TL;DR. Chargebee doesn’t ship a built-in affiliate program, so you add one in one of three ways: build your own webhook consumer, write a relay into a generic S2S tracking API, or connect a platform that speaks Chargebee natively. Native is the 20-minute route: paste your site name and a Read-Only API key, add one webhook, and payments, renewals, and refunds track themselves.
Whichever route you pick, attribution is the part to get right. Chargebee hosts the checkout on its own domain, so the referral has to travel on the subscription itself, as meta_data.rekomi_ref or a cf_rekomi_ref custom field. This guide walks all three routes with honest tradeoffs, then the full setup.
I’ve wired affiliate tracking into more billing platforms than I can count building Rekomi, and I run Rekomi’s own affiliate program on it. Setting up a Chargebee affiliate program is a case I like a lot: Chargebee doesn’t ship affiliate tracking in the box, but its webhook and credit-note model makes it one of the cleanest billing platforms to attach a program to.
This guide covers the whole path: why affiliate programs fit Chargebee businesses so well, the three ways to wire one up, and a setup walkthrough that takes about 20 minutes end to end. If you’re still comparing tools across the whole market, my guide to affiliate tracking software does that job; this one stays focused on Chargebee.
Why Chargebee brands add affiliate programs
Because subscription billing turns one referral into months or years of revenue, an affiliate program fits a Chargebee business better than almost any other paid channel. A referred $79/mo customer who stays 18 months is $1,422 in revenue from a single link click, and you only pay commission after each payment actually lands. Compare that with ads, where you pay for the click whether or not it converts.
The recurring shape matters on the affiliate’s side too. Recurring commissions become real monthly income for your partners, which is why good affiliates seek out subscription offers; across programs running on Rekomi, most SaaS offers land between 20 and 30% revenue share. Whether you call it an affiliate program or a referral program, the mechanics are the same: track the click, attribute the subscription, pay on real revenue.
There’s also a quietly great property specific to Chargebee: it sits on top of whatever payment gateway you already run. Track at the Chargebee layer and your program is gateway-agnostic; Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, whatever processes the card, the same webhooks report the payment. Your payment routing doesn’t change at all.
The three ways to add an affiliate program to Chargebee
If you’ve browsed Chargebee integrations directories looking for affiliate tools, you’ve probably noticed the coverage is uneven. That’s because there are really three routes, and only one of them shows up in a directory.
Route 1: build it yourself on Chargebee webhooks
Chargebee’s webhooks give you everything you need in raw form: payment_succeeded, payment_refunded, the subscription lifecycle events, and credit_note_created. Consume those, store your own attribution, compute commissions, and you have a program with full control and no vendor.
The tradeoffs are real, though. Chargebee doesn’t support webhook signing, so authenticating deliveries is your problem to engineer. Retries continue for up to two days, so you need de-duplication by event id or you’ll double-count sales. Partial refunds need proportional clawback math. And that’s before the affiliate-facing half: signup pages, dashboards, link tracking, payouts, and tax forms. It’s a solid quarter of engineering for a solved problem, which is why I’d only pick this route if your program itself is the product.
Route 2: relay events into a generic S2S API
Most affiliate platforms expose a server-to-server API, so any of them can technically track Chargebee: you write a small relay service that listens to Chargebee webhooks and forwards conversions. This is how brands run Chargebee on platforms with no native support, and it does work.
But you own the relay. Renewals, refunds, retries, and the attribution hop from browser to subscription are all your code, forever. Here’s my one strong opinion on this page: if your commission data depends on a relay you wrote in an afternoon, that relay is now the most fragile piece of your program. Nobody monitors it, it fails silently, and you find out at payout time when an affiliate asks where their conversions went.
Route 3: connect a platform with native Chargebee support
The native route means the platform maintains the Chargebee integration and you paste credentials instead of writing code. Chargebee is reasonably well covered here: FirstPromoter, Tolt, PartnerStack, and Tapfiliate all ship Chargebee integrations, and Rekomi does too. The notable absence is Rewardful, which supports Stripe and Paddle only; it’s a good product on those two rails, it just isn’t an option for Chargebee billing.
For nearly every Chargebee business, this is the right route. The integration is somebody’s maintained product rather than your side project, and the renewal and refund handling that makes subscription attribution hard is exactly the part the platform has already solved.
Rekomi’s Chargebee integration is native and available on every plan, from $19/mo plus 3% of affiliate payouts, with payouts and tax forms handled for you. It listens to Chargebee rather than the gateway underneath, so it’s gateway-agnostic by design, and refunds and Chargeback Management chargebacks claw commissions back automatically. Full plan details are on the pricing page, and every plan starts with a 14-day free trial.
The 20-minute setup, step by step
Here’s the native setup at summary level, using Rekomi as the example. The Chargebee install doc has every step with copy-paste snippets; this is the shape of it.
- Grab your site name and a Read-Only API key. Your site name is the subdomain of your Chargebee URL:
acmefrom acme.chargebee.com. Create the key under Settings > Configure Chargebee > API Keys and Webhooks, choosing the Read-Only type. It’s used to validate the connection and run health checks, never to change anything in your site. - Connect in Rekomi. The setup page shows your per-workspace webhook URL plus Basic Authentication credentials it generates for you. The password is shown exactly once and stored encrypted, so copy it now; if you lose it, there’s a Regenerate button. Enter your site name and the key, and Rekomi validates the pair live against your site.
- Add the webhook in Chargebee. Paste the URL, turn on “Protect webhook URL with basic authentication” with those credentials, set the API version to V2 (V1 deliveries are rejected), check “Exclude card information,” and select the payment, subscription, and credit-note events. An “All Events” configuration works too.
- Stamp the referral onto checkouts. This step is required: Chargebee hosts the checkout, so without it payments arrive with no referral and nobody gets credited. Install the tracking script on your marketing site, then pass
window.Rekomi.getReferral()asmeta_data.rekomi_refon API-created subscriptions, or stamp acf_rekomi_refcustom field onto hosted-page URLs and the drop-in script with a copy-paste snippet.
One thing I’d flag on security, because it’s the honest version: Chargebee doesn’t support webhook signing, so there’s no signing secret like you’d see with Stripe. Rekomi generates Basic Authentication credentials instead and authenticates every delivery against them before anything is processed, on top of an unguessable per-workspace URL. I’d rather state that plainly than pretend a signature exists.
Rehearse before going live. Chargebee test sites (the ones ending in -test) have their own keys and webhooks, so connect one to a sandbox workspace, pay with a test card, and the conversion appears on the campaign’s Activity tab within a minute. Then use Chargebee’s Time Machine to jump a billing term forward and watch the renewal credit the same affiliate. The whole rehearsal takes ten minutes and removes every surprise from launch day!
What Chargebee affiliate tracking records automatically
Once connected, the events do all the work. Here’s what flows through:
- Payments. The first successful payment of a subscription books the first conversion, and one-time charges book one-time conversions, both on
payment_succeeded. - Renewals. Every successful renewal payment records a recurring conversion, so revenue-share commissions keep accruing for the life of the subscription.
- Signups.
subscription_createdis recorded as a zero-value event, tying the customer to the affiliate before any money moves. - Refunds. Full or partial, they claw commission back proportionally when
payment_refundedfires, in the same audit trail as the original conversion. - Chargebacks. Disputes handled through Chargebee’s Chargeback Management feature arrive as refunds and credit notes and claw back the same way.
Now the fun part, the math. Say a referred customer pays $79/mo and your offer is 25% revenue share. The affiliate earns $19.75 when the first payment lands, then $19.75 again on every renewal, with no work from you or them. In month four you refund 40% of an invoice, $31.60 back to the customer; payment_refunded fires and $7.90 of that month’s commission claws back automatically. Your payout ledger stays correct without anyone doing spreadsheet surgery.
I build payout and clawback plumbing all day, and Chargebee’s credit-note model is genuinely one of the cleanest to integrate against: every cash refund is a refundable credit note, so proportional clawback math falls out naturally. One honest caveat: disputes you resolve directly at your payment gateway, outside Chargeback Management, never generate Chargebee events, so no tracking tool can see them. Adjust those by hand if one matters for a payout.
Chargebee affiliate program FAQ
Does Chargebee have a built-in affiliate program?
No. Chargebee is subscription billing on top of your payment gateway; it doesn’t ship affiliate tracking the way, say, Lemon Squeezy does. You add a program through one of the three routes above: build on the webhooks yourself, relay into a generic S2S API, or connect a platform with native Chargebee support.
Which affiliate software supports Chargebee natively?
Rekomi, FirstPromoter, Tolt, PartnerStack, and Tapfiliate all ship native Chargebee integrations. Rewardful doesn’t; it supports Stripe and Paddle only. If a platform isn’t on that list, it can usually still track Chargebee through its server-to-server API, but you’ll be writing and maintaining the relay yourself.
Do commissions track on subscription renewals?
Yes. Every successful renewal payment records a recurring conversion, and the referral set at signup stays on the subscription, so the same affiliate keeps earning for the life of the customer. There’s also a fallback to the customer’s conversion history, so renewals credit correctly even in edge cases.
What happens to commissions when a customer is refunded?
They claw back automatically and proportionally. A 40% refund reverses 40% of the commission; a full refund reverses all of it. Chargebacks handled through Chargebee’s Chargeback Management feature flow through the same pipe and claw back too, all in the same audit trail as the original conversion.
Does the payment gateway under Chargebee matter?
No. Tracking listens to Chargebee, the billing source of truth, not to the gateway underneath. Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, or anything else Chargebee supports: the same webhooks report every payment, and nothing about your payment routing changes.
Can I test a Chargebee affiliate program before going live?
Definitely. Chargebee test sites are fully separate, with their own API keys and webhooks, and the Chargebee Test Gateway lets you pay with test cards. Connect the test site, run a checkout with a referral attached, advance a billing term with Time Machine, then refund the invoice and watch the clawback. When everything behaves, repeat the connection on your live site.
Set it up this afternoon
Here’s your next 15 minutes: log into Chargebee, create a Read-Only API key on your test site, and open the Chargebee install guide side by side. By the time your coffee’s done you’ll have a test conversion on the board, and going live is the same four steps on your production site.
If you’re weighing platforms first, the Chargebee integration page shows exactly what Rekomi tracks and how it’s secured, and every plan comes with a 14-day free trial, so the whole rehearsal costs nothing.
