Free tool
Affiliate commission calculator
Recurring or one-time? The honest answer depends on churn, the duration cap and the subscription price — and it is genuinely hard to eyeball. This models29 real programs month by month, pre-loaded with their actual terms from the program terms index, so you pick by name instead of typing six fields. Runs entirely in your browser.
Why the churn default is 4%, not 2%. 2% is the figure healthy, well-funded SaaS companies publish. The smaller tools most affiliates actually promote churn harder than that. 3–5% monthly is the realistic band, so the default sits at 4% and you can move it. At 4%, the average referral lasts about 25 months — which is the number that decides most recurring-vs-flat arguments.
Pick two programs and press Compare.
A projection is not a promise. This models the terms recorded in the index against assumptions you control. It cannot know your traffic quality, whether a program changes its rates, or whether your referrals behave like the average. Treat the ranking as more reliable than the absolute numbers — the comparison holds even when the inputs are rough.
How the model works
Each month it adds your referred customers as a new cohort, then ages every existing cohort by the churn rate. A cohort still alive and still inside the program's duration cap pays its commission that month; one past the cap pays nothing, however long the customer stays. One-time bounties pay once, in the month the customer is referred.
- Duration caps decide the long game, but later than people think.A 50% rate capped at 12 months versus 30% paid for life: at $49/mo and 4% churn the capped one is still ahead at 24 months — roughly $234 per referral against $226 — and only loses somewhere around month 26. Most advice tells you lifetime always wins. It does, eventually. Whether "eventually" is inside your horizon is the actual question, and it is why this runs the numbers instead of repeating the rule.
- Ranges are modelled at the low end. Where a program advertises "30–50%", this uses 30%. Tiered rates are the top band you might reach, not the one you start on.
- Hybrid programs are handled explicitly. Some let the signup bounty stack with recurring; others make you choose. That distinction roughly doubles or halves the projection, so it is recorded per program rather than assumed.
- Cookie windows are shown but not modelled. A cookie window changes how many referrals you capture, not what each one pays. Mixing the two would let a long cookie silently inflate earnings, so it stays a displayed fact you weigh yourself.
Terms come from the affiliate program terms index, where every row carries the date it was checked and how. Several are still seeded from my own published write-ups rather than re-read on the vendor's page — the index says which, and that gap is published rather than hidden.
Picked a program? The next problem is finding out which of your placements actually earns the commission — which no program dashboard can tell you unless you encode it in the link. Theaffiliate link builder builds the tracked URL correctly for each network and enforces a placement convention that still aggregates six months later.
And once you promote more than a couple, the risks stop being per-program: theportfolio review shows which of your duration caps expire together and how much of the mix sits in bounties that can be clawed back.
Frequently asked questions
Is recurring commission always better than a one-time bounty?
No, and assuming so is the most common mistake in affiliate program selection. A large flat bounty on a cheap subscription can beat a small recurring cut for years. At 4% monthly churn the average referral lasts about 25 months, so a 7% recurring commission on a $30 plan returns roughly $52 in total — well under a $125 one-off. Recurring wins on higher-priced products, higher rates, and no duration cap.
What is a realistic churn rate for affiliate commission projections?
Around 3–5% monthly for the small-to-mid SaaS tools most affiliates promote. The 2% figure often quoted comes from large, well-funded companies publishing their best numbers, and using it will overstate a recurring program by a wide margin. This calculator defaults to 4% and lets you change it.
Why does the duration cap matter more than the commission rate?
Because it truncates the whole stream: a 50% rate capped at 12 months stops paying entirely in month 13, while a 30% lifetime rate keeps paying as long as the customer stays. But the crossover is later than most advice implies. At a $49/mo subscription and 4% monthly churn, the capped 50% is still slightly ahead at 24 months and only falls behind around month 26. Lifetime wins eventually — the question worth answering is whether "eventually" falls inside your planning horizon.
Does the cookie window affect these numbers?
Not in this model, deliberately. The cookie window determines how many referrals you get credited for, not what each credited referral pays. It is shown for every program because it matters to your decision, but folding it into the earnings figure would let a long cookie silently inflate the projection.
Why does the calculator ask for customers rather than traffic?
Because click-to-customer conversion scales every program identically. It changes the absolute earnings but never which program wins, and the comparison is the point. Asking for customers also avoids putting a flattering default conversion rate in front of you, which is how most affiliate calculators produce optimistic numbers.