SaaS affiliate programs are some of the biggest earners out there right now. Put simply, SaaS is a business model where you pay a monthly subscription for access to a piece of software that’s typically stored in the cloud.
That’s why it’s referred to as Software-As-A–Service.
The SaaS industry is a real growth market, with predicted global revenues of US$623 billion within the next 3 – 5 years.
SaaS only accounts for 15% of the total market share right now, meaning the only way is up.
Experience shows us that it’s far easier to make money online in markets with upward growth.
This is why we were able to generate income results like this through our favorite software affiliate programs:
This shows you what’s possible when you tap into the right market with the right programs, like the top SaaS affiliate programs we researched for this roundup.
And, as you’ll learn from this blog post, there’s something to suit almost every niche.
SaaS Affiliate Programs
- Systeme affiliate program
- FreshBooks affiliate program
- ConvertKit affiliate program
- NordVPN affiliate program
- Shopify affiliate program
- Aweber affiliate program
- Hunter.io affiliate program
- Sucuri affiliate program
- WP Engine affiliate program
- LastPass affiliate program
- Microsoft Office 365 affiliate program
- Lifelock affiliate program
- KWFinder affiliate program
- SEMrush affiliate program
- BigCommerce affiliate program
- HubSpot affiliate program
- Moosend affiliate program
- Pipedrive affiliate program
- Teachable affiliate program
- Unbounce affiliate program
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1 Systeme
Systeme offers a package of SaaS tools designed to help people grow an online business, covering everything from sales funnels and email marketing to website and online course builders.
More than 10,000 entrepreneurs have used its solutions, and it has an excellent 4.8-star rating from more than 600 reviews on Trustpilot, so it’s clearly good at what it does.
Helpfully for affiliates, Systeme has a generous freemium product tier that allows subscribers to send unlimited emails to 2,000 contacts. That makes it comparatively easy to convince people to sign up — and once they’ve handed over their details, Systeme’s marketing can do the rest.
Best of all, this affiliate program offers a lifetime cookie window. So if your referred customer signs up for a free account and upgrades to a paid tier after six months or a year, you’ll still earn a commission.
And talking of commissions, they’re also extremely generous. For every sale you refer, you’ll receive 40% lifetime commissions, so you’ll keep earning as long as they keep subscribing to Systeme.
Pretty good, right? So no wonder the company has paid more than $2 million in commissions to affiliates.
- URL: Systeme
- Commission: 40% lifetime commissions
- Cookie duration: Lifetime
2 FreshBooks
Invoicing and accounting are boring. It can also be incredibly time-consuming for the average entrepreneur.
FreshBooks helps to automate your invoicing, time tracking, expenses, and even payment collection with their SaaS accounting solution.
It’s so effective you can save an average of 192 hours per year. Or 5 working weeks.
The mobile app allows you to manage your business finances from anywhere in the world.
FreshBooks is suitable for everyone, from freelance writers to large agencies.
So how does the FreshBooks affiliate program work?
Well, if one of your referrals signs up for a free trial, you make $5 in affiliate commissions.
But if your referral becomes a paying customer, you earn $55 instead.
- URL: FreshBooks affiliate marketing program
- Commission: Up to $5 per lead
- Cookie duration: 120 days
3 ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an email marketing platform designed specifically for creators.
So, if you’re a blogger, YouTuber, author, musician, podcaster, etc, it was created with you in mind.
And to also save you from having to wade through a ton of features you won’t ever need.
Which is exactly what you get with many of the high-end email marketing services.
It makes it easy to do everything from creating a basic landing page to sending a broadcast email to your list.
The built-in tracking and reporting are also deliberately kept simple, ensuring you don’t get overwhelmed.
One of the reasons why we love SaaS affiliate programs is because there’s the potential for affiliate marketers to earn recurring commissions.
ConvertKit is a perfect example of what we mean because it pays you a 30% commission for as long as your referral’s account stays active with them.
So that means you can create a passive income of $2,000 per month by referring 20 new customers every month for a year.
- URL: ConvertKit affiliate marketing program
- Commission: 30% recurring
- Cookie duration: 60 days
4 NordVPN
It’s an unfortunate fact of life, but using a VPN will become as common as using your streaming service of choice. Your ISP no longer guarantees privacy, and most definitely not by your government.
So now is as good a time as any to tell your visitors about NordVPN.
This affordable VPN solution has been available for almost a decade, with millions of active users. And it’s not even all that expensive – you can get full access to 5,000 servers for up to 6 devices for less than $7 per month.
Is this a SaaS affiliate marketing offer worth promoting?
All their metrics on CJ Affiliate — the fourth-most-popular affiliate network, according to our affiliate marketing statistics — tell me “Yes”, and the 40% commission rate is also pretty generous. It doesn’t matter who your audience is – they’ll need a VPN sooner rather than later.
- URL: Nord affiliate program
- Commission: 40%
- Cookie duration: 30 days
5 Shopify
When you decide to start your own e-commerce store (go you!), you’re presented with one of two choices:
- Pull together all the different hosting tools and marketing materials you’ll need to get things going.
- Use Shopify
And if you have a ton of experience building e-commerce stores, Shopify is the smart choice here.
I once watched as two of my friends flushed $20,000 down the toilet on a bespoke e-commerce platform…that never worked. They gave up after almost 3 years of frustration, selling off their warehoused stock for cents on the dollar. On the other hand, Shopify is a tried and tested e-commerce platform with prices starting at $29 per month.
So how much can you make promoting this SaaS affiliate program? You’ll earn $58 in commission if your referral upgrades from a free trial signup to a ‘Basic’ paid plan.
But if they sign up for a ‘Plus’ plan, you can earn as much as US$2,000 per lead. Based on the numbers, this is one of the most potentially lucrative SaaS affiliate marketing programs in this roundup.
- URL: Shopify affiliate program
- Commission: Up to $58 per sale
- Cookie duration: 30 days
Check out our in-depth Shopify affiliate program review.
6 Aweber
Aweber is an email marketing solution service and one of the oldest SaaS companies. That’s because they’ve been in business since 1998 – they did it before SaaS was cool. And they’ve come a long way during those years, constantly adding new features.
So you now get a simple-to-use email automation platform that features tagging, a drag-and-drop email designer, lots of templates to work with and integrates with a large number of third-party services.
If you’re a data-hungry entrepreneur, you’ll enjoy poring over their detailed reports to optimize your email marketing strategies.
This is another affiliate program that offers a recurring commission on all referrals. That means as an Aweber affiliate partner, you can sell once and get paid over and over again, to the tune of 30% commission. Combined with low-competition keywords, a recurring commission payment structure can be worth a lot of money.
- URL: Aweber partner program
- Commission: 30%
- Cookie duration: 365 days
7 Hunter.io
If you’ve read more than a handful of our blog posts, you’ll know that we use outreach as the cornerstone of our link building efforts. And Hunter.io is what we use to find the email addresses of people we want to contact.
We’ve tested similar tools, but none have achieved anything like Hunter’s success rate. And that’s basically because they’ve indexed over 100 million email addresses and have powerful search tools to find the email addresses they don’t have indexed.
But it goes beyond that because their email verification tool ensures the bare minimum of your outreach emails will bounce.
This is a must-have SaaS tool for our affiliate marketing business and probably yours too. Something else to love about Hunter is its affiliate program because it offers recurring commissions.
Granted, that’s only for the first 12 months, but during that time, affiliate partners get a 30% cut of what your referrals spend each month. Hunter’s cheapest plan costs $49 per month, so your average recurring commission will be $14 every time somebody signs up.
- URL: Hunter.io partner program
- Commission: 30% recurring
- Cookie duration: 45 days
8 Sucuri
By the time you finish reading this sentence, another website has been hacked – approximately once every 20 seconds. One of the pitfalls of running an affiliate site, or any online business, is that you will eventually become a target for hackers.
Unless, of course, you’re using Sucuri. These guys can not only scan your site to make sure it hasn’t been compromised, fixing whatever they find, but they also protect it from all future attacks.
But Sucuri can also make your website load faster thanks to their CDN. This means you’re getting multiple SaaS services for one price and exceptional customer service.
Sucuri offers tiered pricing packages, so their affiliate commission structure follows suit. Basically, affiliate marketers earn anywhere from $29 to $209 per referral, depending on what plan their visitor signs up for. That makes Sucuri one of the best affiliate programs in the SaaS niche in terms of potential income. That makes Sucuri one of the best SaaS programs in terms of potential income.
- URL: Sucuri affiliate program
- Commission: Up to $209 per sale
- Cookie duration: 30 days
9 WP Engine
Yes, web hosts are SaaS companies – you pay monthly to access the various software packages on their servers. The problem with web hosts is that you’ll very quickly outgrow the one you’re currently using.
WP Engine is the next logical progression for WordPress site owners it occupies the middle ground between super high-end hosts and cheap shared hosting. But they also offer advanced hosting solutions all the way up to the enterprise level.
They’re also entirely affordable – you can host your site with them for just $30 per month. You get a CDN included in the price, so there’s no need to pay for a separate CDN.
You don’t need us to tell you that promoting web hosting affiliate programs can be insanely profitable.
Just look at Pat Flynn.
But WP Engine is no slouch when it comes to affiliate payouts. As an affiliate marketer, you’ll earn an average of $140 per sale. 20 referrals per month would be job replacement income for many people reading this.
- URL: WP Engine affiliate program
- Commission: Up to 200%
- Cookie duration: 180 days
10 LastPass
I’ve used a password manager of some kind since 2001. When I found LastPass, I was actually between password managers – the desktop app I used had begun to fuck up so royally it was unusable. So LastPass was like a breath of fresh air.
It’s cloud-based, integrates well with my choice of browsers, and works on my smartphone. It also makes it incredibly easy for me to create a secure password for every single site or service I sign up for. Genuinely one of the best SaaS tools I’ve used in the last decade, and over 16 million people agree with me. And yes, it comes with a free trial – it’s actually a free account.
As a LastPass SaaS affiliate, you’ll receive a 25% cut of all sales made across their product range. An annual paid subscription to a basic version of LastPass is $36, so you’d earn $9 per referral just for that. That’s not bad for helping people keep their personal information far more secure.
- URL: LastPass affiliate program
- Commission: 25%
- Cookie duration: 45 days
11 Microsoft Office 365
Remember when Microsoft Office products used to cost hundreds of dollars per year, making them entirely unaffordable for almost everyone? Microsoft finally cottoned on to the idea of moving away from distributing their products on CD/DVD and shifting to a Software As A Service (SaaS) model instead.
You can now access the full MS Office suite for $9.99 per month, which covers licenses for up to 6 people. And you also get 1TB per person of cloud storage and some other extras bundled for that price.
Office 365 is a great example of how a “traditional” software company can pivot and implement the SaaS model to save its customers money and improve Microsoft’s bottom line.
From an affiliate perspective, it’s also way easier to pitch a product that costs $9.99 per month. This is an affiliate program where it pays to read the fine print. A monthly subscription to Office 365 is worth a flat $5 to you, whereas an annual plan is worth $10 instead. So you can double your money by simply changing how you position this offer.
- URL: Microsoft affiliate program
- Commission: Up to $10 per sale
- Cookie duration: 14 days
Read our Microsoft affiliate program review.
12 Lifelock
Identity theft might seem like something that could only ever happen to “someone else.” But the reality is that there’s a new victim of identity theft every 3 seconds. Once your personal information is compromised, it can be used for any of a number of criminal purposes, including taking out a loan or credit card in your name.
This is why LifeLock is such a solid recommendation for your visitors. They’ll get access to a full suite of systems and support tools that can either prevent them from becoming victims of this type of crime or reimburse them for financial losses up to US$1 million. And they get all that for $29 per month or the equivalent of a large pizza and sodas.
We’ll keep things simple here.
Selling a basic LifeLock plan is worth around $8 to you. But if your referral signs up for their ‘Ultimate Plus’ plan, you’ll make $100. This is the type of SaaS affiliate marketing offers you can use to create life-changing passive income.
- URL: LifeLock affiliate program
- Commission: Up to $110 per sale
- EPC: $489.44
- Cookie duration: 30 days
13 KWFinder
And we come to the search engine optimization section of our roundup of the best SaaS affiliate programs. First up is KW Finder, aka Mangools. As much as we love Ahrefs (and we do), it’s simply too expensive for some people when they first start out.
So if you’re operating on a shoestring budget and need an SEO or content marketing tool, you might like what KW Finder offers. Yes, you get a pretty decent keyword research tool and a whole pile of other tools, like a backlink checker, rank tracking, and SERP and website analysis tool.
And with prices starting as low as $49 per month, there’s much value to be had here for the average affiliate marketing business.
It’s one of the best SaaS products listed here.
You get a 30% lifetime commission for each referral you send to their affiliate marketing program. So that means you’ll get paid a recurring commission for as long as your referral remains a customer of KW Finder. Affiliate programs with recurring monthly payments can create a lot of passive income in a matter of months.
- URL: KWFinder affiliate program
- Commission: 30% lifetime
- Cookie duration: 30 days
14 SEMRush
One of the world’s best-known digital marketing tools, SEMrush, carries out 17 billion URL crawls every single day, helping it compile a database of 310 million ads and 20 billion keywords. That database is the beating heart of over 40 other SEO tools, enabling SEO agencies and digital marketers to do everything from building better PPC ads to conducting competitor analysis.
It’s kind of like Hootsuite, Google Trends, and Moz combined in a single platform, which is pretty powerful to say the least. So it’s no surprise SEMrush can count a bunch of household names among its seven million-strong client base, including the likes of Apple, Nike, and Tesla.
What’s more, with prices starting at $119.95 a month, there’s plenty of money to be made through its SaaS affiliate program.
As well as paying a cool $200 for every new subscription sale, SEMrush offers $10 for each lead and $0.01 per new signup, with a comparatively generous 120-day cookie window.
Plus, you can speak to a dedicated affiliate manager and access marketing resources in multiple languages to help drive affiliate sales. All commissions are paid 27 days after the end of each month.
- URL: SEMrush affiliate program
- Commission rate: Up to $200
- Cookie duration: 120 days
15 BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a growth tool aimed at online businesses in the ecommerce space. That’s a pretty smart niche to be a part of, with global retail ecommerce sites projected to hit $5.4 trillion in sales in 2022 — up from $4.3 trillion in 2020. In other words, there are a lot of businesses and money in the world of ecommerce, and BigCommerce does a good job of targeting both.
More than 60,000 merchants in over 150 countries use its digital tools for checkout customization, site speed optimization, SEO improvements, and much more.
Powered by the Impact Radius affiliate network, BigCommerce’s SaaS affiliate program pays 200% of the customer’s first monthly payment or a flat $1,500 commission for enterprise customers. What’s more, you can get $40 simply for generating an enterprise-grade lead, up to a maximum of 20 leaders per month — which means you don’t necessarily even need to close the deal to earn money through this affiliate program.
- URL: BigCommerce affiliate program
- Commission rate: 200%
- Cookie duration: 90 days
16 HubSpot
Anyone working in digital marketing will tell you that HubSpot is a big deal. More than 113,000 customers use its sales, social media management, and digital marketing tools in over 120 countries, and it pretty much single-handedly invented the phrase “inbound marketing”.
Its toolkit helps users bring in leads at the top of the funnel and target them with content through various social media platforms and other channels until they’re (hopefully) ready to buy.
However, it’s certainly not the cheapest tool on the market, with prices starting at $50 per month but rising sharply from there. Of course, the good news is that (comparatively) high prices mean strong commissions, with a structure that offers the chance to earn multiple payouts from the same customer.
That model is based on the referred customer’s first purchase and product tier, paying $250 at Starter/Basic level, $500 for Professional/CMS, and $1,000 for Enterprise sales.
As the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed, the HubSpot affiliate program is ripe for cross-selling. If a customer buys Marketing Starter and Sales Professional in a single transaction, you’ll bag yourself commissions of $250 + $500. HubSpot offers plenty of marketing materials to help you send traffic its way, from demo videos and copy examples to banner ads and landing pages.
- URL: HubSpot affiliate program
- Commission rate: Up to $1,000
- Cookie duration: 90 days
17 Moosend
Moosend helps brands create email marketing campaigns that convert, offering a feature set that includes automation templates, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, and support for A/B testing. It’s evidently pretty good at what it does because it’s used by a bunch of high-profile companies, including Domino’s Pizza, Gucci, and advertising giant Ogilvy.
While its core feature set is available completely free of charge, users understandably have to pay to access more advanced functionality, with prices starting at $8 per month for 1,000 email subscribers.
Moosend operates one of the top SaaS affiliate programs we’ve seen, paying 30% recurring lifetime commissions for successful referrals. What’s more, you’ll top up your earnings if your referrals upgrade their plan. And the good news doesn’t stop there. Whereas most affiliate programs have watertight cookie policies, Moosend pays commissions even if a customer buys outside the 90-day window, as long as they’ve created an account within the window.
- URL: Moosend affiliate program
- Commission rate: 30% recurring
- Cookie duration: 90 days
18 Pipedrive
Pipedrive sells CRM software designed to help customers focus on the actions that are most likely to result in sales. According to Pipedrive’s own figures, its users close 28% more deals on average after a year of using its software, which is no mean feat. So it’s no real surprise that its SaaS software is pretty damned popular, with more than 95,000 customers in 179 countries.
Unlike HubSpot, Pipedrive doesn’t offer an introductory freemium tier, but its prices are generally lower (albeit it has a more limited feature set than HubSpot).
However, there’s still plenty of cash to be made here, with Pipedrive paying a recurring commission of 33% per sale. Unfortunately, it’s not a lifetime commission — you can only get it for a maximum of one year for each referral. Anyone who signs up after hitting your unique referral link or entering your dedicated promo code will be eligible for an extended free trial of 30 days rather than the standard 14 days.
- URL: Pipedrive affiliate program
- Commission rate: 33% recurring for 12 months
- Cookie duration: 30 days
19 Teachable
Teachable helps aspiring tutors build and monetize their own online training courses. It’s a smart market to target, with the industry predicted to be worth $350 billion by 2025. Demonstrating the potential of the online training niche, Teachable has already signed up more than 100,000 creators. In turn, those creators have used the platform to sell over $1 billion worth of courses.
That’s where you come in. Teachable’s SaaS affiliate program pays out each time a new tutor signs up, with recurring lifetime commissions ranging from 30% to 50%, depending on the number of sales you drive.
According to Teachable, its average affiliate pockets an average of $450 in commissions every month, with many earning $1,000 or more per month.
- URL: Teachable affiliate program
- Commission rate: Up to 50%
- Cookie duration: 90 days
20 Unbounce
Unbounce helps brands build better landing pages.More than 15,000 brands, including Campaign Monitor and Later, choose this website builder. It’s got a ton of smart functionality, including a new feature that leverages more than 1.5 billion data points and AI insights to help small businesses drive more conversions from their landing pages.
Clearly, its various tools are effective, because they’ve been the driving force behind more than 500 million customer conversions.
On the subject of conversions, the Unbounce SaaS affiliate program pays a 20% recurring lifetime commission for each customer you refer.
With prices ranging from $80 – $300 a month, that’s a pretty competitive offer. To help you send more traffic toward Unbounce, your affiliate link allows successful referrals to claim a 20% discount on their first three months.
- URL: Unbounce affiliate program
- Commission rate: 20% recurring
- Cookie duration: 90 days
Over to You
There were literally hundreds of different SaaS affiliate programs we could have included here.
But instead of focusing on sheer quantity, we focused on brand names and services you might actually recognize.
That’s because it’s far easier to make money in affiliate marketing by promoting products or services you’re at least somewhat familiar with.
That’s why our roundup of SaaS affiliate programs is unlike anything else you’ll find online.
It’s way better.
What’s that, you’re not sure how to get started with affiliate marketing?
Oh, it does.
And we’re happy to show you exactly how in our free training.
You will learn more with our free training than you would from other training products costing thousands of dollars.
And you’ll also discover one simple truth – affiliate marketing isn’t rocket science.
All we need from you is your best email address — we’ll get your invitation back to you pronto.
