33 Best Recurring Affiliate Programs (Top Offers)

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by
Phil Norris
Updated

It pays to know about the best recurring affiliate programs. In fact, it pays over and over again!

As an affiliate marketer, affiliate programs with recurring incomes are your best friend.

Why get paid once for referring a customer when you could get multiple paydays?  Recurring affiliate programs often offer a big monthly payout and the chance to earn recurring income.

And if you choose the right affiliate program, you’ll even earn lifetime commissions.

Recurring Affiliate Programs 

  1. Aweber 
  2. Convert Kit 
  3. ClickFunnels 
  4. MailerLite 
  5. Active Campaign 
  6. GetResponse 
  7. Leadpages 
  8. Thinkific 
  9. Teachable 
  10. WP Engine  
  11. Elegant Themes 
  12. Serpstat 
  13. Mangools 
  14. Hubstaff 
  15. NordVPN 
  16. PureVPN 
  17. HideMyAss 
  18. LiveChat 
  19. SendLane 
  20. SamCart 
  21. Cloudways 
  22. Kinsta 
  23. Ontraport 
  24. Kartra 
  25. Podia 
  26. Agora Pulse 
  27. Tailwind 
  28. Deadline Funnel 
  29. Snov.io 
  30. Ninja Outreach 
  31. Tubebuddy 
  32. Hunter.io 
  33. Demio
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Like what you hear? Ready to start earning recurring commissions from the products you promote?

Let’s get into it by looking at the 34 best affiliate programs for recurring income.

AWeber

Aweber

AWeber is ostensibly an email marketing platform, although it also does many other things, like allowing customers to build landing pages and send web push notifications. It even offers ecommerce functionality.

While AWeber has a free product tier, it’s the Pro plan — priced from $16.15 per month — that you’ll promote through this recurring affiliate program.

When someone you refer signs up for an AWeber account, you’ll earn a 30% recurring commission on the initial sale, plus 30% on all future payments (paid monthly).

To help you get full value from your referrals, AWeber offers an extremely generous 365-day cookie window, the longest recurring affiliate program we’ve seen.

If you’d like a list of similar programs, check out our roundup of the best email marketing affiliate programs.

ConvertKit

Convertkit

ConvertKit is an all-in-one email marketing platform for online creators that also offers ecommerce tools and landing page-building functionality.

If you want proof that ConvertKit offers one of the best recurring affiliate programs, look no further than that its partners include big-name affiliate marketers like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income.

With recurring lifetime commissions of 30% for every referred customer, it’s not hard to imagine why he signed up.

Affiliate marketers who join the ConvertKit recurring affiliate program get lots of help to maximize performance, including a tutorial with Pat Flynn, graphics, video assets, and evergreen webinars.

ClickFunnels 

ClickFunnels is a sales funnel and website builder aimed at non-coding entrepreneurs.

Its product has helped over 110,000 customers earn almost $12 billion combined sales.

Sign up for the ClickFunnels recurring affiliate program, and you’ll qualify for an introductory 20% lifetime commission rate, which is already pretty healthy. Better still, it scales from there:

  • Earn $1,000 in monthly commissions to apply for 30% recurring commissions
  • Hit 40 active live accounts for at least 30 days, and you can further increase your commission rates to 40%

If that wasn’t enough, you can also bag a $100 bounty commission per sale of ClickFunnels’ “One Funnel Away” and “30 Days” products.

MailerLite

Mailerlite

MailerLite is an email marketing tool built with ease of use in mind.

Despite its name, MailerLite offers a packed feature set, including a drag-and-drop editor that allows users to design beautiful emails without HTML skills.

In terms of simplicity, it also runs one of the best recurring affiliate programs we’ve looked at. Refer a customer, and you’ll earn 30% per sale if they stick with MailerLite. What could be easier than that?

You’ll have access to the same professional branding and content marketing assets used by MailerLite’s in-house team to help you along.

ActiveCampaign

Activecampaign Homepage

ActiveCampaign isn’t just another email platform. It also offers all the CRM tools and marketing automation that brands need to deliver better customer experiences.

With prices ranging from $9 – $229 a month, it appeals to a wide audience, making promoting through your affiliate website easier.

It’s worth promoting because the average affiliate earns $1,350 per sale through ActiveCampaign’s recurring affiliate program.

For every customer you refer, you’ll earn at least 20% recurring commissions if they keep using ActiveCampaign. Based on the volume of sales you drive and their retention rate, your baseline commission could climb as high as 30%.

GetResponse

GetResponse customers use its email marketing software to send almost 765 million emails every single week.

In other words, it’s a pretty big deal. Beyond email, it also automates common digital marketing tasks and builds landing pages.

In addition to offering a “traditional” bounty payment of $100 per sale, GetResponse runs one of the best recurring affiliate programs on the market.

Once approved, you’ll earn a 33% lifetime recurring commission on every customer you refer, with commissions paid around the 20th of every month.

There is serious money to be made with prices as high as $580 a month.

Leadpages

Leadpages’ website and landing page software has helped more than 40,000 small business marketers improve their sites and lead generation strategies.

It is an easy-to-use landing page builder that also lets customers create alert bars and popups.

With prices ranging from $27 – $239 a month, Leadpages isn’t the cheapest tool on the market.

That might make it a slightly tougher sell, but its top-tier commissions are the joint-highest of all the recurring affiliate programs we’ve looked at, so it’s definitely worth the effort.

Every Leadpages affiliate starts earning a recurring commission of 10% per sale.

  • Refer $50 – $2,999.99 in monthly sales to qualify for 40% recurring commissions
  • Climb to 50% commissions for sales of more than $3,000 a month

But you can quickly level up your commission rate by driving more referrals.

Thinkific

Thinkific

Thinkific helps content creators build and promote online courses and membership sites. 

Over the years, over 50,000 creators have used the platform to earn over $650 million in sales.

Thinkific charges content creators a monthly fee to use its tool, so its recurring affiliate program is built around attracting new creators.

Every time you refer a creator, you’ll earn a recurring 30% commission on their monthly or annual plans for their stay with Thinkific. That means a referral could pocket you up to $1,700 a year.

Teachable

Teachable

Teachable is one of Thinkific’s biggest competitors. 

While there are subtle differences between the two products, they essentially do the same thing, although Teachable costs a little more and doesn’t offer a free tier.

The business model is identical to Thinkific’s, which means you’ll need to attract content creators to the platform to earn money through its recurring affiliate program.

Again, it offers residual commissions — so the longer your referred customers keep using Teachable, the more you’ll earn.

While its commission structure starts at 30%, you can earn recurring commissions up to 50% by hitting certain monthly thresholds.

Moosend

Moosend is another email marketing tool that boasts a ton of additional functionality, from CRM and segmentation tools to tracking and reporting.

Its client list includes household-name companies like Domino’s Pizza and Vogue, but it’s still affordable. Moosend’s entry-level plan is free forever, while its mid-tier Pro plan starts at just $8 a month.

With 30% lifetime recurring commissions and a 90-day cookie window, this is already one of the best recurring affiliate programs.

But that’s not all. When a customer hits your affiliate link, registers for the free tier, and then upgrades to a paid plan later, you qualify for the commission — even if they upgrade more than 90 days after the initial signup.

Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes is a website builder for WordPress sites. With a five-star Trustpilot rating and a customer base of over 765,000 business owners and web designers, it’s obviously good at what it does.

More than 30,000 affiliates earn over $3 million a year promoting Elegant Themes, making it one of the most popular recurring affiliate programs.

It’s also one of the best recurring affiliate programs in terms of earning potential, paying a recurring 50% on yearly renewals.

In other words, you’ll keep earning passive income if your referrals keep paying to use its various WordPress themes.

And with one of the longest cookie durations on this list, Elegant Themes gives you every chance to monetize the traffic you drive.

Serpstat

Serpstat

As SEO tools go, Serpstat is about as popular as it gets.

It’s the bestselling product in its category on Appsumo and the most-upvoted SEO tool on Product Hunt. Plus, it earned a 4.6-star rating on G2 from over 400 reviews.

Trust factors like those make it much easier to convince your audience that Serpstat is worth buying (although it’s not cheap, with prices starting at $55 a month).

The commission structure of Serpstat’s recurring affiliate program is built around the volume of new customers you drive, starting at 5% and climbing to:

10% from 1st to 5th payment

20% from 5th to 20th payment

30% from 22nd first payment

Mangools

Mangools offers a whole suite of SEO tools, from backlink and keyword research to rank tracking and SERP visualization.

It’s priced at the lower end of the market, with plans starting at just $29.90 a month. It also offers a 10-day free trial, making it even more accessible for your audience.

According to Mangools, its recurring affiliate program pays an average of $487 per month to each affiliate. Do that, and you’ll be well on making a job replacement income.

The commission rate is a flat 30% and pays out for the life of the account so that recurring income can quickly add up.

The only downside is the 30-day cookie window, the joint-shortest of all the recurring affiliate programs in this article.

Hubstaff 

Hubstaff’s time tracking and productivity management software is trusted by over 40,000 businesses, including big names like Groupon and Instacart.

With prices starting at just $14 for two users, it’s easy to see why so many businesses have signed up.

While its affordability makes Hubstaff an easy sell, you’ll need to send a lot of traffic to it to earn decent money through this recurring affiliate program, which pays 30% recurring commissions.

I have a couple of small frustrations about this affiliate marketing program. First, commissions are only paid for the first 12 months rather than lifetime commissions.

And second, commissions are paid out after those 12 months have passed, so you’ll have to wait a long time to see a return.

NordVPN

Nordvpn Homepage

NordVPN is one of the world’s biggest VPN providers. With the global VPN market projected to be worth almost $36 billion by 2022, it’s obviously picked a smart industry.

Many big-name YouTubers—including PewDiePie, Casey Neistat, and Philip DeFranco—use and promote NordVPN, which has fantastic brand awareness. That makes it much easier for affiliate marketers to promote it.

With 30% lifetime commissions on offer for renewals and up to 100% on the initial sale, this recurring affiliate program is definitely worth promoting.

PureVPN 

PureVPN 

Next is PureVPN, another big player in the VPN market. It operates more than 6,500 VPN servers in 140 countries and has signed up more than three million customers.

Again, that means brand awareness won’t be an issue here. If your audience is in the market for a VPN, chances are they’ll have heard of PureVPN, making it a comparatively easy sale.

While its 35% commission rate is slightly lower than NordVPN’s, it’s still one of this list’s most generous recurring affiliate programs.

It also offers a 90-day cookie window, compared to NordVPN’s 30-day window.

You’ll also have a dedicated account manager to troubleshoot problems, find new ways to generate traffic and increase your EPC.

HideMyAss 

HideMyAss 

HideMyAss is definitely the most literally named VPN provider out there.

Describing itself as the world’s largest VPN network, HMA claims to cover 290+ countries, which is impressive given that there are officially only 195 countries on the planet.

Similar to the other two VPN recurring affiliate programs we’ve discussed here, HMA offers lifetime commissions for renewals and up to 100% of the initial sale.

As standard, you’ll earn 30% on renewals, but if you hit  $25,000.00 – $49,999.99 in monthly affiliate sales, your commission increases to 35%. Sell more than $50,000 in a month, and you’ll get another bump to 40%.

LiveChat

Livechat

Funnily enough, LiveChat sells live chat software. Its product — including help desk and web analytics capabilities — is used by over 32,000 businesses in 150 countries.

While a 20% recurring lifetime commission is lower than many of the other recurring affiliate programs on this list, LiveChat has a comparatively generous 120-day cookie window, helping you get full value from the traffic you refer.

What’s more, LiveChat affiliates can offer their audience custom discount codes and longer product trials, making it easier to close the deal.

SendLane

Sendlane Homepage

SendLane’s email and SMS marketing software is used by over 1,700 businesses to send over 40 million emails daily. With a Net Promoter Score of 88, it clearly does it pretty well.

Rather than a classic recurring affiliate program, SendLane runs a partner program. In other words, you use its product to grow your business while bagging up to 30% lifetime recurring commissions for referring other customers.

That means there’s a higher barrier to entry than with most of the recurring affiliate programs on this list. But if you’re prepared to collaborate on SendLane’s terms, there’s much money to make.

SamCart

Samcart Homepage

SamCart is an ecommerce software company that helps online retailers create shopping carts and one-page sales funnels.

Its 17,000-strong customer base has used SamCart’s tools to build 342,000 landing pages and sell 9.7 million products with a combined value of more than $1.8 billion.

In other words, this industry has plenty of money, and you can grab your share by joining the SamCart recurring affiliate program.

With lifetime recurring commissions of 30%, you could earn up to $995 for every customer you refer. To help you get there, SamCart offers access to a range of videos, banners, images, and high-converting email copy.

Cloudways

Cloudways

Cloudways is a cloud-based web hosting company that targets individuals, small businesses, and agencies.

It works with the five biggest hosting providers, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Engine, and has successfully managed over 250,000 websites across dozens of data centers.

Compared to the other recurring affiliate programs on this list, Cloudways’ offer of 7% lifetime commissions looks pretty stingy. However, you’ll also get a one-time payment of $30 per sale to sweeten the deal. 

Another positive is the low customer churn rate — after all, there’s no point promising big recurring commissions if all your subscribers cancel in a month or two.

Kinsta

Kinsta

Kinsta is another web hosting platform focusing on the WordPress niche.

Since WordPress powers an astonishing 39.5% of all websites, it has a substantial target audience. And you can tap into that audience by joining Kinsta’s recurring affiliate program.

As with Cloudways, its recurring commission rate of 10% is nothing to write home about, but there’s plenty of upside here, too.

For one thing, you’ll also earn a bounty payment of $50 – $500 per sale, depending on the plan purchased.

Kinsta has a churn rate of 4%, so each customer you refer should bag you a lot of recurring income.

  • URL: Kinta affiliate program
  • Commission rate: Up to $500 + 10% monthly lifetime recurring commissions
  • Cookie duration: 60 days

Ontraport

Ontraport

Ontraport sells business automation solutions for entrepreneurs and SMBs, with a feature set encompassing everything from CRM tools to ecommerce software.

As with Sendlane, Ontraport works slightly differently than the other recurring affiliate programs on this list.

It operates a partner program, so you’ll need to be an Ontraport client or a certified consultant to tap into those juicy recurring commissions.

While it requires some legwork to join, the rewards make it worthwhile. 

It offers a 25% lifetime commission and weekly payouts. Top referrers who bring in 20 or more accounts per month also get weekly check-in calls with an Ontraport VIP services manager to help drive even more sales.

Kartra

Kartra

Kartra describes itself as “the greatest all-in-one platform ever”, which is some claim.

Specifically, it offers a substantial toolkit of digital marketing tools — including ecommerce checkout forms, a drag-and-drop page builder, and an automated SMS and email marketing platform — all brought together under the Kartra banner.

Individually, those tools could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, so Kartra’s prices—ranging from $99 to $499 monthly—are comparatively cheap.

However, they’re high enough to make the 40% recurring commission offered through this recurring affiliate program sound extremely appealing. 

Podia

Podia

Podia is another creation and promotion platform for online courses, membership sites, webinars, and downloads. So, just like Thinkific and Teachable, your job as an affiliate marketer is to refer course creators to Podia.

Get them to sign up, and you’ll earn 30% recurring commissions for as long as they keep using (and paying for) the platform.

To help you drive more sales, Podia offers a 14-day free trial. And if you refer someone already using a different platform, Podia will migrate them free of charge, provided they sign up for an annual subscription.

AgoraPulse

Agorapulse

AgoraPulse does social media management software. Its tool is used daily by more than 31,000 social media marketers, including the advertising bigwigs at Ogilvy.

It’s definitely at the more “premium” end of the market, with prices starting at €79 a month — although it offers a 30-day free trial, which somewhat lowers the barrier to entry.

The AgoraPulse recurring affiliate program operates on an invite-only basis, so your acceptance is not guaranteed.

But if you are, you’ll earn 15% recurring lifetime commissions on every customer you refer.

Tailwind

Tailwindapp

Tailwind is a scheduling and analytics tool for Instagram and Pinterest. Over 700,000 customers use it to generate more engagement on these image-heavy social platforms.

According to Tailwind, its members see 1.8X more Instagram likes and 6.9X more Pinterest repins than the average user.

While many of the recurring affiliate programs we’ve looked at offer a flat commission rate, Tailwind’s program operates on a sliding scale.

Everyone starts out at 15%, but it can climb to 20% by hitting $2,000 in monthly sales or 25% by referring $5,000 of business a month.

Deadline Funnel

Deadline Funnel

Deadline Funnel helps users convert more of their leads into customers through a wide range of marketing campaign types — think webinars, special offer email sequences, product launches, and more.

Its tools have enabled over 3,000 marketers, business owners, and course creators in 94 countries to generate combined sales of $57 million.

Like most software-as-a-service companies, Deadline Funnel offers a range of product tiers, priced from $49 – $199 a month.

Regardless of which product you refer customers to, Deadline Funnel’s recurring affiliate program pays a recurring lifetime commission of 33%, so it’s definitely worth promoting.

Snov.io

Snovio

Snov.io is a sales CRM used by more than 150,000 companies, including Toyota, Nike, and Disney, to drive over 750,000 verified leads daily. As you can tell from the names in its client base, Snov.io caters to enterprise-level organizations, costing its XXL product $482 a month.

However, its prices start at just $33 a month, so if your audience is a little more down-to-earth, this recurring affiliate program could still be a good fit.

Snov.io pays 25% recurring commissions for each referred customer. However, unlike the very best recurring affiliate programs we’ve looked at, these recurring payments only last 12 months. 

  • URL: Snov.io affiliate program
  • Commission rate: 25% lifetime recurring commissions for up to 12 months
  • Cookie duration: Unknown

ClickMagick

Clickmagic

It can be difficult for business owners to understand where all their revenue comes from. That’s where ClickMagick comes in, promising a “single source of truth” for ad results across multiple social media and search networks.

Since 2014, it’s helped more than 122,000 small businesses track and optimize their marketing.

In addition to offering strong monthly recurring commissions of 35%, ClickMagick promises a high conversion rate, with many of its affiliates enjoying EPCs of more than $20.

Commissions are paid out daily with just a 14-day lag time.

TubeBuddy

Tubebuddy

TubeBuddy is a free browser extension that automates several YouTube management and optimization-related tasks.

I know what you’re thinking. How does a free tool offer a recurring affiliate program? Youwon’t be surprised to hear that while the extension is free, many of the tools it offers aren’t. 

Paid plans start from just $7.20 and can be canceled at any time, which is good and bad — it’s an easy sell, but if customers churn after a month, your commissions dry up.

Now, let’s discuss those commissions in more depth. Depending on your affiliate tier, TubeBuddy pays a very healthy 30%—50 %.

Intriguingly, those tiers aren’t based on sales. To unlock the 40% VIP commission, you only need to get 50 people to install TubeBuddy — they don’t actually need to make a purchase.

Likewise, the 50% commission rate for super affiliates is unlocked after 250 installs.

In our eyes, that makes this one of the best recurring affiliate programs available.

Hunter.io 

Hunter Io

Hunter is a simple but intelligent tool that helps people track down professional email addresses in seconds. Users can make 25 searches a month free of charge, but after that, they’ll have to pay, with prices ranging from $€34 – €279.

Sadly, Hunter’s is another of those pesky affiliate programs that only pays for 12 months rather than for the full lifespan of the account.

However, its fantastic awareness and big-name customers — including Adobe, Google, and Microsoft — make it a comparatively easy sell, and its 45-day cookie window is generous enough.

Demio

Demio

Demio makes it easy for users to run webinars. With the number of video marketers who plan to include webinars in their video marketing strategy increasing by 11% year on year in 2021 to 53%, it’s clearly in the right place at the right time.

Like many software-as-a-service companies, Demio offers a 14-day free trial and a tiered product list, with prices ranging from $34 to $163 a month.

That makes the 30% recurring commission rate sound attractive, especially as it lasts the account’s lifetime.

Affiliate payments are made on the 1st and 15th of every month, with a minimum delay of 30 days before commissions are approved.

What Are Recurring Affiliate Programs?

It sounds too good to be true. Trust me, it isn’t. There are many amazing recurring commission affiliate programs — way more than we’ve included on this list.

Recurring affiliate programs are exactly what they sound like. Instead of paying a one-off “bounty” commission for every customer you refer, they give you a cut of monthly recurring revenues.

With “normal” affiliate programs, when you refer a customer who buys a $100 product, you earn a chunk of that money — say, 15%.

However, that product might cost $100 a month with a recurring affiliate program. You’ll be paid your 15% commission every month, either for a set period (typically one year) or as a residual commission.

What Are the Best Programs to Earn Recurring Affiliate Commissions?

No one wants to pay monthly recurring commissions on a one-off purchase, so recurring affiliate programs involve promoting products with monthly payments.

You can find recurring income affiliate programs across multiple niches and product types, such as:

  • Software as a Service: Products like CRM software, SEO tools, and social media managers often pay recurring commissions.
  • Online courses & subscription sites: You’ll earn affiliate commissions as long as customers remain signed up.
  • Web hosting & cloud storage: These “online infrastructure” products are promoted through some of the best recurring affiliate programs.

Why Promote Affiliate Programs With Recurring Commissions?

It’s generally a “harder sell” to convince customers to sign up for paid-monthly products rather than to make one-time purchases.

However, the rewards mean recurring affiliate programs are definitely worth the effort.

When each referral offers you the possibility of earning lifetime commissions, you can start affiliate marketing and achieve the dream of earning a passive job replacement income.

Conclusion

There’s no shortage of recurring affiliate programs.

But be under no illusions: setting yourself up to earn recurring affiliate commissions is hard work.

Before you start seeing a return, there’s much to do, from building a website to carrying out keyword research and writing blog posts to attract the right audience.

And that’s before you even think about the best affiliate programs with recurring commissions for you.

Don’t be put off, though. Everyone has to start somewhere, and we’re here to help you realize your affiliate marketing ambitions.

Sign up for our free training to learn the five simple steps needed to create an authority site in 2024.

Article by

Phil Norris is a freelance writer who specializes in digital marketing, SaaS, and e-commerce. Before becoming a freelancer, he worked in various content roles at marketing agencies for nine years, most recently as head of content. Since branching out on his own in 2018, Phil has worked with and written for the likes of Neil Patel, AWeber, Drip, and the Social Media Strategies Summit.

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