How I Find SaaS Affiliate Programs Using Affiliate Software (2026)

Last Updated on July 6, 2026 by Mr.Feng

This article is part of Experiment #001 — Iteration 3 prep. Most SaaS affiliate programs aren’t on any network. they run independently using affiliate software tools like FirstPromoter and Rewardful. This article documents how I reverse-engineer those platforms to find affiliate programs that most people never see.

[👉 See the full experiment context here: Experiment #001]

Most affiliate marketers rely on networks like Impact and PartnerStack to find offers. These platforms act as intermediaries that connect affiliates with SaaS brands, and they provide a marketplace where you can easily browse and search for products.

There is nothing wrong with that approach. But as a beginner, I realized that most SaaS companies on these networks are already quite mature, and their affiliate programs are usually well developed and competitive.

I also noticed that these networks only cover a portion of the SaaS ecosystem. Many early stage or fast growing products are not listed there. Instead, they choose to run their affiliate programs independently. For example, tools like FirstPromoter are simply used to manage affiliate programs. They are not marketplaces.

So I started to change my approach. Instead of relying only on affiliate networks, I began working backwards and using affiliate software to uncover more SaaS affiliate programs.

Then I started digging into how to actually do it.

Affiliate Networks vs Affiliate Software (What I Learned as a Beginner)

First, let me clarify how I personally distinguish between affiliate networks and affiliate software. The simplest way I look at it is whether there is a marketplace.

Affiliate networks like Impact and PartnerStack feel more like a centralized marketplace. They bring together a large number of relatively mature SaaS affiliate programs, so affiliate marketers can easily browse and apply. But the offers on these affiliate networks are usually already well established, which is not always beginner friendly. You often deal with stricter approval processes, sometimes even double screening, and you are competing with experienced affiliates on the same offers.

When I was using Product Hunt to find early stage SaaS affiliate programs, I noticed something interesting. A lot of startup or early stage SaaS companies prefer to run their programs independently. Instead of joining a network, they use affiliate software like FirstPromoter, Rewardful, or Tapfiliate to set up and manage their own affiliate programs.

Affiliate software is mainly built for SaaS companies to create, manage, and track their own programs. Unlike affiliate networks, these tools do not have a marketplace. The offers are scattered, and you usually have to find them through the SaaS company’s website or by using specific methods.

How I Find SaaS Affiliate Programs Without a Marketplace

Since these SaaS affiliate programs are run through affiliate software and there is no marketplace, the question is, how do I actually find them?

I’ve discovered two methods that work well together.

The first is footprint searching. SaaS companies leave behind certain patterns when they use affiliate software, things like their affiliate signup pages, login portals, URL structures, and recurring keywords on those pages. By identifying these patterns, I can search for them on Google to uncover programs that most people never find.

The second is subdomain lookup using VirusTotal. Since most affiliate software platforms host their clients on subdomains, searching the platform’s main domain on VirusTotal returns a comprehensive list of all subdomains at once. This is especially useful for platforms like Everflow where Google footprint searches return almost nothing.

How I Find SaaS Affiliate Programs Using Affiliate Software Footprints

Because there are a lot of affiliate software platforms out there, this is something I plan to keep updating over time. I will keep discovering new software, and keep testing how to find SaaS affiliate programs through them.

So I put together a table to summarize everything so far.

Affiliate Software	Key Footprint	Common URL Pattern	Recommended Google Search Command
FirstPromoter	“Powered by FirstPromoter”	affiliate.domain.com	“Powered by FirstPromoter” or inurl:affiliate “Powered by FirstPromoter”
Rewardful	“Powered by Rewardful”	domain.com/signup	“Powered by Rewardful” or inurl:signup “Powered by Rewardful”
Tapfiliate	“Become our affiliate. Sign up here!” “* The password must be at least 8 characters long. Don’t use passwords for other accounts or weak, easy-to-guess passwords.”	affiliate.domain.com	site:*.tapfiliate.com or “Become our affiliate. Sign up here!” or “* The password must be at least 8 characters long. Don’t use passwords for other accounts or weak, easy-to-guess passwords.”
Tolt	“Powered by Tolt”	affiliate.domain.com	“Powered by Tolt” or site:*.tolt.com
Everflow	“Don’t have an account? Create one as:”	brand.domain.io	“Don’t have an account? Create one as:” or site:*.everflowclient.io
Affonso.io	“Powered by Affonso”	brand.affonso.io	“Powered by Affonso” or site:*.affonso.io

Recently, I’ve found that searching Google for each software’s footprint in quotation marks can uncover as many results as possible. Some of the results may not be exactly what I’m looking for, so I usually need to do a bit of filtering.

If I want to narrow things down and find more targeted results, I combine the URL patterns I summarized in the table above with the inurl: operator.

Below, I will go through each affiliate software in detail and explain how I use it to discover SaaS affiliate programs.

FirstPromoter

FirstPromoter is the first affiliate software I started noticing while using Product Hunt to find SaaS affiliate programs.

Over time, I realized that a lot of SaaS tools are running their affiliate programs on FirstPromoter. What stood out to me is that many of these programs share a common footprint. On their affiliate signup pages, I often see a “Powered by FirstPromoter” label at the bottom. That became a clear signal for me that I can use to trace back and identify other SaaS affiliate programs using the same setup.

Here are some screenshots I selected from affiliate signup pages of SaaS companies using FirstPromoter. You can clearly see that they all have a “Powered by FirstPromoter” label at the bottom. As I mentioned earlier in this article, simply searching Google for “Powered by FirstPromoter” (be sure to include the quotation marks) will give you a fairly comprehensive list of SaaS affiliate programs that use FirstPromoter.

I also noticed a pattern in the URLs of these FirstPromoter affiliate signup pages. Most of these SaaS companies use subdomains like affiliate. or partner. Here are a few examples:

Based on the footprints I found for FirstPromoter, I usually run a search like this on Google:

inurl:affiliate "Powered by FirstPromoter”

I also put together a list of common subdomain keywords used for affiliate programs. You can try them out, but in most cases, “affiliate” is still the one I see used the most.

Common subdomain keywords I use for finding affiliate programs:

affiliate
partner
referral
ref
signup
join
program
refer

Rewardful

Rewardful is another affiliate software I see quite often, especially among SaaS products that are built on Stripe.

The overall approach is very similar to what I do with FirstPromoter. I still look for common footprints on affiliate signup pages, and one of the most obvious signals is the “Powered by Rewardful” label.

Simply search for “Powered by Rewardful” with quotation marks in Google, as shown in the screenshot below.

I also noticed a pattern in the URLs of Rewardful affiliate signup pages. Most of them share a common path, usually using “signup”. As shown below:

Likewise, based on the footprints I found related to Rewardful, the search command I use in Google when I want more targeted results is:

inurl:signup "Powered by Rewardful”

So far, the recurring SaaS affiliate programs I’ve found through this method on Rewardful don’t require a website or any proof of traffic. After signing up, I was approved automatically right away, which makes them very beginner friendly.

Tapfiliate

Tapfiliate is also a well-established and widely recognized affiliate software platform. It is used extensively by SaaS companies and small to mid-sized online businesses, and it is one of the affiliate platforms I come across most often when searching for independent SaaS affiliate programs.

I first used the following search command:

site:*.tapfiliate.com

to find some brands running their affiliate programs on Tapfiliate subdomains, as shown in the screenshot below.

I then went through these affiliate signup pages one by one and identified the footprints they have in common, as shown below.

Based on those footprints, I can search for

"Become our affiliate. Sign up here!"

"* The password must be at least 8 characters long. Don't use passwords for other accounts or weak, easy-to-guess passwords."

Using these 2 footprints, I can uncover most affiliate programs built on Tapfiliate.

Since I’m only looking for recurring SaaS affiliate programs, I end up having to manually go through the search results one by one and filter them.

Tolt

Tolt is an affiliate software platform built specifically for SaaS companies, and it has become increasingly popular among indie developers and bootstrap SaaS businesses in recent years.

I started with the same approach I used for Tapfiliate by running the following Google search.

site:*.tolt.com

This returned a large number of affiliate signup pages from SaaS companies using Tolt, and it was very easy to identify the patterns they have in common, as shown in the screenshot below.

"Powered by Tolt"

Using the same logic, I can use the two search commands above in Google to uncover a large number of affiliate programs powered by Tolt.

During my testing, I found that Tolt is similar to Rewardful in that it does not require website verification or traffic from other social media platforms. In most cases, you only need to enter your email address to be approved automatically.

Update — June 4, 2026

While going through the application process I came across Shadowmap, which requires manual review. So I need to correct my earlier conclusion. Not all programs on Tolt have automatic instant approval.

Everflow

Everflow is another affiliate management platform I know of, and it mainly attracts enterprise level brands.

I found that the domain used for Everflow hosted affiliate programs is everflowclient.io, not everflow.io. If you try the same site: search method that works for FirstPromoter or Tapfiliate, you’ll get almost no results on Google.

From the one result that does show up, there’s a clue on the page

"Don't have an account? Create one as:"

Searching that phrase returns some useful results, but the information is still pretty thin.

So I switched to using VirusTotal to search for subdomains instead, and that turned out to be a lot more effective.

Affonso.io

I’d never heard of this affiliate software before, but while researching SaaS programs on Tolt I came across Affonso.

Using the same approach as with Tolt, footprints on the page plus subdomain lookups, you can find a lot of SaaS programs running on Affonso.

What I noticed is that Affonso is a lot more transparent about PPC policies than the other platforms. Each program’s dashboard has an “Allowed Marketing Methods” section that specifically states whether paid search advertising is supported and whether brand keyword bidding is allowed.

A Faster Alternative: Using VirusTotal to Find Affiliate Programs by Platform

The footprint method works well for some tools, but it depends on Google having already indexed those pages. A faster and more comprehensive approach is to go straight to VirusTotal to find all the subdomains of an affiliate software platform.

The logic is simple. When I was doing footprint research earlier I noticed that most affiliate software platforms host their clients on subdomains. So by searching the platform’s main domain on VirusTotal, you can pull up every subdomain all at once.

Go to virustotal.com, search the platform domain, click the Relations tab, then find the Subdomains section. You’ll instantly get a complete list.

The results still need to be filtered manually since not every subdomain is a SaaS affiliate program, but the volume of results you get is significantly higher than what a Google footprint search typically returns. That said, I’d still recommend using both methods together to complement each other.

What’s Next

Finding SaaS affiliate programs by working backwards from software footprints has opened up a lot of opportunities for me that I couldn’t find on major networks.

As I mentioned before, this is a living document. I’ll continue testing other affiliate software and share my findings as I go.