified November 4, 2026. Plan prices and the Essentials transaction fee from kartra.com/pricing. Commission types, payout process, Instant Payments limits, tax handling and the affiliate-deletion rule from the Kartra support centre. Kartra's own partner program terms from kartra.com/partners. Founding and founder details are third-party. The author has not used Kartra. Some links on this page are affiliate links.