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Recurring commission means a creator or affiliate earns a percentage every time a subscription renews — not just on the first sale. That's different from pay-per-sale commission, which fires once. Most programs put a cap on it: no cap (lifetime commission, rare), a duration cap (typically 6-12 months), a dollar cap, or commission on the first order only. The right choice depends on your gross margin, your churn rate, and how predictable your CAC payback period needs to be.
Recurring commission means a creator or affiliate earns a percentage of revenue every time a subscription renews — not just on the first sale. It's a different mechanic from pay-per-sale, per-click or per-lead, which all fire once, on a single action. For a subscription or DTC brand with repeat payments (a monthly box, subscribe-and-save, a membership), it means a creator's original referral can keep earning for the customer's entire lifetime — but it also means the commission expense doesn't stop when the campaign does.
Most programs that offer recurring commission put a cap on it. Without one, a single good referral can end up costing far more than it was ever budgeted for.
The Academy's general commission article — how much commission should influencers get — covers commission on one tracked sale. Recurring commission is a variant that only makes sense when the product itself is recurring: a subscription, a membership, a subscribe-and-save order. If your product is a one-time purchase (even with occasional repeat buys), ordinary pay-per-sale through an affiliate program is the right model — not recurring commission. For the full range of ways brands pay creators for an outcome, see performance-based influencer marketing, explained.
In practice there are four variants you can see in live programs today:
| Structure | How it works | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Uncapped / lifetime | Commission continues for as long as the customer stays an active subscriber — no upper limit | Design tool Piktochart's own Awin affiliate program states it pays "40% lifetime recurring commissions on every paying customer you refer, for as long as they remain a subscriber" — confirmed directly on the program's own Awin page. |
| Active-subscription (functionally uncapped) | Commission continues while the subscription stays active and paying — no fixed end date, but stops at cancellation | Pros Marketplace's own Awin affiliate program: "Publishers earn a 30% recurring commission on qualifying Pros Marketplace subscription payments while the referred customer maintains an active paid subscription" — confirmed directly on the program's own Awin page. |
| Duration cap | Commission pays out for a fixed number of months (typically 6-12), then stops even though the customer keeps paying | Reditus' own definition of commission caps describes an example of 20% recurring commission with a 12-month duration cap — a common SaaS structure per the same source. |
| First-order only | Commission fires only on the first payment; every subsequent renewal pays nothing | Functionally the same as ordinary pay-per-sale, just applied to a recurring product — the simplest structure to implement and explain. |
There's also a fifth, rarer variant: a dollar cap per customer (e.g. a maximum of DKK 3,000 total commission), regardless of how long the customer stays — useful if you want to protect against a small number of very long-lived customers without setting a fixed time limit.
Illustrative, hypothetical example — not a confirmed Make Influence case. Picture a DTC subscription brand selling a box at DKK 249/month, with a 40% gross margin and an agreed recurring commission of 15% of revenue. Monthly churn (the share of subscribers who cancel each month) is 8%.
Commission per payment = 15% × DKK 249 = DKK 37.35.
At 8% monthly churn, the expected lifetime of an average customer is roughly 1 ÷ 0.08 = 12.5 months (the standard approximation for constant churn — a simplification, not a guarantee for any individual customer). Summing the probability of still being active month by month gives the expected total commission per referred customer under each cap structure:
| Structure | Expected total commission per customer | Difference from uncapped |
|---|---|---|
| Uncapped (lifetime) | ≈ DKK 467 | — |
| 12-month cap | ≈ DKK 295 | 37% less |
| 6-month cap | ≈ DKK 184 | 61% less |
The point isn't that a cap is always better — it's that the gap between uncapped and a 6-month cap is more than half the expected cost per referred customer, even at a fairly ordinary churn rate. Monthly gross margin in this example is 40% × DKK 249 = DKK 99.60, so even uncapped, contribution after commission stays positive (DKK 99.60 − DKK 37.35 = DKK 62.25/month) — but the thinner the margin, the faster a cap becomes necessary just to stay profitable, not only to control spend.
| Situation | Recommended structure |
|---|---|
| High gross margin, low churn, want a long-term creator relationship | Uncapped / lifetime, or "active-subscription" |
| Thin margin, need a predictable CAC payback period | Duration cap of 6-12 months |
| High monthly churn (above 10%) | Duration or dollar cap — bounds the downside on the few customers who do stick around |
| Mostly one-time purchases with occasional repeat buys, not a true subscription | Skip recurring commission — use ordinary pay-per-sale per order instead |
| Want to launch fast without knowing actual churn yet | Start with first-order-only or a short duration cap; extend to a longer cap once you have real churn data |
Ordinary tracking — a click on a link, a cookie, a code at checkout — is built to catch one sale, close to the click. A renewal two or six months later has no new click to attach the commission to. That's why recurring commission typically needs a different mechanism: a persistent link between the referred customer's subscription record in the billing system and the original affiliate or creator, not a repeated cookie fire. Many self-service affiliate setups pay out only on the first commissionable transaction by default, unless the integration is specifically configured to recognize and credit the following renewals — that's a configuration you need to confirm explicitly with your network or platform, not something that works automatically just because the first sale tracked correctly.
Make Influence's own model is built around performance commission on the individual tracked sale, not a built-in recurring commission on subscription renewals. For brands building a recurring-commission program on top of a subscription or DTC product, our experience from ordinary commission structuring still applies: the same principle of letting margin — not the ambition to reward the creator as much as possible — set the cap holds just as much on renewal number six as it does on the first sale.
No. A discount code that stays active gives the customer an ongoing discount — that's not the same as paying the creator a commission on every renewal. The two can be combined, but they're independent decisions: the discount code is customer-facing, the commission structure is creator-facing.
Among SaaS subscription programs that offer recurring commission, published rates typically sit in the 20-40% range — an observed pattern from publicly available affiliate programs, not an industry standard. For physical subscription boxes, affiliate-platform sources typically report lower rates, around 10-20% of the first order plus a share of renewals — also not a guaranteed norm, but a directional pattern.
No. If the product is really only bought once at a time (even with occasional repeat purchases), ordinary pay-per-sale is simpler and fits better. Recurring commission only makes sense when the product itself is a subscription with predictable, repeat payments.
Assuming a constant monthly churn rate, you can use a simple approximation: the expected number of payments under a cap of N months is (1 − (1 − churn)^N) ÷ churn. Multiply that by the commission per payment to get the expected total commission. Uncapped, replace N with the expected lifetime, 1 ÷ churn. This is an approximation based on constant churn — actual churn typically varies over a customer's lifetime.
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