Kit Affiliate Program: How to Run Your Own on Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) has no affiliate feature for what you sell on it, and you can still run a full affiliate program on Kit: your affiliates earn a cut of your course, download or newsletter sales, and Kit already stores the one piece of data that makes it work, which is where every subscriber came from.

So an affiliate program on Kit is one API key in Rekomi and a read of that record when a sale lands, with no script on your checkout. The way that first sale gets credited is the part I find super interesting, so I’ll walk it with a concrete setup, then the limits, the refund habit, and a 15-minute checklist.

How an affiliate program on Kit works, in one screen

Before the details, here’s what you get and exactly how it works, in plain terms:

• What you get: affiliates apply on a page Rekomi hosts, you approve them, each one gets a link, and you set the commission once, as a percentage or a flat amount, one-time or recurring.
• What you install on Kit: nothing. You paste one Kit API key into Rekomi and leave one switch on.
• How a sale gets credited: the affiliate’s link carries a small tag, Kit stores that tag on the subscriber when they sign up through your form, and when that person later buys on Kit Commerce, Rekomi reads the tag back and credits the affiliate. Nothing runs in the buyer’s browser.
• What counts: a reader who signed up through a Kit form or landing page (an embedded Kit form on your own site counts too) and then buys, inside the credit window, which is a year by default. A buyer who never signed up first isn’t credited, and neither is someone who was already on your list before they clicked.
• Who pays the affiliates: Rekomi runs the payouts and collects the tax forms; you fund the run and approve the people.
• What it costs: a Rekomi plan at $29, $49 or $99 a month after a 14-day free trial, plus 3% of the commissions actually paid out. Kit’s own fees don’t change.
• How long it takes: about 15 minutes, and one test signup proves the whole path.

Kit Commerce has no affiliate feature, so here’s what does the job

Let me walk it with a concrete setup. Meet Tessa (made up, but her setup is the exact path a Kit creator walks today): she writes a free weekly newsletter about growing vegetables on apartment balconies, sells a $149 course called Balcony Harvest through Kit Commerce, and her readers keep asking whether they can earn a cut for selling it.

Kit Commerce is a very good place to sell a $149 course (0.6% plus card fees, weekly payouts to your bank, and a one-click refund button). Keep that refund button in mind, because it comes back later. What Commerce doesn’t have is any way to say “Marcus sent this buyer, pay Marcus 30%.” Kit’s App Store has an Affiliate Management category, and as I write this the only affiliate-program tool in it is Rewardful (the other listings under that tag are a Linktree contact sync and two Amazon-affiliate content helpers). Rewardful’s integration copies your affiliates into Kit as subscribers so you can email them. It’s a sensible integration; it just doesn’t credit a Kit Commerce sale to anyone. The other tools I found that mention Kit either do the same sync, run subscriber-refers-subscriber loops for list growth, or need a pixel or a WordPress form on a page you control.

Tessa’s course checkout is a Kit page. Her landing pages are Kit pages. Kit has no site-wide head slot to paste a script into, so the standard “just add the tracking snippet” advice was a dead end before it started.

So, what does an affiliate program on Kit actually need? Three things: a link that names the affiliate, a place where “who referred this person” gets stored, and a signal when a sale happens. Kit turns out to have two of the three already, which is the part I enjoy.

Marcus’s link, and the record Kit keeps

Here’s where the story starts moving.

Marcus runs a YouTube channel about container gardening. He applied to Tessa’s program, she approved him, and Rekomi handed him a link that looks like this:

https://balconyharvest.example.com/free?via=marcus&utm_source=rekomi&utm_campaign=marcus

The via=marcus part is the usual affiliate parameter. The two utm values are the interesting ones. Every link Rekomi hands out for a Kit campaign carries them, and they’re there for Kit to read, not for a script.

A viewer named Priya clicks it from a video description, lands on Tessa’s free newsletter page, and signs up. Kit stores those utm values on Priya’s subscriber record the moment she joins through the form. Kit writes them once, at that first signup, and never again. That record is 100% Kit’s own feature (Kit’s API even calls it attribution), and nobody on Tessa’s side built anything for it to happen.

Note: Kit only writes that record on signups through a Kit form or a Kit landing page, and the JS embed of a Kit form on your own site counts. Hold that thought; it draws the line between what gets credited and what doesn’t, and I’ll put the whole line in a table further down.

Priya doesn’t buy anything – she reads the newsletter for three weeks.

The first credited sale

Three weeks in, Priya buys Balcony Harvest for $149, and this is the part I want to walk slowly.

Here’s the thinking: Kit Commerce bills through a Stripe account that Kit manages, not Tessa’s, so that sale never reaches Rekomi as a Stripe event, and there’s no script slot on that checkout to watch it from the browser either. But Kit itself knows two things at the moment of purchase: who bought, which is Priya’s email, and who sent her, which has been sitting on Priya’s subscriber record since week one. Join those two facts and you have an affiliate program. So that’s literally what the connection does:

1. The purchase feed comes first. When Tessa connected Kit, Rekomi registered Kit’s purchase feed for her account. Priya’s order arrives through it with her email, the $149 total and a purchase id. Rekomi records each purchase id once, so a repeated delivery never turns into a second sale.
2. The lookup runs next. When nothing Rekomi already holds names an affiliate for that email, and on Kit Commerce that’s the normal case because there’s no coupon and no checkout metadata to carry one, Rekomi asks Kit for the subscriber by email and reads the stored tag back.
3. The credit lands last. The tag says marcus. Rekomi records the sale, credits Marcus, and the Sales page shows it with a Platform match label beside the rows that came in by coupon or by link. At Tessa’s 30% rate, that’s $44.70 owed to Marcus, and nothing ran in Priya’s browser at any point!

The retry: sometimes the purchase lands before Kit has finished creating the subscriber (usually someone who signs up and buys in the same minute). Rekomi keeps checking Kit for that email for about two hours, after 2 minutes, 15 minutes and 2 hours, and credits the sale the moment the subscriber appears with the tag. Kit’s rate limit is 120 requests a minute per key, shared with the affiliate sync, and Rekomi reads once or twice per sale, remembers each buyer for a few minutes so it never reads the same person twice in a burst, and waits two minutes before trying again if Kit answers 429. A busy launch day slows the sync a little; it doesn’t drop sales.

That’s the whole Kit connection in Rekomi: one API key, and the record Kit was already keeping.

Payout day

Marcus’s $44.70 went out on Tessa’s next payout run, and her part of it was watching it happen.

Rekomi runs the payout rail. Marcus set up his own payout details when he joined the program, Rekomi collects the tax forms, and Tessa never collects a bank account or a tax form from anyone. Her cost for all of it is a plan, $29, $49 or $99 a month after a 14-day free trial, plus a flat 3% on commissions actually paid out, so $1.34 on that first sale. Kit’s own 0.6% on the $149 doesn’t change; Rekomi never touches the purchase itself, only the record of it.

The payout went out – and nobody on either side chased a spreadsheet!

Why a Kit affiliate program doesn’t need a pixel

Let me pull back from Tessa now, because the general rule is the useful part.

Kit already stores where every subscriber came from, on signups through its forms and landing pages, first touch, written once. That’s the whole trick. Affiliate tracking on most platforms means a script on the page to catch the click and a second hook at checkout to catch the sale. On Kit the click record already exists, and the sale comes from Kit’s purchase feed, which is why what people still call ConvertKit affiliate tracking ends up being a read, not an install.

I love that a record Kit was already keeping for its own reasons turns out to be exactly the one an affiliate program needs; one read of one subscriber, and the sale has an owner.

The record gives you two more things for free. With Credit sales on, Rekomi registers signed Kit webhooks for new and activated subscribers, so a reader who arrived through an affiliate link appears under that affiliate as a lead before they’ve bought anything, and your affiliates see their traffic turning into people. And there’s a window: a subscriber is credited only if they joined within the window shown on the integration page, 365 days unless you change it, counted from the day Kit recorded the signup.

If you sell through your own Stripe instead of Kit Commerce, the same record does the naming. You connect that Stripe account under Setup > Connect payment gateway, the sale arrives from Stripe, and the Kit connection says whose it is. Recurring subscriptions and one-time products bought through a Stripe Checkout both credit that way.

I went back and forth on whether the per-landing-page script should be a required step, because it’s the only way to get click counts into the dashboard. I landed on optional. Sales credit without it, and asking a Kit creator to paste a script into every landing page just to see clicks felt backwards.

Sell through Kit Commerce? Connect Kit in Rekomi with a v4 API key, leave Credit sales through Kit on, and your next affiliate-referred purchase credits itself. Start a 14-day free trial at https://app.rekomi.com/sign-up

Setup is one API key and one switch

Tessa’s whole setup took less time than this section takes to read, so here it is in her order.

1. In Kit, open Settings > Developer and click Generate API Key. It has to be a v4 key. A legacy v3 API secret won’t authenticate, because Kit retired active development on v3 and the two credentials are separate; if you only have a v3 secret, generate a fresh v4 key.
2. In Rekomi, open Integrations, click the Kit card, paste the key in and hit Connect. Rekomi verifies the key against your account, runs a test subscriber read, and registers the purchase feed. The status line under Credit sales through Kit fills in right away: when Rekomi last checked the key, whether that check passed, and the running count of sales it has credited. The switch is on from the moment you connect.
3. Pick a default form under Sync affiliates into Kit if you want approved affiliates landing in Kit as tagged subscribers. Tessa did; her affiliates arrive with a Rekomi affiliate tag and a short sequence she wrote just for them. If you’d rather keep affiliates out of Kit, turn that switch off and sales still credit.
4. Test it. Open an affiliate link in an incognito tab, join through your form with an email Kit has never seen, then type that email into the checker on the Kit page (Check a subscriber’s email). It tells you three things: whether Kit has the subscriber, whether the tag names your affiliate, and whether we’d credit a sale from that person.

The Kit docs page has the same walk with screenshots, plus the per-campaign overrides if different campaigns should land in different forms.

The optional part: click counts need the script. Kit has no site-wide head slot, so the Rekomi loader goes on each landing page individually, from the editor’s toolbar: Grow > Landing Pages & Forms > the page > + > Script. Sales credit without it – add it if you want clicks in the dashboard, or to cover the two edge cases in the next section on the pages your affiliates send traffic to.

What gets credited, and what doesn’t

Every limit here comes from how Kit stores the record, and I’d rather you hear them from me than discover them on a launch weekend.

Remember Tessa’s one-click refund button? It works exactly as advertised on Kit’s side, and Kit tells nobody about it. So when Tessa refunds an order, she opens the Sales view in Rekomi, invalidates the matching sale, and the commission reverses. It’s a 20-second habit, and the alternative is paying commission on money you gave back.

There’s one more thing that isn’t an option here, and I’d rather say so before you go looking: coupon codes. Rekomi’s codes are real discount codes minted on a connected gateway like Stripe, Shopify or Wix, and attribution happens when that gateway reports the redemption. Kit Commerce runs its own checkout with its own codes, so a code typed there never reaches Rekomi. On Kit Commerce, the subscriber record is the path, full stop.

The Kit Creator Network is a different tool

One more thing Tessa’s search kept surfacing, and I want to be fair to it, because it’s a genuinely good feature.

The Kit Creator Network (the product calls it Recommendations) is creators recommending each other’s newsletters inside their signup flows, with pinned, smart and paid slots. Paid recommendations are priced per new subscriber, and Kit’s page shows a $2.00 CPA in its example, so you can pay to appear in other creators’ flows and earn by recommending paying creators. It’s a list-growth engine with, by Kit’s count, 74k creators in it. But it pays per subscriber, not per sale, and a subscriber it brings in carries no affiliate tag, so it doesn’t credit a course sale to anyone and it isn’t an affiliate program. Tessa runs both, happily: recommendations grow the list, affiliates sell the course.

The questions Kit creators ask before they connect

These are the ones that come up in nearly every Kit conversation, so here are the short answers.

Does Kit have a built-in affiliate program for my own products?

No. Kit Commerce has no affiliate feature, the one affiliate-program app in Kit’s App Store syncs affiliates into Kit rather than crediting sales, and Kit’s own program on PartnerStack pays people for referring customers to Kit, not to you. Running a program for what you sell on Kit means connecting a tool that can read Kit’s subscriber record.

Do I need to add a script to my Kit landing pages for sales to credit?

No. Sales credit from Kit’s subscriber record and the purchase feed, with nothing in the browser. The per-landing-page script is optional and adds click counts, plus a lead by email for readers who were already on your list.

What happens to the commission when I refund a Kit Commerce order?

Nothing automatic. Kit has no refund event, so the sale stays credited until you invalidate it from the Sales view in Rekomi, which reverses the commission.

Will a subscriber who was already on my list be credited if they click an affiliate link later and buy?

No, not by the lookup, because Kit wrote their arrival once, on the day they first joined. If they type their email on a landing page running the optional script, that records a lead under the affiliate, and the lead credits the sale by email match within 90 days.

Can my affiliates use coupon codes on Kit Commerce instead of links?

No. Rekomi’s coupon codes are minted on a connected gateway, and Kit Commerce runs its own checkout with its own codes, so a code typed there never reaches Rekomi. Links plus the subscriber record are the path on Kit Commerce.

I sell through my own Stripe, not Kit Commerce. Does this still work?

Yes. Connect that Stripe account under Setup > Connect payment gateway, and the sale arrives from Stripe while the Kit connection names the affiliate from the subscriber record. Recurring subscriptions and one-time Stripe Checkout purchases both credit.

What Tessa did next, and what you can do in the next 15 minutes

She recruited from her own list. Her most engaged readers were already telling friends about the course, so she invited 40 of them, approved the 11 who applied, and let the sync put each one into Kit with the Rekomi affiliate tag. She also turned on Sync referred customers and leads, which writes each affiliate’s own referral link into a custom field on their Kit record, so her monthly “share Balcony Harvest” email could merge in every partner’s tagged link without her copying a single URL. Two months on, 6 of the 11 had a credited sale, and Marcus was on his fourth.

Now it’s your turn, and this is 15 minutes if your Kit login is handy:

1. In Kit, generate a v4 API key under Settings > Developer.
2. In Rekomi, connect Kit under Integrations and leave Credit sales through Kit on.
3. Open one of your affiliate links in an incognito tab, sign up with a fresh email, and check that address on the Kit page. When it says the next sale from that address is credited to your affiliate, you’re live!