Viraly recently moved its affiliate program from Rewardful to Rekomi. We asked co-founder and CTO Dejan Bogatinovski to tell the story in his own words.
By Dejan Bogatinovski, co-founder and CTO, Viraly.io
At a glance
- Migration time: about 30 minutes, in one sitting
- Brought over with nothing lost: around 138 affiliates, 450 plus transactions of history, and about $2,100 in pending payouts
- Cost: roughly 60% lower fixed monthly cost
- Time saved: about 4 hours a month on payouts and tax
Why we started looking
Rewardful served us well for a long time, and I want to be fair to it: it is a solid, Stripe-native tool, and it did the job through a lot of our early growth.
But as the program grew, a few things started to wear on us. Paying affiliates was manual; every cycle meant exporting data and sending money out by hand, or paying extra to have it managed. The tax side was on us too, which is not what I want our small team spending time on. And our costs kept climbing with the program, while the coupon options we could give creators stayed pretty limited.
None of that made Rewardful a bad choice. We just wanted tracking, payouts, and tax in one place, more flexibility on creator coupons, and a price that made sense at our scale.
The migration we kept putting off
Honestly, this was the part we dreaded most, and it is why we waited as long as we did. Moving an affiliate program sounds like the kind of thing that breaks in a hundred small ways.
It did not. We exported our data from Rewardful, imported it into Rekomi, and it came across perfectly formatted. The import brought over our full transaction history, our pending payouts, and every customer and affiliate. No manual cleanup, nothing lost. The whole thing took about half an hour.
The migration we kept dreading took about half an hour, and nothing was lost.
What changed for us
A few things stood out once we were live.
The biggest one: payouts and tax are handled for us now. Every payout runs through Rekomi, and they collect the tax forms and deal with the compliance side. That gave us back a few hours every month, and a lot of mental overhead.
The creator coupons turned out better than what we had. We can create any kind of eligible code we want, free for life, a percent or amount off, time-limited, or recurring, then open it to everyone in a campaign or just specific affiliates. When an affiliate creates their code, it is created right in our Stripe account through the API, so when a customer signs up with it the discount just works and the affiliate gets credit. It is all connected.
Tracking did not skip a beat. Like Rewardful, Rekomi gives us a custom tracking domain, so our clicks are tracked accurately and hold up against ad blockers. We did not lose anything in the move.
We also lean on the mass invites to bring customers into the program, and we send those from our own domain with custom SMTP, so everything stays on brand.
And it costs us less. Our fixed monthly cost dropped by around 60%, with a flat take only on what we actually pay out. The part I did not expect was that we gave up nothing to get there: the Stripe Connect and first-party domain setup made everything work as well as before, or better.
Where we landed
We migrated in an afternoon, kept all of our history and affiliates, lowered our costs, and handed off the two most tedious parts of running a program. For us, it has simply been smoother.
From the Rekomi team: if you are weighing a similar move, our guide to the best Rewardful alternatives walks through the options, and you can start a 14-day free trial of Rekomi to try the migration yourself.
