Survey of 252 SaaS affiliate programs finds 38% of key terms unpublished

What the survey covers

A survey published on dev.to by developer dave8172 examined the affiliate pages of 252 developer and SaaS tools and recorded five commercial terms for each one: the commission rate, whether commissions recur, the cookie window, the minimum payout threshold, and the payout method. Every recorded field carries the URL it was taken from and the date it was checked, so figures can be verified or flagged when they go stale.

Out of 1,260 total fields, 483 — 38% — are not published anywhere by the vendor.

Which terms go missing

The gaps are not evenly distributed. The commission rate is the term vendors most reliably publish: only 7% of programs leave it unstated. The terms that determine whether an affiliate actually receives the money are the ones most often omitted:

• Minimum payout: 65% of programs never state it
• Cookie window: 52%
• Payout method: 45%
• Recurring or one-time: 23%
• Commission rate: 7%

The headline rate is the least informative number

The author's central argument is that a percentage means little without knowing how often it gets paid. Using a $100/month product as an illustration, a $150 one-time bounty yields $150 in total; 60% commission for 12 months yields roughly $720 in the first year and then stops; and 30% recurring for the customer's lifetime yields $360 per year indefinitely. The lowest percentage produces the highest long-run return.

Across the surveyed programs, 143 pay recurring commission, 51 pay a one-time bounty, and 58 do not say which model applies.

Cookie windows, thresholds and payment rails

Cookie windows matter for considered purchases like developer tooling: if a buyer converts after the attribution cookie expires, the referring publisher earns nothing. According to the survey, the published windows range from 14 days (Jasper) to 365 days (TubeBuddy), two programs state that attribution never expires, and 131 programs publish no window at all.

Minimum payout thresholds, where stated, run from $5 to $450. Seven programs state no minimum, while 164 remain silent. The author notes this is where small affiliates lose out, since earnings that never cross the threshold cannot be withdrawn.

Payout method matters most for affiliates outside the United States. Programs pay via PayPal, Wise, Payoneer, direct bank transfer or EFT, and 113 of the 252 do not state their method at all.

A deliberate methodological choice

One hundred and fifty-two of the 252 programs name no affiliate network, but the author deliberately excluded that from the transparency count. A company running its program in-house is a different fact from one concealing its network, the author argues, and treating the two as the same would label every self-built system as secretive.

Where a vendor publishes nothing, the record says "not stated" rather than filling the gap with an estimate. That rule, the author says, is why the work required reading 252 pages rather than aggregating existing roundup posts — which typically earn commissions from the programs they rank and therefore have an incentive to sort by rate rather than accuracy. The survey itself earns no commission from any program listed.

The dataset is published at affiliateprogramterms.com, with 50 programs readable in full for free, each field carrying its source URL and check date. The same free tier is mirrored as a generated README in the GitHub repository under dave8172, and the author says every count in it is computed from the dataset rather than typed manually, so the summary cannot drift from the underlying records. Corrections are accepted via GitHub issues.

Why it matters

For developers and independent publishers who monetize tutorials and reviews through affiliate links, unpublished terms are a silent financial risk. A high commission rate is meaningless if the cookie expires before a considered purchase happens, if the payout threshold exceeds what a small site will realistically earn, or if the only payment rail does not work in the affiliate's country. The 38% figure quantifies how often vendors leave affiliates to sign up blind.

The survey is also a useful template for transparency research in general: dated, source-linked records, explicit "not stated" values instead of guesses, and documented decisions about what is counted and what is not. Vendors wanting to attract affiliate publishers could treat the five fields as a minimum disclosure standard — and the missing 483 fields as a to-do list.