impact.com publishes four plans: Starter from $30 a month, Essentials from $500 a month, Pro from $2,500 a month, and Enterprise on request, plus a 2.5% transaction fee on partner-driven transactions and a one-time setup fee that depends on your onboarding. The catch is what the percentage is charged on. impact.com's own help center describes the self-serve bills differently from the pricing page, and at scale that difference is worth thousands of dollars a month.
Most pages about impact.com pricing say the company does not publish prices. It does, on its plans page, and has for a while. What those pages miss is the second source: the billing articles in impact.com's help center, which explain how a Starter or Essentials invoice is actually calculated. Read the two side by side and you get a much clearer picture of what a US brand will pay, and a short list of questions to settle before you sign.
How much does impact.com cost?
Here is what impact.com states on its plans page, which it also serves at its integrated platform prices URL. Every figure is a floor ("priced from"), billed monthly, with an annual option.
| Plan | Published price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | From $30/mo | Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce and Squarespace plugins, promo code and link tracking, product feeds, 40+ reports, basic contracting, chat support |
| Essentials | From $500/mo | The impact.com Partner Marketplace (90,000 partners), unlimited contract templates and event tracking, multi-domain programs, performance bonuses, automated workflows |
| Pro | From $2,500/mo | Dedicated support, cross-device and API-based tracking, Data Lab, SAML, partner discovery by keyword |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Fraud scoring, forecasting and anomaly detection, offline and call tracking, partner deduplication, attribution risk protection |
| Transaction fee | 2.5% | "Applies only to partner-driven transactions, charged only when a sale occurs" |
| Setup fee | One-time, varies | Depends on the technical resources your onboarding needs |
Two things on that grid matter more than the headline numbers. First, the marketplace, which is the reason many brands pick impact.com over an in-house tracker, starts at Essentials, not Starter. A $30 program has tracking and payouts but no access to impact.com's partner directory. Second, the setup fee is real and unpriced. Budget for it before you compare anything.
What the help center says your bill actually is
This is the part the directory sites skip. impact.com publishes a billing explainer for each self-serve edition, and they read differently from the plans page.
| Edition | Plans page says | Help center billing article says |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | From $30/mo plus 2.5% on partner-driven transactions | Fees are "the greater of 2.5% of the total monthly revenue of locked partner costs or $30 USD", charged on the 1st of each month for the previous month |
| Essentials (self-serve) | From $500/mo plus 2.5% on partner-driven transactions | "$500 USD per month, and include $2,500 USD in partner payouts at no additional cost. Any partner payout amounts exceeding this are charged at a 20% rate" |
| Sales-assisted contracts | Not separated | If you signed with help from the sales team, "your billing details may differ slightly from what's described here" |
The Essentials line is the one to read twice. As the help center describes it, the self-serve Essentials meter is a percentage of the payouts you send partners, not of the sales they drive, and the first $2,500 of payouts each month is covered by the $500. The Starter wording ("revenue of locked partner costs") is ambiguous enough that you should ask which base applies before you model it. Neither article mentions the 2.5% separately, while the plans page lists it on every edition. We are not going to guess which reading your contract uses. We are going to show you why it matters.
What impact.com costs at three program sizes
The table below assumes a 6% average commission rate, the same rate Awin uses in its own worked example, so partner payouts are 6% of partner-driven sales. It shows the impact.com platform charge only. The commissions themselves are paid on top in every case, and the one-time setup fee is excluded.
| Monthly partner-driven sales | $10,000 | $50,000 | $200,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Partner payouts at 6% | $600 | $3,000 | $12,000 |
| Starter, 2.5% of sales (plans page reading) | $250 | $1,250 | $5,000 |
| Starter, 2.5% of payouts, $30 floor | $30 | $75 | $300 |
| Essentials self-serve, $500 plus 20% of payouts over $2,500 | $500 | $600 | $2,400 |
| Essentials, if 2.5% of sales were also added | $750 | $1,850 | $7,400 |
| For reference: Awin Accelerate, $99 plus 2.5% of sales | $349 | $1,349 | $5,099 |
At $200,000 a month in partner sales, the same Essentials program costs $2,400 or $7,400 depending on which meter applies. That is a $60,000 a year question, and it is answered by one sentence in your order form. The Starter rows spread even wider, from $300 to $5,000, which is why "2.5% of what?" is the first thing to ask on any call with impact.com.
The table also shows why the self-serve Essentials meter, if it is the one you get, becomes cheap at scale. Because it charges on payouts, a 20% rate on a 6% commission works out to 1.2% of sales above the included band. Awin's 2.5% of sales is roughly double that at the same commission rate. The crossover is simple: a 20% charge on payouts equals a 2.5% charge on sales at a 12.5% commission rate. Pay partners less than 12.5% and the payout meter is the cheaper one.
Is impact.com free?
No. There is no free plan. Starter has no minimum fee in the first 30 days unless your partners drive sales, and if the program generates less than $30 in partner revenue in that window, impact.com charges the $30 anyway. After that the Starter fee is charged monthly at whichever is higher, 2.5% or $30. Partners, on the other hand, join impact.com at no cost.
Does impact.com charge a transaction fee?
Yes. The plans page lists a 2.5% transaction fee that applies only to partner-driven transactions and only when a sale occurs, on every edition. The help center's Essentials billing article describes the self-serve meter as 20% of partner payouts above $2,500 a month instead. Ask impact.com which of the two applies to your order form, and have it written in.
How impact.com bills you day to day
impact.com runs on a prefunded funding account, and this changes how the cost shows up in your books. You put a credit card on file at sign-up. The system checks daily what you owe partners plus its own fees, and when the funding account falls below that total (plus a $50 buffer on Essentials), it charges your card to top it up, in amounts of at least $30. Commissions are counted as soon as actions are tracked but only deducted from the funding account once those actions lock.
In practice that means a busy month produces many separate card charges of varying size rather than one invoice. Your finance team will be matching those top-ups against locked commissions and the monthly platform fee, and the fastest way to do that is to turn the card statement into a spreadsheet and reconcile it against the impact.com funding account export line by line. Set that process up in month one, not at year end.
What was Impact Radius, and is the pricing the same?
Impact Radius is the company's former name. It rebranded to Impact and now trades as impact.com, and searches for Impact Radius pricing or Impact Radius cost lead to the same four plans above. Older reviews quoting a sales-only price with no published tiers describe the company before it put Starter, Essentials and Pro on its site. If an article tells you impact.com hides its prices, it is out of date.
Is impact.com worth it?
It is worth it when you need what only a platform of its size provides: a partner marketplace of 90,000 partners, contracting at scale, and one system for affiliates, influencers, creators and strategic partners under your own terms. Retail and DTC brands running several partner types at volume get real value from Essentials and above.
It is harder to justify in two situations. The first is a small program that will sit on Starter, because Starter has no marketplace, and you can get self-serve tracking and payouts elsewhere at a flat price. The second is a B2B program. impact.com's marketplace is built around publishers and creators. If your partners are resellers, agencies, systems integrators and technology partners, they are not browsing a marketplace for programs to join. You have to find them, and paying a transaction fee on revenue from partners you recruited yourself is the expensive way to run that program.
impact.com pricing compared with the alternatives
| Vendor | Entry price | Percentage fee | Charged on | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| impact.com | From $30/mo | 2.5% (see above) | Partner-driven transactions, per the plans page | Brands running several partner types under their own contracts |
| Awin | $49/mo Access, from $99/mo Accelerate | 3.5% or 2.5% | Sale value | Brands that want a publisher network from day one |
| CJ Affiliate | Not published | Not published | A share of the commission, quoted privately | Large retail and travel brands |
| Everflow | Quote only, $950/mo on its Shopify listing | None listed | Payout-based tiers, six-month term | Networks, agencies and high-volume CPA programs |
| Partnerize | Not published | Not published | Quoted privately | Enterprise brands with a procurement process |
| Partnerships | $47/mo | None | Not applicable | B2B and SaaS programs that need to find partner companies |
Where impact.com wins on that table: it publishes its tiers, unlike CJ and Partnerize, and its self-serve Essentials meter can undercut Awin at scale if your commission rates are modest. Where it loses: the marketplace sits behind a $500 floor, and the fee base is not stated consistently across impact.com's own pages. Against Everflow the trade runs the other way: impact.com Essentials costs more than Everflow's listed $950 entry tier once partner sales pass $18,000 a month, and our Everflow pricing breakdown shows what the six-month term commits you to. For the full head-to-head, see Awin vs impact.com and the plan-by-plan Awin pricing breakdown, or our Awin alternative comparison if you are already on Awin and pricing a move. If you run a Shopify affiliate app rather than a network, our Refersion alternative page does the same math for apps that take a share of every sale, and Social Snowball pricing shows the point where a flat app plan beats a 3% one. For the enterprise quote-only end of the market, Partnerize pricing and Commission Junction pricing work through the same arithmetic.
Five things to get in writing before you sign
- The fee base. Is the percentage charged on partner-driven sale value, on partner payouts, or both? Get the exact sentence in the order form.
- The included band. On Essentials, is $2,500 of payouts included in the $500, and is anything above it billed at 20%?
- The setup fee. A number, not "depends on onboarding".
- The "from" price. Plan prices are floors. Ask what moves your quote above the floor: partner count, domains, event volume or support level.
- Exit terms. Notice period, renewal date, and whether your partner contracts and historical data export cleanly if you leave.
When a different kind of platform is the better buy
impact.com is priced for brands whose partners already exist somewhere it can reach: in its marketplace, on social platforms, or in a publisher network. A B2B software company building a reseller or referral program is usually in the opposite position. The partners that fit are companies already selling to your buyers, and none of them is waiting in a directory.
That is the problem Partnerships is built for. It researches the companies that sell into your market, ranks them by a fit score with the reasons shown, drafts outreach a person on your team approves, and tracks the partner revenue that follows, on a flat $47, $119 or $269 a month with no percentage of partner revenue. If you are shortlisting platforms for a B2B program, compare it directly on our impact.com alternative page, or see how the whole category prices in our affiliate software pricing breakdown.