Disclosure: Coupon Affiliates is our own plugin, made by RelyWP. This post explains what the paid version adds so you can decide whether you need it.
The free version of Coupon Affiliates runs a complete affiliate program on its own. Affiliates get a dashboard, their own coupon code and referral link, click and conversion stats, and email notifications when they make a sale. You get a registration form that creates coupons automatically, percentage or fixed commission, fraud prevention, refund handling, and admin reports covering the last 3 months.
So the real question isn’t whether the free version works. It’s whether the paid version saves you enough time, or adds something you actually need, to cover what it costs.
What Coupon Affiliates Pro Costs
For one site, PRO is $23.99 a month, $179.99 a year (about $15 a month) or $599.99 once for a lifetime licence. There are 10-site and 25-site plans too. Every plan includes every PRO feature, with no transaction fees and no limit on affiliates. You can try it free for 7 days, and there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee after that. Current prices and any discounts are on the pricing page.
What PRO Automates
Most of the time savings come from these automation features, none of which are in the free version:
- Payout requests and tracking: instead of working out what each affiliate is owed in a spreadsheet, PRO tracks unpaid commission and payout requests for you. You can also have it create payout requests on a schedule (daily, weekly or monthly) for affiliates who don’t request one themselves.
- One-click payments: pay commission through PayPal, Stripe, Wise bank transfer or store credit with one click. You can also turn on automatic payouts, which try to pay each request as soon as it’s made.
- Campaigns, short URLs and QR codes: referral links are free, but PRO lets affiliates create their own campaign links, short URLs and QR codes from their dashboard, so they don’t need to ask you for them.
- Automatic approvals and custom fields: PRO can accept new affiliates automatically, limited to certain roles or groups if you like, and lets you add your own fields to the registration form.
- Creatives: give affiliates a library of banners and other creatives to download. Dynamic creatives go further, filling in each affiliate’s coupon code, name and QR code automatically so you design one banner instead of one per affiliate.
Is the automation worth it?
A quick way to check: divide the monthly cost by the number of hours PRO would save you each month. If the answer is less than what an hour of your time is worth, the upgrade pays for itself.
For example: on the yearly plan PRO works out at about $15 a month. If it saves you 4 hours of payout and admin work a month, that’s $15 / 4 = about $3.75 an hour. If your time is worth more than that, it’s worth upgrading.
How much time it saves depends on how many affiliates you have and how often you pay them. With a handful of affiliates and a few sales a month, paying everyone by hand might take 20 minutes, and the free version is probably enough for now. Once you’re paying a dozen or more affiliates every month, the payout tools alone usually make the difference.
Reporting and Analytics
The free version already includes admin reports for the last 3 months. PRO adds:
- Advanced admin reports: any date range, comparisons between two periods, extra filters and CSV export.
- Scheduled affiliate reports: an email report, with an optional PDF copy, sent to each affiliate every week, month or quarter with their sales, commission and clicks.
- Payout statements: PDF statements for each payout, which affiliates can print or keep for their records.
- Export to Excel: affiliates can export their monthly summary and recent orders tables as a CSV file, which opens in Excel or Google Sheets.
Features you only get with PRO
Some PRO features aren’t about saving time. They change how your program works: custom commission rates per affiliate, product, category, role or group; lifetime commission; multi-level affiliates; performance bonuses and leaderboards; affiliate landing pages; affiliate email newsletters; webhooks and mailing list integrations. If you need one of those, that decides it regardless of the time maths. The pricing page has the full Free vs PRO table.
Should You Upgrade?
Start with the free version. Set up your program, recruit a few affiliates and see whether it brings in sales. Paying a small number of affiliates by hand is fine, and the free reports show you how the program is doing.
Upgrade when the manual parts start taking real time, usually payouts, or when you need a feature that only PRO has. The 7-day trial lets you set everything up on your own store before paying, and PRO also comes with priority support if you need help configuring it.
Bill Ricardi is a former Silicon Valley sysadmin, and uTest’s 2010 Performance Tester of the Year. He was test manager for Deloitte before becoming a full time author in 2017, and is also a regular contributor to the Coupon Affiliates blog.
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