Compare · FirstPromoter and Dub
FirstPromoter vs Dub pricing and payout fees at your affiliate volume
These two get shortlisted together because they sit at the same stage of a SaaS affiliate program: you have a product, you have people willing to promote it, and you need referral tracking that plugs into your billing so commissions follow upgrades, refunds, and cancellations without a spreadsheet. Both publish real numbers on a public pricing page, which already puts them ahead of most of this category, and both run a 14-day trial.
The reason a straight price comparison misleads is that they do not measure the same thing. FirstPromoter meters the revenue your affiliates bring in. Dub meters the money you send back out, then charges a percentage of it on top. Two companies with identical affiliate programs can land on opposite sides of this comparison depending only on their commission rate, so the honest answer starts with your own payout math rather than with a feature table.
Ranked by fit · outreach you approve · no marketplace tax
Describe your product, find your partners
Partnerships surfaces the companies who should resell, refer, and integrate with you, ranked by a transparent fit score, then drafts the outreach for you to approve.
Ideal partners for
ranked by fitDrafted outreach · Drafted outreach
WritingClick a match to draft a first-touch message in your voice.
A human approves every outreach before it sends. Nothing goes out automatically.
Partner pipeline
One co-sell overlap surfaced from account mapping. Referral and co-sell revenue tracked per partner.
Interactive preview on sample data · ranked by transparent fit
Sample companies, shown to illustrate the loop · ranked by transparent fit · you approve every outreach · no marketplace tax · you own your partner list
Choose FirstPromoter if your commission payouts are large relative to your plan price, if you already have a payout process you like, or if you bill through Chargebee. Choose Dub if you want the payout rail, the tax compliance, and the link infrastructure from one vendor and the 5% is worth not building that yourself. Choose Partnerships if the real bottleneck is that you do not yet know which companies should be promoting you.
The short answer
What is the difference between FirstPromoter and Dub?
Both track affiliate referrals for SaaS companies and both publish their prices, but they meter you on opposite ends of the same transaction. FirstPromoter charges by the revenue your affiliates earn you, starting at $49 a month for up to $5,000 of it. Dub charges by the money you pay out, starting at $90 a month for up to $2,500 of monthly payouts, and takes a further 5% of every payout it processes. That 5% is the number most comparisons miss. Dub also runs the payout rail and handles tax compliance itself, where FirstPromoter collects tax forms and pushes payouts through PayPal, Wise, and Stripe without taking a cut. If you pay out a lot, FirstPromoter is usually cheaper. If you want one vendor to move the money and file the paperwork, Dub is doing more work for the fee.
Pricing re-verified on each vendor's own pricing page
- FirstPromoter published pricing
- $49, $99, and $149+ a month, tiered by affiliate-driven revenue
- Dub published pricing
- $90 and $300 a month, tiered by monthly partner payout volume, plus Enterprise
- Dub payout fee
- 5% on Business and Advanced, 3% on Enterprise
- FirstPromoter payout fee
- None published on its PayPal, Wise, and Stripe payouts
- Partner limits
- FirstPromoter caps Starter at 1,000 affiliates. Dub caps Business at 500 partners
- What neither one does
- Find reseller, integration, or co-marketing partner companies for you
- Partnerships pricing
- $47/mo flat, published, no cut of partner revenue or payouts
Side by side
FirstPromoter and Dub vs Partnerships, honestly
A fair look at what each does well. Both are capable tools. Here is where they differ.
| What matters | Partnerships | FirstPromoter and Dub |
|---|---|---|
| Published pricing | Yes. $47, $119, and $269 a month, on the pricing page | Both publish. FirstPromoter $49/$99/$149+, Dub $90/$300 plus a custom Enterprise tier |
| What sets your plan | Feature tier only. Your partner revenue and payouts never change the bill | FirstPromoter: affiliate-driven revenue. Dub: monthly partner payout volume. Opposite ends of the same transaction |
| Percentage taken | None. We do not move partner money | Dub charges 5% of payouts on Business and Advanced, 3% on Enterprise. FirstPromoter publishes no payout percentage |
| AI partner discovery (finds partners) | Surfaces reseller, affiliate, integration, and co-marketing companies ranked by transparent fit, with reasons | Neither sources partner companies for you. Dub Enterprise adds access to its own Partner Network, which is a marketplace rather than research |
| Payout rail | Not handled. We are not a payout processor | Dub runs automated global payouts itself. FirstPromoter pushes bulk payouts through PayPal, Wise, and Stripe |
| Partner motions covered | Referral, reseller, affiliate, integration, and co-marketing on every plan | Affiliate, creator, and referral on both. No reseller or co-sell motion on either |
| Deal registration for resellers | Included, with conflict checks against your own pipeline | Neither offers deal registration, account mapping, or co-sell attribution |
| Link management | Not our category | Dub is a link platform first and bundles short links, QR codes, deep links, and A/B testing. FirstPromoter does referral links only |
Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each product for the latest.
Verified figures
FirstPromoter, Dub, and Partnerships side by side
Checked against firstpromoter.com/pricing and dub.co/pricing in August 2026, on monthly billing. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this table says so rather than repeating a figure from a third-party listicle.
| FirstPromoter | Dub | Partnerships | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $49 a month | $90 a month | $47 a month |
| What the entry plan covers | Up to $5,000 a month in affiliate revenue | Up to $2,500 a month in partner payouts | No revenue or payout cap at any tier |
| Plan names | Starter, Business, Enterprise | Business, Advanced, Enterprise | Starter, Growth, Scale, Enterprise |
| Middle tier | $99 for up to $15,000 a month in revenue | $300 for up to $15,000 a month in payouts | $119, feature tier only |
| Top published tier | From $149, above $15,000 a month | Enterprise, custom annual billing | $269, feature tier only |
| What sets the plan | Affiliate-driven revenue | Partner payout volume | Feature tier only |
| Percentage of payouts taken | None published | 5% on Business and Advanced, 3% on Enterprise | None |
| Partner limit on entry plan | 1,000 affiliates on Starter | 500 partners on Business | Unlimited |
| Team members on entry plan | Unlimited | 10 users on Business, 20 on Advanced | Unlimited |
| Billing systems supported | Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, Braintree, Recurly | Stripe and Shopify, plus its own conversion API | Not required |
| Tax forms and filing | Collects W-9 and W-8BEN. Filing not advertised | Tax compliance included on every plan | Not applicable |
| Payouts | Bulk PayPal and Wise, one-click Stripe | Automated global payouts on every plan | Not applicable |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card | 14 days | No free trial, interactive demo on the home page |
| Annual discount | Yes, on yearly billing | 10% discount, with 12x usage charged upfront | 50% off, yearly is half the monthly price |
| Fraud controls | Self-referral and ad-traffic detection, reCAPTCHA, chargeback tracking | Risk monitoring, from the Advanced plan | Deal conflict checks |
| SSO | Yes, on Enterprise | SAML/SSO on Enterprise | Enterprise |
| Finds new partners for you | No | No. Enterprise adds a Partner Network marketplace | Yes. AI discovery with fit scores and reasons |
Figures reflect monthly billing in August 2026. Dub prices its Partners product separately from Dub Links and bundles the Links plan with it. Confirm any number with the vendor before you budget, because the bands in this category change often.
Why teams pick Partnerships
AI prospecting and drafted outreach, with no marketplace tax
Do the payout math before you read another feature list
This comparison usually resolves on arithmetic rather than features. Say your affiliates drive $10,000 a month in revenue and you pay a 20% commission, so $2,000 goes back out. On FirstPromoter you are on the $99 Business plan, because $10,000 sits inside its $15,000 revenue band, and there is no percentage on top. On Dub you are on the $90 Business plan, because $2,000 sits inside its $2,500 payout band, plus 5% of $2,000, which is $100. Total $190 against $99. Now change one variable. Drop the commission to 10% and Dub costs $90 plus $50, so $140. Raise it to 30% and your $3,000 in payouts pushes you onto the $300 Advanced plan plus $150 in fees, so $450 against the same $99. The commission rate you chose months ago, for reasons that had nothing to do with software, is what decides this. Run your own numbers at your real commission rate before you shortlist either one.
The 5% is a fee on money moved, not a fee on money earned
It is worth being precise about what Dub charges, because it is easy to describe it unfairly in either direction. The 5% is not a commission on your revenue and it is not a cut of what your affiliates earn you. It is a processing fee on payouts Dub sends on your behalf, and it drops to 3% on Enterprise. In exchange Dub runs the payout rail globally and includes tax compliance on every plan, which is real work you would otherwise do with a spreadsheet, a PayPal mass-pay file, and an accountant every January. Compare it to what it replaces rather than to zero. FirstPromoter publishes no payout percentage, but it also is not moving the money for you: it hands off to PayPal, Wise, or Stripe, each of which has its own fees that land on your statement instead of your software bill. The honest framing is that Dub bundles a cost you are already paying somewhere and charges a margin on it.
Dub is a link platform that grew a partner product, and it shows
Dub started as link infrastructure, and its plans still bundle the two products together: buy Dub Partners and you get Dub Links with it, including short links, custom domains, QR codes, deep links, UTM templates, and A/B testing. Business covers 10,000 new links a month and 250,000 tracked events; Advanced covers 50,000 and 1 million. If your marketing team already pays for a link shortener, that overlap is genuine value and changes the comparison, because you are consolidating two line items. If you do not, you are paying for a category of tool you were not shopping for. FirstPromoter is narrower and older, built since 2016 around one job: track SaaS referrals through your billing system and pay the people who sent them. It supports Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, Braintree, and Recurly, and Chargebee support is the single most common reason a team rules Dub out without getting to the pricing question at all.
Honest about where each one beats us
If you want an affiliate program running this week, both of these do that job better than we do. Their billing integrations are deeper than anything we attempt with subscription data, FirstPromoter has fraud controls we do not match, and Dub operates a global payout rail with tax compliance that we deliberately stay out of because moving partner money is a different business. We are the better answer earlier in the sequence, when nobody has decided which companies should be promoting you in the first place. Our AI surfaces reseller, integration, affiliate, and co-marketing candidates with a fit score and the reasoning behind it, drafts the outreach for a human to approve, and runs B2B motions like deal registration that neither product attempts. A fair number of teams run one of these alongside us rather than instead of us.
Good questions
FirstPromoter and Dub vs Partnerships, answered
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Find your partners with Partnerships
Describe your product, get partners ranked by fit, approve the outreach, and track the revenue they drive. Flat pricing, no marketplace tax, your relationships stay yours.
Ranked by transparent fit · you approve every outreach · full lifecycle in one place · no marketplace tax