We built AffRef because nothing else worked for us.

Pawsome Couture, the brand that built AffRef. Premium cat accessories, family-grown since 2015.

We tried everything before we built our own

Pawsome Couture isn't venture-backed. It's a family business making premium cat accessories since 2015. Collars, ID tags, engraved paw jewelry, beds. 300,000+ cat lovers in the community. We also run a handful of SaaS brands on the side. Affiliate programs across both worlds, same operator team.

The affiliate program became one of our biggest growth channels. So we needed a platform that actually worked for operators in the trenches. We tried most of what's on the market. Five problems kept coming up.

• The fees. Especially Refersion's. We also don't agree with the % of revenue model that's everywhere on Shopify apps. Taking a cut of every affiliate sale just punishes growth.
• The clunky interface. Simple things took too many clicks. Custom things usually weren't possible at all.
• The marketplace. Refersion and most of the bigger platforms drop your affiliate list into a directory their other merchants browse. Brands we don't compete with, brands we do compete with, all browsing the affiliates we built relationships with from ground zero. We never understood why anyone agrees to that.
• The lack of customization. Every brand runs its program differently. Most platforms force you into theirs. Commission rules, payout cadence, portal branding, affiliate tagging, the basics. If your program doesn't fit the default mold, you're stuck.
• The sales calls. Half the enterprise tools won't even show you pricing without a 30-minute call. We don't have time for that, and we don't think anyone should have to.

So we built it ourselves

After enough months of fighting the tools, we built it ourselves. People who run a brand built this, not people running a SaaS company.

• No marketplace, ever. Your affiliate list is yours. There's no directory where competitor brands can browse it. Hard policy.
• Flat pricing. No transaction fees on affiliate sales. Whatever the program earns, the platform fee stays the same. No greedy % of revenue. We wanted to scale this channel without watching the meter every time we signed up another affiliate.
• Actually editable. Commission rules, branded affiliate portal, payout schedules, affiliate tags, tiered overrides, all toggles. Custom per-affiliate rules are basic. The affiliates we particularly value get their own rules and 0-day payment delays. That's just a UI toggle.
• Every brand, one dashboard. Ecommerce, SaaS, side projects, all of our affiliate programs run from the same AffRef account. Different stores, different rules, different payout setups, one login. That came out of running multiple brands ourselves and being sick of jumping between five different affiliate platforms.
• Operator-grade nuts and bolts. First-party tracking so Safari ITP doesn't eat your mobile attribution. Stripe Connect auto-payouts so the end-of-month grind disappears. One click pays every Stripe-ready affiliate. Money moves directly from your Stripe balance, AffRef never touches funds. Multiple payout rails (PayPal, Wise, Stripe) so you can pay affiliates across geographies the way each one prefers. Refunds that reverse the commission cleanly.
• We ship fast. If something's missing, we build it. AffRef gets shaped by what we need to run Pawsome's program every week. We don't have a quarterly roadmap.
• No sales calls. Pricing is on the site. Register, start your trial, run your program. We don't have a sales team and you don't have to talk to one.

“We built the platform we wished existed. Other brands using it now just tells us we weren't the only ones frustrated.”

Pawsome's program today

Same brand, same community, no Refersion bill, no marketplace anxiety. The program runs continuously now, cost is predictable, and the interface does what we tell it. When we need something it doesn't do yet, we usually have it built within the week.

The decision to build AffRef came out of years of operating Pawsome and the SaaS brands. The annoyances and workarounds we kept running into became the design requirements. We use it daily to run our own programs. It's also what we share with other operators who got tired of fighting the same platforms.