At Viraly, a lot of our growth comes from people recommending the product to other people. That is why our affiliate program matters to us, and why the tool we run it on matters too. After a long stretch on Rewardful, we recently moved the whole program to Rekomi. Here is the honest story of why, and how it went.
Why we ran Rewardful in the first place
Rewardful is a good tool, and it did right by us for a long time. It is Stripe-native, quick to set up, and it tracked our recurring commissions accurately. If you bill on Stripe and want a simple affiliate program, it is a reasonable default, and for a while it was exactly that for us.
What started to wear on us
As the program grew, a few things stopped fitting:
- We were paying $99/month for the “custom domain” (which is necessary to bypass ad-blockers). The non-custom domain is essentially unusable. We were able to get this same feature for $39/month on Rekomi.
- We had creators that wanted custom coupon codes. It wasn’t user friendly to create the code, have it natively created in Stripe (VIA the affiliate platform), then allow affiliates to create custom codes based on that condition (which auto-creates within Stripe). Rekomi handles all of this, on the same $39/month plan.
None of that is a knock on Rewardful. We had simply outgrown the shape of it, and we wanted tracking, payouts, and tax living in one place.
The switch we kept delaying
I will be honest: we put this off for months, because migrating an affiliate program sounds like a great way to lose data and break things.
It was the opposite. We exported everything from Rewardful, imported it into Rekomi, and it landed perfectly. Our full transaction history, pending payouts, and every affiliate came across with no cleanup on our end. Start to finish, it took about half an hour.
What is better now
A few things stood out once we were running on Rekomi.
Payouts and tax are off our plate. Every payout goes through Rekomi, and they handle the tax forms and the compliance side. That is a few hours back every month, and a lot less to think about.
The creator coupons are a real upgrade. We can create any kind of eligible code, free for life, an amount or percent off, time-boxed, or recurring, and open it to a whole campaign or just specific affiliates. When an affiliate makes their code, it is created in our Stripe account through the API, so the discount works and the credit lands automatically.
Our tracking did not change for the worse. We kept a custom tracking domain, so clicks are still measured accurately and survive ad blockers. We also use the bulk invites to bring customers into the program, sent from our own domain over custom SMTP.
And we pay less. Our fixed monthly cost dropped meaningfully, with a flat take only on what we actually pay out. We gave up nothing to get there.
Would we recommend it?
For us, yes. We migrated in an afternoon, kept everything, lowered our costs, and handed off the two most tedious parts of running a program. It has simply been smoother.
If you want the full write-up, including the specific numbers, the Rekomi team published a detailed version: How Viraly Switched from Rewardful to Rekomi. And if you are comparing options, their guide to the best Rewardful alternatives is a good place to start.