Herd
Comparison · Herd vs Rewardful

Rewardful charges you
$49 before your program
earns a dollar.

Herd is free until you make $1,000. Then 10% above that — and at every dollar of cost you've made $10 of new revenue. No seats. No tiers. No "tracked-revenue cap" that forces an upgrade the month you find product-market fit.

Start free →Run the math on your numbers →
Annualized cost · 2026 pricing

Three programs.
Two invoices each.

Pick a scenario. We show what each tool would bill you for an entire year. No handwaving, no add-ons, no asterisks. The math is in this file — app/(marketing)/vs/rewardful/page.tsx.

IF YOUR PROGRAM DOES
$5,000/mo

Pre-product-market-fit B2B SaaS, ~$60K ARR. Most of our ICP lives here.

REWARDFUL · STARTER
$588
$49/mo × 12
HERD
$4,800
10% of $4,000/mo × 12
↑ Herd costs $4,212/yr more — every dollar buys $10 of new revenue.
IF YOUR PROGRAM DOES
$20,000/mo

Past PMF. Funded or ramen-profitable. Hits Rewardful's Starter cap; forced upgrade.

REWARDFUL · ENTERPRISE
$1,788
$149/mo × 12
HERD
$22,800
10% of $19,000/mo × 12
↑ Herd costs $21,012/yr more — every dollar buys $10 of new revenue.
IF YOUR PROGRAM DOES
$50,000/mo

Established. Rewardful gets cheaper than Herd here — and that's the point. Pay when it works.

REWARDFUL · ENTERPRISE
$1,788
$149/mo × 12
HERD
$58,800
10% of $49,000/mo × 12
↑ Herd costs $57,012/yr more — every dollar buys $10 of new revenue.
Be honest: at scale, Herd gets more expensive than Rewardful. That's the deal. Rewardful charges you a flat fee whether your program earns $0 or $50K — Herd earns when you earn. At $50K/mo of referred revenue, paying us $58K/yr means we drove $600K/yr of new revenue you wouldn't otherwise have. The breakeven where Herd costs more in absolute dollars is roughly $2,500/mo of referred revenue. We think that's the right inflection.
Where Rewardful bleeds

Three things they charge $49/mo to not include.

01 · Embedded UX
Their affiliates log into rewardful.com.

Your customers click "refer a friend," land on someone else's website, and see someone else's branding. Reviews call it "a generation behind." Herd renders inside your own settings page — one line of React, one continuous experience.

02 · Payouts
CSV → PayPal → reconcile by hand.

Rewardful's base plan exports a CSV. You (or your bookkeeper) wire payments to PayPal or Wise once a month. Herd uses Stripe Connect — partners onboard once, money moves the moment criteria trip.

03 · Tax compliance
1099s are on you, until you pay extra.

When a partner crosses $600/yr you owe them a 1099-MISC. Rewardful collects W-9s only on their Managed Payouts add-on. Herd collects W-9 / W-8BEN at signup and tracks the threshold per partner — at no upcharge.

The Starter-tier exploit
$7.5K

Rewardful's Starter caps tracked affiliate revenue here. Hit it and you're forced upgrade to $99 or $149.

Every Rewardful customer who hits the cap is a Herd convert.

Rewardful's Starter tier looks cheap until your program works. The month you find product-market fit on referrals, Rewardful raises your bill by 2-3×. We don't have a cap. We have a percentage. The percentage doesn't change.

Switching from Rewardful

Fifteen minutes.
Same affiliates.

Export your affiliates from Rewardful as a CSV. Drop it into Herd's import. We generate fresh links and email each affiliate the new URL with a one-click migration. They keep their existing referrals on the books; new clicks attribute to Herd.

Start the migration →

What carries over. Affiliate names, emails, payout addresses if present in the export. We map their existing commissions to a "legacy" status on their dashboard — read-only, for the record.

What doesn't. Rewardful's external portal sessions. Affiliates will see your in-app widget instead — that's the upgrade.

Watch out for. Refund clawback windows running on the day of migration. We default to honoring Rewardful's existing window for any Rewardful-tagged conversions; you can override per-program.

Migrating from FirstPromoter, Tolt, Affonso, or Refgrow? Same import — drop us a note at hello@herd.co.

One more honest line

Rewardful is the comfortable choice.
Herd is the right one.

Nobody got fired for picking Rewardful. Nobody got promoted for it either. If you want a flat fee and don't care that your customers see someone else's brand at the most loyal moment of their journey, pick Rewardful. Otherwise: try Herd. The first $1,000/mo of referred revenue is on us.

The receipt
  • Free tierUp to $1K/mo of referred revenue
  • Starter capThere isn't one
  • Affiliate experienceEmbedded in your app
  • PayoutsAutomatic via Stripe Connect
  • W-9 / 1099 trackingIncluded
  • Migration importerCSV from Rewardful, FirstPromoter, etc.