Compare · FirstPromoter and Dub

FirstPromoter vs Dub: pricing, payout fees, and which affiliate software actually costs less at your 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.

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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.

Last updated August 2026 · pricing re-verified on each vendor's own pricing page

FirstPromoter and Dub at a glance

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: $79/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. $79, $199, and $449 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	$79 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	$199, feature tier only
Top published tier	From $149, above $15,000 a month	Enterprise, custom annual billing	$449, 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	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	Self-serve signup
Annual discount	Yes, on yearly billing	10% discount, with 12x usage charged upfront	Monthly, cancel anytime
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, and Paddle, 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

Usually not, once the payout fee is counted. Dub starts at $90 a month against FirstPromoter at $49, and adds 5% of every payout it processes. Dub only comes out ahead when your payouts are small relative to the revenue behind them, meaning a low commission rate, or when you would otherwise be paying separately for link management, which Dub bundles.

Dub publishes three tiers for its Partners product. Business is $90 a month and covers $2,500 in monthly partner payouts, 500 partners, and 10 users. Advanced is $300 a month and covers $15,000 in payouts with unlimited partners and 20 users. Enterprise is custom annual billing with unlimited payouts. Business and Advanced both carry a 5% payout fee; Enterprise drops it to 3%.

FirstPromoter publishes three plans, all metered on the revenue your affiliates drive. Starter is $49 a month for up to $5,000, capped at 1,000 affiliates and 3 campaigns. Business is $99 for up to $15,000 with unlimited affiliates and campaigns. Enterprise starts at $149 above $15,000, with further tiers available. Every plan includes a 14-day trial with no credit card.

No. Dub charges a percentage of payouts, not of revenue. The fee is 5% of the money you send to partners on the Business and Advanced plans, falling to 3% on Enterprise. Your plan tier is also set by monthly payout volume rather than by revenue. So the fee scales with what you pay out, which is a fraction of what affiliates earn you, set by your commission rate.

Dub lists tax compliance on every plan and handles payouts itself, so the paperwork sits with the platform moving the money. FirstPromoter collects W-9 and W-8BEN forms but does not advertise filing 1099s for you, which leaves the January filing with your finance team. For tax year 2026 the 1099-NEC reporting threshold rose from $600 to $2,000, so confirm the current rule before you plan around either answer.

Not per its published integrations. Dub documents Stripe and Shopify plus its own conversion tracking API, so a Chargebee-billed company either writes to the API or looks elsewhere. FirstPromoter lists Chargebee alongside Stripe and Paddle natively. If Chargebee is your billing system, that single line usually settles the comparison before price enters it.

FirstPromoter caps its $49 Starter plan at 1,000 affiliates and removes the limit from the $99 Business plan up. Dub caps its $90 Business plan at 500 partners, with 3 partner groups and 10 partner tags, and goes unlimited on the $300 Advanced plan. Neither cap tends to bind early, because most programs hit a revenue or payout band well before they hit a headcount limit.

Neither can. Both are built around a tracked link, a billing integration, and a payout, which is the affiliate and creator motion. Deal registration, partner tiering with co-sell attribution, and account mapping are the mechanics a B2B channel program runs on, and neither product attempts them. If a reseller asks how to register a deal so your reps do not collide with them, there is no answer in either tool.

Neither researches partner companies for you. Both assume you already know who should promote your product. Dub Enterprise adds access to its own Partner Network and a Program Marketplace, which is an inbound listing rather than outbound research, so it surfaces partners already inside Dub. Recruiting outside that pool stays your job, and it is where most affiliate programs actually stall.

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See every use case

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.

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Ranked by transparent fit · you approve every outreach · full lifecycle in one place · no marketplace tax