A one-time affiliate commission pays you once per sale. A recurring commission pays you a share of the subscription for months, which means a single well-placed recommendation keeps paying as long as the customer stays — and the terms allow. For SaaS products, recurring programs are usually the better deal for partners, but only if you read the numbers that define them.
Why recurring fits SaaS referrals
SaaS buyers do not churn the way coupon shoppers do. When you refer a team that genuinely needs a tool, they tend to stay subscribed, and a recurring share aligns your incentive with theirs: you get paid for sending customers who stick, not clicks that bounce. It also compounds — each month's new referrals stack on top of the previous months' active ones.
The four numbers that define a program
- Commission rate: the percentage of subscription revenue you receive. For B2B SaaS, recurring rates commonly land between 20% and 40%.
- Commission duration: how many months each referred customer pays out. 'Recurring' can mean 6 months, 12 months, or lifetime — the word alone tells you nothing.
- Attribution window: how long after a click a signup still counts as yours. Short windows quietly drop the B2B buyers who evaluate for weeks.
- Payout threshold and hold: the minimum balance before payment, and how long commissions are held against refunds and chargebacks.
Read how the commission is calculated
Serious programs pay on net revenue: what the company actually collects after discounts, refunds, taxes, and chargebacks. That is not a trick — it is the honest base, and it protects the program from fraud that would otherwise get it shut down. What you should demand is that the calculation is written down before you promote, not discovered on your first payout.
Red flags worth walking away from
- No public terms page — rates and windows that only exist in a DM can change in a DM.
- Attribution you cannot verify: no dashboard, no click or referral reporting.
- Payout thresholds set so high that typical partners never reach them.
- Terms that let the program reclassify or void qualified referrals without stated criteria.
- Earnings screenshots doing the work that terms should do.
How our own program reads on these tests
We publish the CommentProtect affiliate terms so you can apply exactly this checklist to us: 30% recurring commission on net subscription revenue for the referred customer's first 12 paid months, a 30-day referral window, a $50 payout threshold, and a 30-day refund hold before commissions become payable. Approved partners get tracked links and referral reporting in a dedicated portal.