Rewardful and Dub both run SaaS affiliate programs, but they meter opposite sides of the transaction. Rewardful charges on the affiliate revenue coming in, starting at $49 a month for up to $7,500 of tracked revenue with a 0% transaction fee. Dub charges on the partner payouts going out, starting at $90 a month for up to $2,500 of monthly payouts plus a 5% fee on every payout. Those two meters are equal only when your commission rate is exactly one third. The number that usually decides it: Dub's 5% payout fee alone passes Rewardful's entire $49 subscription once you pay affiliates more than $980 a month.
Last updated September 2026. Every figure below was read off rewardful.com/pricing and dub.co/pricing this month. Both vendors repackage without announcing it, so confirm anything here before you budget against it.
What is the difference between Dub and Rewardful?
Rewardful is a dedicated affiliate and referral platform for SaaS and subscription businesses, built around Stripe. Dub is a link management and short-link platform whose affiliate features, sold as Dub Partners, are built on top of that link infrastructure and included with the paid plans.
That origin explains almost every difference between them. Rewardful thinks in subscriptions, so it reasons about recurring commissions, upgrades and refunds. Dub thinks in links and clicks, so it can reward a partner for a click or a lead rather than only a sale, and it can apply conditional rewards based on things like geography or performance tier. One is a billing-aware commission engine, the other is a tracking-aware rewards engine.
The pricing follows the same split, and this is where buyers get caught out. Rewardful counts the money your affiliates bring in. Dub counts the money you send affiliates out. Those are different quantities and the ratio between them is your commission rate, which means you cannot compare the two price lists at all until you know what commission you pay.
How much does Rewardful cost?
Three plans, all published, all metered on monthly affiliate-driven revenue, all with unlimited affiliates and no transaction fee.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Revenue limit | Campaigns | Transaction fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 | $588 (2 months free) | Up to $7,500/mo | 1 | 0% |
| Growth | $99 | $1,188 (2 months free) | Up to $15,000/mo | Unlimited | 0% |
| Enterprise | From $149 | Custom | Over $15,000/mo | Unlimited | 0% |
Starter is tighter than the headline suggests: one campaign and up to two team members. Growth is where the branded affiliate portal with a custom domain and private invite-only campaigns appear. All tiers include every integration and REST API access, there is a 14 day free trial, and monthly plans carry a 30 day refund guarantee.
How much does Dub Partners cost?
Dub Partners is included in every paid Dub plan rather than sold separately, so the subscription buys you the link platform and the affiliate program together. What varies is how much you are allowed to pay out, and there is a percentage fee on top.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Partner payouts | Payout fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business | $90 | $81 | $2,500/mo | 5% |
| Advanced | $300 | $270 | $15,000/mo | 5% |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Unlimited | 3% |
Annual billing saves 10%. Payouts run through Stripe Express, with PayPal where Stripe is not supported, and tax compliance is handled inside the product. The 5% is the line item to model, because unlike a subscription it scales with success.
Which is cheaper, Dub or Rewardful?
Rewardful, for most programs, and the reason is the payout fee rather than the subscription. Work the arithmetic in two steps.
First, the meters. Rewardful Starter allows $7,500 of affiliate revenue for $49. Dub Business allows $2,500 of partner payouts for $90. To compare them you convert payouts into revenue using your commission rate. At a 20% commission, $2,500 of payouts represents $12,500 of affiliate revenue, so Dub's ceiling is higher. At a 50% commission, common for AI tools and info products, $2,500 of payouts represents only $5,000 of revenue, so Rewardful's ceiling is higher. The two are exactly equal when $2,500 divided by your commission rate equals $7,500, which happens at a commission rate of 33.3%.
| Your commission rate | Revenue Dub Business allows | Revenue Rewardful Starter allows | Higher ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15% | $16,667 | $7,500 | Dub |
| 20% | $12,500 | $7,500 | Dub |
| 33.3% | $7,500 | $7,500 | Level |
| 40% | $6,250 | $7,500 | Rewardful |
| 50% | $5,000 | $7,500 | Rewardful |
Second, the cost of actually using that ceiling, which is where the comparison stops being close. Dub charges 5% of every payout. Five percent of $980 is $49, so once you are paying affiliates more than $980 a month, Dub's payout fee on its own costs more than Rewardful's entire Starter subscription. Past $1,980 a month in commissions, the fee alone exceeds Rewardful's $99 Growth plan. Run Dub Business at its full $2,500 payout allowance and you pay $90 plus $125 in fees, so $215 a month against Rewardful Starter's $49 for a comparable ceiling at a one third commission rate.
The gap widens with scale rather than closing. Dub Advanced at its full $15,000 payout ceiling costs $300 plus $750 in fees, which is $1,050 a month, while Rewardful Growth handles $15,000 of affiliate revenue for $99. Those are not identical measurements, since one is payouts and one is revenue, but no commission rate makes a ten times cost difference disappear.
Is Rewardful's 0% transaction fee really free?
Not exactly, and this is the honest correction to the arithmetic above. Rewardful charges no percentage of your affiliate revenue, which is a real and meaningful difference from Dub. But Rewardful does not pay your affiliates itself. It routes payouts through Tipalti, a third-party mass-payments provider, and Rewardful does not publish what Tipalti costs. Dub, by contrast, pays partners natively through Stripe Express and folds tax compliance into the product.
So the fair statement is that Rewardful moves the payout cost off its own price list rather than eliminating it, while Dub prices it visibly at 5%. Before you commit, ask Rewardful directly what the Tipalti arrangement costs at your payout volume and compare that against Dub's 5%. For a program paying out modest amounts, the fixed costs of a separate payments provider can be worse than a percentage. For a program paying out serious money, a percentage fee is usually the more expensive shape. Anyone comparing total cost of ownership across this category should read the full affiliate platform comparison on price and metering unit, which lines up eight products on exactly this axis.
When is Dub the better choice?
There are three situations where Dub genuinely wins, and they have nothing to do with price.
You already need link management. Dub's core product is short links and click analytics. If you were going to pay for that anyway, Dub Partners arrives included and the affiliate program is effectively a bundled feature rather than a second subscription.
You reward clicks or leads, not just sales. Rewardful is built around sales attributed through Stripe. Dub can reward partners for clicks, leads or sales, which matters for programs where the valuable action happens before revenue exists, such as a demo booking or a signup on a long enterprise sales cycle.
You want conditional reward rules. Dub supports rewards that vary by conditions such as geography or performance tier, and applies them over custom time windows or a customer's lifetime. If you pay a different rate for enterprise referrals than for self-serve, that logic exists natively.
Rewardful's counterweight is depth in the thing it does. It is Stripe-native, it has been running for around eight years, it handles recurring commissions across upgrades, downgrades and refunds, and it includes fraud detection that flags suspicious self-referrals. For a subscription business that pays purely on revenue, that focus is worth more than breadth.
Which one should a SaaS company pick?
Start with the commission rate, because it determines which meter binds first. If you pay under a third of the sale, Dub's payout meter gives you more revenue headroom per plan and you should model the 5% fee carefully against your growth plan. If you pay a third or more, Rewardful's revenue meter is more generous and cheaper at essentially every volume.
Then check the reward type. Sales only points to Rewardful. Clicks or leads points to Dub, because Rewardful cannot meaningfully do it. Then check whether you already want link management, which tips a marginal decision to Dub.
One thing to size before either: the size and shape of your roster. Both tools price around program activity, so a program that recruits broadly and converts narrowly is expensive under either meter. If you are still choosing among the wider affiliate field, our FirstPromoter vs Affonso comparison covers the one pair in this category that meters the identical unit, which makes their prices directly comparable in a way Dub and Rewardful's never are.
The step neither tool covers
Both products assume you already know who should be promoting you. They track links, calculate commissions and move money, and they do those jobs well. What neither does is tell you which creators, newsletters, review sites, agencies or complementary SaaS tools are worth approaching in the first place.
That is where most programs actually stall. A tracking link earns nothing until somebody with a relevant audience agrees to use it, and plenty of teams pay an affiliate subscription for a year while that never quite happens. The failure is quiet, because an empty program stays cheap and the dashboard simply shows zeros. Working out which smaller publishers and creators have an audience that genuinely overlaps with your buyer is a targeting job rather than a tracking one, and a directory of vetted creators with audience data you can filter answers a different question than either of these platforms is built to answer.
Partnerships sits earlier in that sequence. Our AI agent reads your product, surfaces affiliate, reseller, integration and co-marketing candidates ranked by a transparent fit score with the reasoning shown, drafts the outreach for a person to edit and approve, and never sends anything on its own. Pricing is flat at $79, $199 and $449 a month with no revenue meter, no payout percentage and no affiliate cap, so neither a growing roster nor a good month changes what you pay. If your list already exists and just needs tracking, pick between Dub and Rewardful on the arithmetic above. If the list is the problem, see how the discovery model works on our affiliate program software page.