MerittA Refersion alternative without the 3%
Refersion deserves credit for being plain about it: the percentage is printed on the pricing page rather than hidden in a tier. It is still taken from sales your affiliates brought and that you have already paid for once, in commission.
What you pay, on each side
Refersion is the only one of the five to print its percentage in plain sight on its pricing page. That deserves credit: the others filed theirs under tiers, which comes to the same thing less legibly.
| Plan | Listed price | What the price follows |
|---|---|---|
| Refersion | ||
| Launch | $39 / month | plus 3% of the sales your affiliates bring |
| Growth | $199 / month | plus 2% of the sales your affiliates bring |
| Scale | on quote | monthly subscription, percentage not published |
| Meritt | ||
| Starter | $0 / month | until your first commission |
| Pro | $49 / month | no cap on sales, clicks or affiliates |
| Business | $99 / month | that is the ceiling, there is nothing above it |
Prices checked on September 8, 2026 on each vendor's own site. They change without notice: check them before you decide.
The entry subscription is the cheapest of the group — $39 against $49, $49, $89 and $299. It is the "plus 3%" that decides everything else.
The arithmetic, on real amounts
A percentage cannot be compared with a flat fee in the abstract; it can only be compared against a volume. Here is the same program, seen by both bills.
| Sales your affiliates bring, per month | Refersion, Launch plan | Meritt, Pro plan |
|---|---|---|
| $2,000 | $99 | $49 |
| $10,000 | $339 | $49 |
| $20,000 | $639 | $49 |
| $50,000 | $1,539 | $49 |
| Over twelve months at $20,000 | $7,668 | $588 |
There is a detail the pricing page does not draw attention to, and it is worth money: above roughly $16,000 of affiliate sales a month, the Growth plan at $199 + 2% becomes cheaper than the Launch plan at $39 + 3%. A subscription six times the price that saves you money — the kind of crossing point you only find by looking for it.
You pay for the same sale twice
A sale brought in by an affiliate has already cost you something: the commission. That is normal, that is the whole idea, and it is money well spent — you only pay it after the sale. The platform's percentage is taken from that same sale, on top of the commission, for work that does not change with the amount: recording a click, matching an order, computing a line.
The real cost of that work, for us as for them, does not depend on the size of the sale. Which is why we bill what actually costs us something — payouts, migration — and not what costs us almost nothing, which is the tracking.
What Refersion does better
Refersion runs an affiliate marketplace: a directory where already-active affiliates look for programs to join. We have no equivalent, and it is worth being clear about what that means — recruiting your affiliates is the real work of an affiliate program, far more so than choosing the tool that tracks them. If you are starting from nothing, with no audience and no list, that directory is a serious argument in their favour.
Their Shopify integration is also older and deeper than ours, which matters if your store runs a lot of third-party apps at checkout.
Moving from Refersion to Meritt
The automatic import from Refersion is not live yet. One platform imports file-to-file today; Refersion is listed in the product as coming, with a button to tell us it is yours.
Once in place, the import keeps each affiliate's code — which is what lets links already published keep crediting the right person — and shows you the full count before anything is written. You decide whether commissions still owed at Refersion become owed here, or whether you settle them there before closing the account.
If you want to put a number on the gap for your own program without committing to anything: the starter plan is free until your first commission, tracking installs on your own domain, and the comparison then runs on your real figures.
See what it does on your own program
Tracking is free until your first commission, your own domain included. You will know whether the links get through before you pay anything.