Flodesk Affiliate Program: How to Run Your Own Next to Flodesk

Flodesk has no affiliate feature for the templates, courses or services you sell, and you can still run a full affiliate program with Flodesk as the email tool underneath it. The honest route is to run the program next to Flodesk rather than inside it, and this article is that setup, start to finish.

I helped build Rekomi, which is the tool in that setup, so read it knowing where I sit. I’ll walk it with a concrete setup: Dana designs Canva templates and teaches a small course, her whole list lives in Flodesk, and she wants other people selling her products for a cut.

The short version: what runs where

Here’s the whole thing in one screen, before the detail:

• What you get: affiliates apply on a page Rekomi hosts, you approve them, each one gets a link to your own site, and you set the commission once; Rekomi runs the payouts and collects the tax forms.
• What Flodesk does: it keeps sending your emails and holds a segment of your affiliates, synced from Rekomi, so you can write to them from the editor you already use. Nothing else in the program touches Flodesk.
• How a sale gets credited: the Rekomi script on your site remembers which affiliate link the visitor arrived on, and when they buy through the payment gateway behind your checkout (Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad and the rest), Rekomi matches the purchase to that click and credits the affiliate.
• Where the checkout has to be: on a page you control, with the script in its head and your gateway behind the buy button. Flodesk-hosted forms and Checkout pages can’t run the script, so sales there aren’t credited.
• 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.
• How long it takes: about ten minutes for the Flodesk connection, and one $1 test purchase through your own link proves the chain.

Can I run my own affiliate program if my list is in Flodesk?

Yes, and it runs next to Flodesk rather than inside it.

Flodesk is your email tool, not your affiliate tool. The links, the tracking, the commissions and the payouts live in affiliate software; Flodesk keeps doing the emails, which is the part it’s genuinely great at, and gets a copy of your affiliates as subscribers so you can write to them from the editor you already use.

Also, don’t let one line you may have read put you off. SparkLoop’s help center says Flodesk lacks “the necessary API and functionality to add referral programs”, and for a newsletter referral program living inside the email platform, that’s fair. But a referral program rewards readers for sharing a free newsletter. An affiliate program pays partners when someone buys, and the buying happens on your site and your payment gateway, not in Flodesk. That second thing you can 100% run today!

What can Flodesk itself not do here?

It can’t record which affiliate link a subscriber arrived from, and that one limit decides the whole design.

All of this is in Flodesk’s own help center:

• No affiliate feature for your products. Flodesk’s program pays people to promote Flodesk; there’s nothing in the app for paying people to promote you, and the integrations directory lists no affiliate software.
• No hidden fields on forms. The custom fields article says hidden custom fields are “not currently supported” and custom fields “must be filled out manually by the subscriber.” So nothing captures the arriving link at signup (the API can write custom fields on a subscriber; no form fills one from the URL).
• Segments, not tags. There’s no tag concept in Flodesk. Anything you’d tag, you segment.
• Subscriber-only webhooks. The developer API sends subscriber.created, subscriber.added_to_segment and subscriber.unsubscribed. There are no purchase or click webhooks.
• Checkout tracks itself, lightly. Checkout analytics show visitors, orders and total sales, and the only tracking Flodesk documents for a Checkout page is a Meta Pixel.

If you searched for Flodesk affiliate tracking and landed here, this is the answer: the tracking can’t live in Flodesk, so it lives on your site. Here’s the two-column version:

None of that is a complaint. Flodesk made a deliberate bet on simplicity for designers and creators, and it shows on every screen. It just means the affiliate click has to be captured somewhere Flodesk isn’t: your own website.

How does Rekomi run an affiliate program for a Flodesk business?

Here’s the honest answer: Rekomi runs all of it outside Flodesk, and the only thing it asks Flodesk to do is hold a segment. That’s the real shape of Flodesk affiliate software in 2026, and I’d rather say it in the first sentence than bury it in a footnote. Let me walk it in the order Dana would set it up.

Where do the links and approvals live?

They live in Rekomi, and the links point at Dana’s own domain. She creates a campaign (name, commission, cookie window; the defaults are sensible), and every affiliate gets one referral slug for her links: danadesigns.com/?via=maya. The Rekomi script on her site records the click and remembers the slug on her domain for the campaign’s cookie window, 60 days by default, with the last click winning unless she switches the campaign to first touch.

Affiliates apply on a page Rekomi hosts at danadesigns.rekomi.com, or affiliates.danadesigns.com on her own domain, on every plan. Applications wait in Pending until she approves them, or auto-approve sends them straight through, and the approval email carries their link and a one-click sign-in to their portal.

How do commissions get set?

You set them per sale, as a percentage or a fixed amount, and you choose how long a sale keeps paying: one time, a set number of months, or the customer’s lifetime. Dana can override the rate for one affiliate or add performance tiers that step it up as referred revenue grows. A refund inside the hold window, 30 days by default, reverses the commission on its own.

Who actually pays the affiliates?

Rekomi does, and this is the part I genuinely enjoy. Dana funds a payout run, Rekomi disburses to each affiliate through Stripe Express, bank deposit or PayPal in 165+ countries, and the tax paperwork is collected on the way in: W-9 or W-8 during Stripe onboarding, or uploaded to Rekomi for PayPal and bank-deposit affiliates. She never wires anyone one at a time. Rekomi’s fee is a flat 3% on what gets paid out, charged on top of the commissions and never taken out of the affiliate’s share.

So where does the sale get credited?

It’s credited by the payment gateway behind Dana’s checkout plus the Rekomi script on her own site, and never from Flodesk. She connects the gateway under Setup (Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, Polar, Shopify, Wix and the rest connect natively, and WooCommerce through the Rekomi WordPress plugin) and adds one script tag to her site’s head; there are install guides for Squarespace, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Framer and Carrd. When Stripe fires invoice.paid, or another gateway fires its equivalent, for a buyer who arrived on an affiliate link inside the window, Rekomi creates the sale and the commission. Flodesk is never in that path, not for the click and not for the sale.

Also, to be fair to the neighbors: on platforms like beehiiv, Kit and MailerLite, Rekomi also reads the affiliate tag back from the platform’s own signup record when a sale arrives with no affiliate named any other way, and I wrote up how that works; on Flodesk it doesn’t, because there’s no record to read.

The Rekomi for Flodesk page says the same, in the same words.

Start a 14-day free trial of Rekomi, connect your gateway, paste one script tag, and connect Flodesk so approved affiliates land in your segment. Start a free trial

How do my affiliates land in Flodesk?

They land through a segment, and the setup is super quick, about ten minutes.

1. In Flodesk, go to Account, then Integrations, then Developer API, and click Add API key (keys are on paid plans). Copy it.
2. In Rekomi, open Integrations, click the Flodesk card, paste the key, and click Connect. Rekomi runs a test call against your segments to confirm it works.
3. Pick the segment approved affiliates land in. Each campaign can override it from its Settings tab, under CRM sync for this campaign.

From then on, every approved affiliate is added to that segment with their name and email, and a re-sync updates rather than duplicates. Flip on “Include applicants before approval” if you’d rather email people while they’re pending. And because Flodesk workflows can start from a segment, Dana’s affiliate welcome sequence is just a workflow pointed at that segment: swipe copy, launch calendar, the “here’s your link” email.

One extra worth knowing: switch on Sync referred customers and leads and each credited sale or lead is written into Flodesk as well, matched on email, with fields like rekomi_referring_affiliate you can segment on. The details are in the Flodesk setup docs.

There’s no tag step, because Flodesk has no tags. That’s ten minutes, and the setup’s done!

What about Flodesk Checkout?

Verify it before you promise anyone a commission on it. I went back and forth on whether to write this section at all, and landed on: the facts are useful, so here they are, with the limits attached.

Flodesk’s help center says Checkout is built on Stripe and runs through a unique Flodesk Stripe Standard account that keeps Checkout transactions separate from any other Stripe payments you take. The only tracking its help center documents for a Checkout page is a Meta Pixel, so the Rekomi script can’t run there, and Checkout’s own analytics show visitors, orders and sales with no source.

In Rekomi, that plays out like this: connect that Flodesk-created Stripe account under Setup (that’s the one, not your main account, and Rekomi binds one Stripe account per organization today) and subscriptions and payment plans arrive as Stripe events. But the click was recorded on your site and the buyer paid on a Flodesk-hosted page where nothing of Rekomi’s runs, so I’m not going to tell you that sale gets credited. I haven’t verified it end to end, and until I have, don’t promise it to a partner either.

The safe path: sell on a page you control, with the Rekomi script on it and your gateway behind it. The click, the purchase and the credit all happen on one chain you can test in five minutes with your own link and a $1 product. Flodesk Checkout is lovely for a quick digital download; for the products you want affiliates selling, put the checkout where the tracking can see it.

What commission fits a designer or coach selling templates and courses?

25% on the template pack and 15% on the course is where I’d start, and the math is the bit I like most.

Dana sells a $79 template pack and a $600 course. The pack pays $79 × 25% = $19.75 per sale, enough for someone with a design audience to write a real post, and Dana keeps $59.25 on a product that costs nothing to deliver twice. The course pays $600 × 15% = $90 per sale: a lower rate but a much bigger check, and a course sale takes more of the affiliate’s trust to close, so the $90 is what makes it worth their while.

Say 6 partners send 40 template sales and 12 course sales in a quarter. Commissions come to 40 × $19.75 + 12 × $90 = $790 + $1,080 = $1,870. Two course buyers refund inside the 30-day hold, their $180 of commission reverses before anyone is paid, and the payout run is $1,690. Rekomi’s 3% on that run is $50.70, on top, and Dana’s plan is $29, $49 or $99 a month depending on the tier, with a 14-day free trial first. That is the entire cost of an affiliate program for digital products. I love how clean that is: a percentage of money that already arrived, and nothing else.

Two settings to make on purpose. Use Percentage rather than Fixed if you sell in more than one currency, because a Fixed rate pays that many units of whatever currency the sale arrives in (a rate of 20 pays $20 on a USD order and 20 EUR on a EUR order). And if the pack is a one-time Stripe charge, it credits the same way a subscription does, whether your checkout creates a Stripe invoice (the Stripe install guide shows that setup), takes a plain one-time payment, or the buyer redeems a per-affiliate coupon code. Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy report one-time orders natively too, so the pack credits there as well.

The follow-up questions

Here are the four that come up next, answered short.

Does Flodesk have a built-in affiliate program for the products I sell?

No. Flodesk’s program pays members $15 per referred paying signup for promoting Flodesk itself. There’s nothing for paying people to promote your templates, courses or services, so your own program runs in affiliate software, with Flodesk holding a segment of your affiliates.

Can a Zap connect Flodesk to affiliate software and credit sales?

No, not on its own. A Zap can add a new affiliate to a Flodesk segment, and that’s useful. But crediting a sale needs the click on your site and the paid event from your gateway, and Flodesk has neither to hand over.

Can I pay an affiliate who isn’t on my Flodesk list?

Yes. The segment sync is there so you can email partners from Flodesk. Approval, tracking, commissions and payouts happen in Rekomi whether the sync is on or not, and an affiliate who unsubscribes keeps earning.

Will Rekomi read anything back from Flodesk later?

No, not on any date I can give you. Flodesk would need a form or Checkout page that stores the arriving link on the subscriber, and today its help center says the opposite. If that changes, the connection gets a Credit sales switch like the beehiiv, Kit and MailerLite ones; until then, the integration page says plainly that sales aren’t credited through it.

The one question to answer before you launch

Where does the purchase actually happen?

That’s it – that’s the only question that decides whether this works. If it’s a page you control, with the Rekomi script in its head and your gateway behind the buy button, you’re set: click, sale and commission live on one chain, and Flodesk does what it’s best at on top. If the answer is a Flodesk-hosted page, move the checkout first and launch second; an affiliate who sends you a sale and never sees a commission is very hard to win back.

Do this next: create your campaign, install the script, connect your gateway, and buy one $1 product through your own affiliate link. If it shows up as a credited sale, invite your first partner today!