Show HN: Reflio – Open-source affiliate program creator for SaaS

Post by bradycassidy » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 3:04 AM UTC

thayne wrote: post #47

throwaway2016a wrote: post #38

Interesting project but I've always half-consciously avoided self-hosted affiliate programs because of one simple reason: trust. My (possibly misguided) thought is that when dealing with self-hosted referral tracking the affiliate needs to trust that their commission is being tracked properly. But when the SaaS controls the database themselves the affiliate is putting a huge amount of trust in them that tracking is w…

Well a hosted service that is open source would be even better for trust right, since you can inspect the code and make sure it isn't doing anything nefarious. Of course, ideally you would want some kind of garantee they aren't making any changes to the code before deploying it, but a periodic third party audit could potentially accomplish that.

Post by ezekg » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

matt-p wrote: post #36

mcilroy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, how’s that sketchy? It’s a commercial open-source product. Look at Cal.com’s licensing - that’s what we based Reflio’s licensing on. I think it’s more than fair.

I regret the wording, apologies if it comes across negatively, but sometimes you can surprise people if you market as open source and then when reading the licence people find out it's actually more "opensource-ish". As far as I can see it's not AGPL, like Cal.com. It's actually AGPL + Commercial. That's to say if you clone the repo into a private repo but don't make any changes then you have to pay for some magical…

Post by XCSme » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 9:07 AM UTC

bradycassidy wrote: post #52

XCSme wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was the most 3rd party affiliate system (rewardful, CJ) actually don't properly record conversions (most likely they are blocked by ad-blockers or other technical issues that popular 3rd party services have).

Do you have any proof that the named systems don't properly record conversions? Sounds like a hoax as Rewardful ties directly into the payment processor. Ad-blockers do (or will) block tracking scripts from every provider, open source or not, once they reach enough scale to get on their radar. Although there's always ways around them if you know what you're doing.

Post by bradycassidy » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #55

bradycassidy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any proof that the named systems don't properly record conversions? Sounds like a hoax as Rewardful ties directly into the payment processor. Ad-blockers do (or will) block tracking scripts from every provider, open source or not, once they reach enough scale to get on their radar. Although there's always ways around them if you know what you're doing.

I think the best solution that works with most platforms and doesn't have to deal with adblockers, is to use coupons (e.g. 10% discount using the affiliate's code).