You're shipping a Next.js SaaS. You want affiliates. You look at Rewardful — $49/month. FirstPromoter — $89/month. Impact — "contact sales." All of them to do one thing: track a ?ref= query param and attribute a Stripe payment to it.
That's it. That's the core problem. You're paying three figures a month for a cookie and a dashboard.
This guide shows you how to implement affiliate tracking yourself — the right way — and introduce a free, self-hosted alternative that handles the rest of the infrastructure you don't want to build.
The Core Logic of Affiliate Tracking in Next.js
Affiliate tracking boils down to three steps:
