beehiiv Affiliate Program: How to Run Your Own on Premium Subscriptions

beehiiv doesn’t ship an affiliate program for your own newsletter (its Referral Program pays readers in rewards, not cash), but Premium Subscriptions bill through a Stripe account you can connect, and that’s enough to run one: your affiliates earn a recurring cut of every paying subscriber they send you. This article is how to run it on beehiiv, from the math to the first credited upgrade.

Let’s open with the money, because the recurring math is the whole reason to bother. A $14.99/month Premium tier with a 30% recurring commission hands an affiliate $4.50 for every referred subscriber, every month, for as long as that reader stays. So, 40 referred subscribers is $180/month, or $2,160 a year for the affiliate, and the newsletter still keeps $4,684.80 of that year’s revenue after Stripe’s card fee and the commission. I’ll walk every line of that below, ramp and churn included.

Then I’ll walk the mechanism, which is the part I find super satisfying: beehiiv already writes down how every subscriber arrived, so a reader who subscribes and upgrades later can be credited to the right affiliate from beehiiv’s own record, and a reader who pays first is credited through the affiliate’s Rekomi link, with nothing installed on your beehiiv site either way. After that comes setup, the limits you need to plan around, told as a timeline, and the difference between a referral program and an affiliate program, because on beehiiv those are two separate features.

The short version: what you get and how a sale gets credited

Here’s the whole thing in one screen before I go into the detail:

• What you get: affiliates apply, you approve them, each one gets a link, and you set a commission on Premium (30% recurring is my pick, and the math is next).
• What you install on beehiiv: nothing in the site builder. You connect the Stripe account beehiiv bills through, paste your beehiiv API key into Rekomi, switch on the Rekomi link in your campaign, and paste one redirect URL into beehiiv’s Paid subscriptions settings.
• How a sale gets credited, path one: a reader who subscribes to the free list through your beehiiv site carries the affiliate’s tag on their beehiiv record, and when they upgrade to Premium, Rekomi reads that tag back and credits the affiliate.
• How a sale gets credited, path two: a reader who clicks the link and pays straight away passes back through Rekomi for a second after paying, Rekomi matches the payment to their click, and it credits the affiliate before sending them on to your thank-you page.
• What counts: Premium subscriptions and one-time products billed through that Stripe account, renewals included, with refunds clawed back on their own. Boost spend and Referral Program rewards never count.
• Who pays the affiliates: Rekomi runs the payouts and collects the tax forms; you fund the run.
• What it costs: a Rekomi plan at $29, $49 or $99 a month after a 14-day free trial, plus 3% of commissions paid out. You need beehiiv’s Scale plan for Premium anyway.
• How long it takes: about 10 minutes, and two test purchases prove both paths.

beehiiv’s Referral Program pays in rewards, not cash, and that’s a smart design

Now the feature most beehiiv publishers already have and sometimes mistake for an affiliate program: the built-in Referral Program, under Referral Program in the left-hand menu. It’s a reader-refers-reader growth tool, and it’s a genuinely good one. Your subscribers get a personal referral link, you set milestones (3 referrals, 10, 25, etc.), and when a reader hits one, beehiiv hands them the reward you configured: merch shipped through beehiiv’s dropshipping partner, a promo code, a digital download, or a gifted paid subscription. Referrals are tracked by the subscriber’s email, you can auto-fulfill or review each milestone before the email goes out, and it’s available on beehiiv’s paid plans. beehiiv’s setup guide walks the whole thing.

What it isn’t is an affiliate program. No cash changes hands, and when a referred reader later upgrades to Premium, the person who referred them doesn’t get a cut of it. That’s by design, and I think the design is right for the job. Rewards keep the ask casual, forward this to a friend and get a mug, which is exactly the pitch that works on a free list. Cash commissions belong to a different relationship: a creator with their own audience, sending you readers who pay.

Both can run on the same publication at the same time – and I’d definitely do exactly that: Referral Program for the free list, affiliates on top for the paid tier. One tracks by email and the other by the arrival tag (more on that in a minute), so they don’t step on each other.

Running your own beehiiv affiliate program on Premium: the math

Premium Subscriptions are the product your own program runs on. They’re beehiiv’s paid tier, billed through a Stripe account beehiiv creates for your publication, and every one of those subscriptions can carry an affiliate commission. As of September 2026, beehiiv’s pricing page lists paid subscriptions on its Scale plan and above with a 0% take rate on that revenue, which is a very good deal for a beehiiv paid newsletter. So the real question is what to pay, and I want to answer it with actual numbers instead of a range.

The setup is a $14.99/month Premium tier, a 30% recurring commission (the affiliate earns on every renewal, not only the first payment), and one affiliate who has brought you 40 paying subscribers. Stripe’s standard US card fee is 2.9% + $0.30 per charge, and it comes off before anyone splits anything.

I went back and forth on whether Stripe’s fee belonged in the table at all (it isn’t the affiliate’s concern), and I left it in because “what the newsletter keeps” is the number you’ll actually make decisions on, and it’s an honest $9.76 per subscriber per month, not $10.49.

The ramp: 40 subscribers don’t show up on January 1. If your affiliate brings them in evenly across the year, at 3 or 4 a month, the first-year commission comes to about $1,170, and by December the run rate is the full $180/month. Year two is where recurring really pays off: $2,160 with zero new referrals, as long as those 40 stay!

Churn: they won’t all stay, and that’s the nice part of recurring commissions from the newsletter’s side. When a subscriber cancels, the commission stops with them. You never pay for a reader who isn’t paying you.

So, why 30% recurring instead of a one-time bounty? Because on a $14.99 tier, 30% of one month is $4.50, and no creator gets excited about $4.50. The same 30% recurring turns one referral into $54 a year and 40 referrals into $2,160, and that’s the kind of number that gets a creator to write about you a second time. Two other structures work fine too: a flat amount per new paid subscriber, say $10, which is simpler to explain but has no recurring tail, and a recurring share with a cap, like 30% for 12 months.

Two fixed costs sit outside the table: beehiiv’s plan, which is $43/month for Scale as of today, and whatever you run the affiliate program on. On Rekomi that’s a $29, $49 or $99 plan plus a flat 3% of the commissions paid out, so the 3% on this example is $64.80 for the year. I’d rather you see that line now than discover it later.

How a Premium upgrade gets credited to the right affiliate

This is my favorite bit, because nothing has to run inside beehiiv for any of it. There are two ways a reader reaches Premium, and each has its own way of being credited. A reader who joins the free list first is credited from beehiiv’s own data: beehiiv keeps a record of how every subscriber arrived (the UTM values on the link they clicked), it writes that record once at signup, and Rekomi reads it back when the money shows up. A reader who goes straight to a plan and pays is credited through the affiliate’s Rekomi link, which I’ll get to right after the first path.

Here’s the clean version:

1. Each affiliate link in your campaign is a short Rekomi link, so Nadia’s is something like https://rekomi.link/k4x9q2?p=your-campaign-id. It records her click on the way through and lands the reader on your beehiiv site with a tag beehiiv can store: utm_source=rekomi, plus utm_campaign set to Nadia’s link slug. A plain link with that tag on the end, the kind she shared before you switched the Rekomi link on, still credits readers who subscribe first, but only the Rekomi link can credit a reader who pays first, so have her copy the new one from her dashboard.
2. A reader clicks it, lands on your beehiiv site and subscribes. beehiiv stores those two values on the new subscriber, once, at signup, and never overwrites them.
3. Weeks or months later, that subscriber upgrades to Premium. The payment runs through the Stripe account beehiiv created for you, and Stripe tells Rekomi about the sale.
4. Rekomi first checks everything it already knows about that sale: a coupon, checkout metadata, the customer’s history, an email lead it recorded itself. Only when none of those names an affiliate does it ask beehiiv for the subscriber by email, read the stored tag, and credit Nadia.
5. The sale shows in your dashboard like any other, labeled Platform match on the Sales page, with beehiiv as the source. Renewals keep crediting Nadia through the customer’s history, and a refund claws the commission back on its own.

Now the reader who never subscribes first. She clicks Nadia’s Rekomi link, lands on your upgrade page, picks a plan, types her email into beehiiv’s Confirm your email box and pays on Stripe. beehiiv creates her subscriber record at that moment, on its own servers, with no tag on it, so the lookup above would come back empty. She’s credited anyway, for two reasons. Rekomi recorded her click when she came through the link, and the redirect after purchase you set in beehiiv (one URL, pasted once, in the setup below) sends her back through Rekomi for about a second on her way to your thank-you page. In that second Rekomi matches the payment to her click and credits Nadia. The sale shows as Link on the Sales page, and it works whether or not she clicked Accept on your cookie banner, because none of it runs on your beehiiv pages. This is the case that used to be lost on beehiiv, and I’d guess it’s most of what an upgrade page sees.

A quick warning about step 4: the beehiiv lookup is the fallback, not the first guess, so a coupon code or a lead the affiliate captured directly always wins. And an upgrade started while the reader is logged in credits the same way, because nothing needs to be typed. That’s literally the whole crediting side of the Rekomi beehiiv integration: two connections, one link and a lookup.

Want to watch it credit a real upgrade? Connect the Stripe account beehiiv bills through, paste your beehiiv API key, and run the 2-minute test from the next section inside a 14-day free trial. Start a free trial

Setup: two connections, one switch, and nothing to install on beehiiv

Here’s the whole install, and since I helped build Rekomi, this is the part I can vouch for line by line. Budget about 10 minutes, and the Stripe consent screen is the slow part. Nothing goes into beehiiv’s site builder; the only thing you touch in beehiiv is one settings field.

Connect the Stripe account beehiiv bills through

In Rekomi, open Setup > Connect payment gateway and click Connect Stripe. In Stripe’s consent screen, pick the account beehiiv created for your publication. beehiiv sets that account up under your own Stripe login, separate from any other Stripe account you run, so if you see more than one, it’s the one whose payments are your newsletter subscriptions. If you connect the wrong one, nothing arrives.

Connect beehiiv under Integrations

Grab your API key and Publication ID from beehiiv under Settings > Integrations > API Keys; the ID starts with pub_. Paste both into the beehiiv card under Integrations in Rekomi and click Connect. Rekomi verifies the key, does a test read of your subscriber list, and fills in a one-line status right away instead of waiting for the first sale.

Leave Credit sales on, and decide about affiliate sync

“Credit sales through beehiiv” is on from the moment you connect – nothing to flip. The other switch on the same page, “Sync affiliates into beehiiv”, adds every approved affiliate to your publication as a subscriber (email only, since beehiiv’s subscription API has no name fields) with custom fields for their referral link, slug, campaign and status, so you can merge a partner’s link straight into your emails. Keep it or turn it off as you like.

Switch on the Rekomi link and paste one URL into beehiiv

Open the campaign in Rekomi, go to the Tracking tab and switch on Track sales through a Rekomi link. From then on every affiliate link in that campaign is a short rekomi.link address that records the click and sends the reader on to your beehiiv site with the tag, exactly as before. The same panel shows a redirect URL; copy it. In beehiiv, go to Settings, then Paid subscriptions, and paste it as the redirect after purchase, curly braces and all, because Stripe fills those in when it sends the buyer back. If you’d rather buyers end up on your own thank-you page, put that page’s address in the campaign’s thank-you field and Rekomi forwards them there after its second of work.

This is the step that credits readers who pay before they ever subscribe, so I wouldn’t skip it. Two small things: affiliates who already have a link copy it again from their dashboard once the switch is on, and if beehiiv ever refuses to save the braces (it didn’t in any test I ran), the same panel has a second mode, Ask for the email first, which puts a one-field Rekomi page in front of your upgrade page and writes the tag onto the subscriber for you.

Test it in 2 minutes

Copy an affiliate’s link, open it in a private window, and subscribe with a fresh email address. Then drop that address into the checker box on the beehiiv page in Rekomi (“Check a subscriber’s email”). It answers in one sentence: the subscriber exists, the tag names your affiliate, and a sale from that email would be credited. Upgrade with that address on your beehiiv site and the purchase lands in the campaign’s Activity view as a credited sale!

Then run the pay-first version, since that’s how most upgrade-page traffic behaves: open the affiliate’s link again in a fresh private window, don’t subscribe, pick a plan and pay with a new email address (a cheap test tier is handy here). It lands on the Sales page within a few seconds, labeled Link, and the buyer ends up on your thank-you page none the wiser.

The beehiiv connection docs cover the status line, the signup alerts and the troubleshooting list. And if a test purchase ever shows up as a purchase but not as a credited sale, the first thing to check is which Stripe account you connected.

Optional: Google Tag Manager. You don’t need this for clicks or sales; the Rekomi link counts the clicks and the two paths above credit the sales. The one thing it adds is a lead the moment a reader types their email anywhere on your beehiiv site, before they pay. beehiiv has no site-wide head slot, so if you want that, you add one Custom HTML tag in GTM with Rekomi’s loader script, set the trigger to All Pages, and paste your GTM container ID into beehiiv under Website > Builder > Settings > All general settings > Pixels. Two quirks worth knowing: the settings ride on the script URL because GTM strips data- attributes, and beehiiv’s cookie banner holds every GTM tag until the reader clicks Accept, and only from the next page they load, which affects this optional tag and never the connection or the Rekomi link. The beehiiv install guide has the exact snippet.

What your affiliates actually get

Affiliates care about three things: a link that works, numbers they can check, and money that arrives.

The link comes with everything already on it, so there’s nothing for them to remember. Their dashboard shows clicks, leads and credited sales under their name. With affiliate sync on, each of them is also a subscriber in your beehiiv with their own link in a custom field, so you can drop it into a partner-only email. And commissions get paid out in cash, with Rekomi sending the payouts and collecting the tax forms; your part is approving affiliates and funding the run.

The limits to plan around: beehiiv writes the arrival once, and the link needs the same browser

The one rule: beehiiv records how a subscriber arrived at the moment they subscribe, and it never overwrites that record. Every attribution method has a rule like this, and the question it raises is what happens when someone was already on your list before they met your affiliate. Let me answer it as a timeline: three readers, one affiliate, Nadia.

Priya: joined in March, clicked in June, upgraded in July

Priya finds your newsletter through a Google search and joins the free list in March. In June she reads Nadia’s review of your newsletter and clicks Nadia’s link. In July she upgrades to Premium. When the July invoice arrives, Rekomi checks its own signals, finds nothing, then asks beehiiv for Priya’s record. beehiiv has her, but the arrival record says March and Google, not June and Nadia, so the beehiiv lookup can’t credit Nadia. This is where the Rekomi link earns its keep. Priya clicked Nadia’s link in June, Rekomi recorded that click, and if she upgrades in July from the same browser, inside the campaign’s cookie window, the redirect after purchase matches the payment to that click and credits Nadia anyway. If she clicked on her phone in June and upgrades on her laptop in July, or cleared her cookies in between, the sale lands as a purchase without an affiliate, and “Check a subscriber’s email” tells you exactly that in one line.

Tom: clicked in June, joined that day, upgraded in July

Tom has never heard of you. He clicks Nadia’s link in June, subscribes free that day, and upgrades in July. beehiiv stored the tag in June, so the July sale credits Nadia. This is the main case, and it’s most of what an affiliate sends you, because bringing you people who weren’t already there is the whole job.

Lena: clicked in June, upgraded 15 months later

Lena clicks Nadia’s link, subscribes in June, and doesn’t upgrade until the September after next. The lookup only credits subscribers who joined inside the window shown on the integration page (a year by default, counted from the day beehiiv says they subscribed), so Lena’s upgrade falls outside it. That window is there on purpose, since a year is a long time to owe someone a commission on a click, and you can change it on the same page if your readers take longer to upgrade.

Priya is the case the Rekomi link was built for, and it covers her whenever the click and the upgrade happen in the same browser inside your cookie window, logged in or not. For the Priya who clicks on one device and pays on another, the optional GTM tag can still catch her if she types her email somewhere on your site in between, and beyond that the honest move is how you frame the deal to affiliates, which I’d do plainly: you’re paid for the readers you send, and the link is how they’re counted.

A few more limits, all in one place so nothing surprises you after launch:

• Only beehiiv-hosted pages store the tag. A beehiiv subscribe form embedded on another website records nothing unless beehiiv’s own attribution script runs there, so send affiliate traffic to your beehiiv site itself.
• Premium Subscriptions and one-time digital products sold through the same Stripe account both credit, the same way.
• Signup alerts, meaning a tagged subscriber showing up as a lead before they pay, use beehiiv webhooks, which beehiiv offers on Scale and above. On other plans the integration page says so in one line, and sales still credit.
• Boost spend and Referral Program rewards are never recorded. They’re separate beehiiv features.

Referral program or affiliate program: which one does your newsletter want?

Both, usually, and happily they’re not competing for the same job. When someone searches for a newsletter referral program they almost always mean the reader-refers-reader kind: existing subscribers share a link, they earn rewards at milestones, and the free list grows. beehiiv’s built-in Referral Program is exactly that, and it’s the right tool for the free tier.

An affiliate program is a cash deal with people who have their own audience: other newsletter writers, YouTubers, bloggers and podcasters in your niche. They send you readers, and you pay a share of the Premium revenue those readers generate. It only makes sense once there’s revenue to share.

If you don’t have a paid tier yet, start with the Referral Program today, since it’s already in your plan. The moment you launch Premium, adding affiliates is a no-brainer, because a reader paying $14.99/month is worth a real commission, and a mug isn’t a compelling reason for a creator with 20,000 subscribers to write about you.

One more thing, since it comes up constantly: Boost is a third feature, paid recommendations between publishers (you pay another newsletter for subscribers, or they pay you). Boost spend is never an affiliate sale.

Quick answers for beehiiv publishers

Here are the short versions of the questions that come up most, in case you skipped to the end.

Can you have an affiliate program on beehiiv?

Yes. beehiiv doesn’t ship one for your own newsletter, since its Partner Program pays people who promote beehiiv and its Referral Program pays readers in rewards. But Premium Subscriptions bill through a Stripe account you can connect to an affiliate tool, and beehiiv’s subscriber record carries the tag needed to credit the right affiliate, with a Rekomi link covering the readers who pay before they subscribe.

Does the beehiiv Referral Program pay cash?

No. It pays the milestone rewards you configure: merch, promo codes, digital products, gifted paid subscriptions. Referrals are tracked by the subscriber’s email, and a Premium upgrade doesn’t pay the referrer anything on its own.

Does beehiiv Boost count as an affiliate sale?

No. Boost is beehiiv’s paid recommendation network between publishers. Rekomi never records Boost spend, and affiliates can’t earn on it.

Do I have to add code to my beehiiv site?

No. Sales credit through the two connections, the Stripe account beehiiv bills through and your beehiiv API key with Credit sales on, plus one URL you paste into beehiiv’s Paid subscriptions settings so buyers pass back through Rekomi for a second. The Google Tag Manager tag is optional and only adds a lead when a reader types their email on your site.

Do renewals keep paying the affiliate?

Yes, when the commission is recurring. Each renewal invoice on the connected Stripe account credits the same affiliate through the customer’s history. Set a duration on the campaign if you’d rather it stop after 12 months.

What happens on a refund or a cancellation?

A refund claws the commission back automatically off Stripe’s charge.refunded event, and a cancellation stops future renewal commissions without taking back what was already earned. There’s nothing to configure on beehiiv for either.

Do I need beehiiv’s Scale plan?

Yes, in practice. As of September 2026 beehiiv lists paid subscriptions on Scale and above, and Premium is what your affiliates get paid on. Scale also includes webhooks, which is what Rekomi uses to show a tagged signup as a lead before they pay.

Launch it with 3 affiliates this week

Challenge: don’t try to build the whole program this week. Just pick 3 people who already mention your newsletter: a peer writer, a podcaster, a reader who forwards every issue. Offer them 30% recurring on Premium, connect the two accounts, switch on the Rekomi link, run both tests, and send each of them their link by Friday. Three affiliates is enough to see a real credited upgrade in the dashboard, and I’d bet that first credited sale teaches you more about your program than any planning doc could!