A Refersion alternative that lives on your own server.
Refersion is a well-established hosted affiliate platform, and for merchants who want someone else to run the infrastructure it does that job properly. This page is not going to pretend otherwise. The question worth asking is a different one: do you want your affiliate program to be a service you rent, or software you own? Affiliate Factory WP is the second answer — the same core job, run entirely inside your own WordPress install.
- One flat annual license
- Every feature in every plan
- 14-day money-back guarantee
Where the philosophies differ
Every claim below is about Affiliate Factory WP. The grey lines are the trade-off, framed as neutrally as we can manage — because you should buy this with clear eyes or not at all.
Your bill stops growing when your program does
Affiliate Factory WP: One flat annual license — $129 to $269 a year depending on how many sites you run — and that is the entire cost. Unlimited affiliates, unlimited referrals, unlimited tracked orders. A program driving $500 a month and a program driving $500,000 a month pay exactly the same.
Hosted platforms are usually priced to scale with your success: monthly tiers keyed to tracked orders, conversions, or affiliate-driven revenue. That is a reasonable model for the vendor, but it means the software gets more expensive precisely when it starts working. Check the current tier structure and any order or revenue caps on the vendor’s own pricing page.
First-party tracking, not a third-party script
Affiliate Factory WP: Tracking is a signed, consent-aware cookie set by your own domain, with IPs truncated and hashed before they are ever stored. There is no external script to load, no third-party domain to call, and nothing for a content blocker to recognise as a tracker.
Any hosted platform necessarily tracks through its own infrastructure — that is what makes it hosted. As browsers and ad blockers keep tightening the screws on third-party requests, first-party tracking has a structural reliability advantage that no amount of vendor engineering fully closes.
Your customer data stays in your database
Affiliate Factory WP: Partners, referrals, commission history, and payout ledger all live in your WordPress database, next to your orders. Backups, exports, and retention rules are yours to set. WordPress’s built-in personal-data export and erase tools work on affiliate data out of the box.
With any hosted platform, customer purchase behaviour and affiliate contact details sit in a third party’s database under their privacy policy. That is workable — it just means a data-processing agreement, a subprocessor you cannot control, and a migration path defined by what they let you export.
Commissions that show their work
Affiliate Factory WP: Every referral stores its attribution source, the rate applied, the base amount, any exclusions, and the resulting figure — computed in integer cents so ledgers reconcile to the penny. Held referrals state their fraud reasons in plain English. Every approval, rate change, and payout lands in an append-only audit log.
Explainability is the design bet this product is built around. When a partner emails asking why a commission came out the way it did, the answer should take ten seconds to find, not an afternoon of spreadsheet forensics.
Payouts from your own accounts
Affiliate Factory WP: Pay through your own PayPal or Stripe credentials, export a Wise or bank batch file, or record manual payments. The money moves directly from you to your partners.
Platforms that handle payouts on your behalf add convenience and a layer of fees and float. Which trade-off is right depends on how much you value the convenience versus the control.
What does a percentage actually cost you?
Rather than tell you which is cheaper, we built a calculator. Enter your affiliate-driven revenue and your platform's monthly fee and revenue share; it shows both totals over three years, and the month the flat license breaks even.
Coming from a hosted platform? Bring your history.
Export your affiliates and referral history from your current platform as CSV, then run the importer in Affiliates → Tools. Partners keep their details and rates, your reports keep their history, and you can run both systems side by side during the changeover — the 14-day guarantee is deliberately long enough for a real parallel test.
Step-by-step guide: Migrating your program · background reading: how to switch without losing data
Pick a plan. Get everything.
The only thing that changes between plans is how many sites you can activate.
Personal
For one store that wants a real affiliate program.
About $11/month for a complete affiliate platform.
- 1 site
- Every feature included
- Standard support
- 1 year of updates
Professional
For growing businesses running several stores.
About $34 per site per year — staging sites included.
- 5 sites
- Every feature included
- Priority support
- 1 year of updates
Agency
For agencies shipping affiliate programs for clients.
One flat price for every client site you ever launch.
- Unlimited sites
- Every feature included
- Priority support
- 1 year of updates
Common questions
Is Affiliate Factory WP a genuine Refersion alternative?
What if my store is not on WordPress?
Will I lose tracking accuracy by self-hosting?
Can I try Affiliate Factory WP before leaving Refersion?
Are there per-referral fees or a cut of my revenue?
What happens if I stop renewing?
Comparing something else?
Try it before you decide anything
The demo is a real WordPress admin with the real plugin and a season of sample data. No signup, no email, and it resets every hour — so open a held referral, look at the payout ledger, and break whatever you like.
Refersion is a trademark of its respective owner, used here only to identify a product store owners commonly compare and migrate from. Affiliate Factory WP is an independent product with no affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement. Details about third-party products describe publicly documented pricing models rather than specific figures, and reflect information available at the time of writing — always verify current features and pricing on the vendor's own site.