Reflink vs Tapfiliate pricing: $3,204 vs $39 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Tapfiliate is $89 a month and FirstPromoter starts at $49 a month, forever, to answer one question: who sent this sale and what do I owe them. Reflink is $39 once. Give every affiliate a tracking link, count their clicks, attribute their conversions, compute their commissions, and export the payout CSV — from one Node process and one SQLite file that you own. No subscription.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Tapfiliate actually costs over one, two and three years, what Reflink gives you for $39 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Tapfiliate actually costs you

At $89/mo, one Tapfiliate subscription adds up to $1,068 every year — $3,204 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Reflink is $39 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $3,165 — and every year after that adds another $1,068 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Reflink vs Tapfiliate, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $39, once

Self-hosted affiliate tracking with attribution, commissions, approvals and payout CSV export. The highlights:

• 🔗 Tracking links — A short link records the click and 302-redirects to your landing page with a ref code appended for client-side pickup.
• 🍪 Cookie-based attribution — A configurable window of 30, 60 or 90 days is your call.
• 🎯 Conversion tracking two ways — A server-to-server postback from your checkout webhook, or a JS pixel with a convert call.
• 🚫 Order-ID dedupe — The same order can never pay commission twice.

Pays for itself in the first two weeks of a Tapfiliate subscription, then keeps running for free.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $39 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source and deploy it yourself for free.
2. Deploy and wire your checkout. Run it as a desktop app or on a $5 VPS, then call the postback from your checkout webhook on each purchase.
3. Approve and pay. Approve conversions in the dashboard, bundle them into a payout, export the CSV and pay via Stripe or PayPal.

When paying Tapfiliate is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Tapfiliate's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $89/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Reflink is $39, once. For the deeper dive, read the Reflink vs Tapfiliate head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the source is MIT and always will be at github.com/bensblueprints/affiliate-tracker-mvp. The $39 buys a packaged Windows installer with updates; building from source is free.

Where does my affiliate data live?
On your server. Reflink is one Node process and one SQLite file that you own, and visitor IPs are stored only as salted hashes, never raw.

Does it replace Tapfiliate entirely?
No, on purpose. If you need multi-level marketing trees and 40 native integrations, buy Tapfiliate. If you need who sent this sale and what do I owe them, that's Reflink.

More on Tapfiliate pricing

Reflink — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns