Rewardful starts at $49/month. That's before a single affiliate has driven a single dollar of revenue. At their Growth tier, you're paying more — and as your MRR climbs, so does your plan requirement. The pricing is structured to extract more from you precisely when your affiliate program is working. That's not a partnership. That's a toll booth on your own growth.

The developer community has already solved this pattern in adjacent categories. You don't pay Mixpanel when you can self-host PostHog. You don't pay a managed auth vendor when you can run Supabase. You don't pay for a black-box analytics SaaS when Plausible runs on your own VPS for the cost of a DigitalOcean droplet. The same logic applies to affiliate tracking — and the tooling now exists to act on it.

The core engineering argument for self-hosting affiliate tracking:

100% data ownership. Your conversion events, click logs, affiliate relationships, and commission history live in your own Postgres database. No API rate limits. No export quotas.…