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How Much Does an Affiliate Programme Cost an Online Store? A Full Cost Breakdown

5 November 2026 · Leopold Landsdorff

How much does an affiliate programme cost an online store? At Brachion, the fixed part is €500–1,500 a month, and the rest is paid only from sales that actually happen.

On competitors’ websites the price “varies”. That is true, but you can’t make a decision from it. Let’s break the price into parts so you can calculate it for your own online store.

The short answer: what an affiliate programme’s price is made of

The price has two parts. The first is fixed: the network’s platform fee and the agency’s work. The second is variable: commissions, which are paid only when a sale has genuinely taken place.

The variable part can’t exist without the fixed one. Affiliate is not a channel you switch on and leave running. An empty, unmanaged programme produces nothing, which is why you need someone to recruit the publishers and keep the programme running.

Four cost items

When a programme is bought as a managed service, there are four costs.

1. Network fee. The affiliate network provides tracking, agreements and payment handling for publishers. At Brachion we work with Awin, and the monthly fee covers Awin’s platform cost. You don’t need to handle a separate network agreement.

2. Agency monthly fee. This is the work you don’t see on the invoice but that decides the result: programme structure and strategy, publisher recruitment and screening, agreements and tracking, and ongoing optimisation and reporting. I go into more detail on what the monthly fee includes on the how it works page.

3. Service commission. In some models the agency also takes a small share of realised sales. In Brachion’s Growth package it is 5%. The Fixed package has no service commission.

4. Publisher share. This is the commission paid to the publisher for each sale. It comes on top of the agency’s price, and it is agreed programme by programme. According to Zoner’s page, the most typical pricing model is that the advertiser pays a pre-agreed amount for each purchase. The amount can be a percentage or a fixed euro sum, and different products can be priced differently.

Brachion’s prices are public: Growth €500/month + a 5% service commission on realised sales, and Fixed €1,500/month with no service commission. You can find them on the pricing page.

Worked example: what the programme costs at different sales levels

The figures below are illustrative examples, not promises of results or averages. The service fees are Brachion’s actual prices. For the publisher share I have assumed 10% of sales for the sake of the example. The real figure depends on the products, the margin and the programme.

If affiliate sales are €10,000 a month:

If sales are €30,000 a month:

If sales are €100,000 a month:

Two observations. At low sales, Growth is cheaper because the fixed part is small. At higher sales, Fixed starts to win because the service commission doesn’t grow with sales. When sales are zero, the cost is just the monthly fee: €500 or €1,500. Nothing is paid to publishers, because nothing has been sold.

You can enter your own figures in the calculator.

Commission levels and margin

You shouldn’t set the publisher commission according to what others pay. Set it according to your own margin. If a product’s margin is 25%, a 20% commission makes no sense unless the customer buys again. If they do, the situation is different.

That’s why I always start from two questions. How much is left once the product has been sold and returns have been deducted? And what is the customer worth after the first purchase? The commission is tied to these, not to a general “market rate”.

This is where affiliate differs most from other marketing: you can design the cost so that no single sale is loss-making.

What an unmanaged programme costs

An unmanaged programme is not a cheap programme. It is a programme where fixed costs keep running and no sales come in.

The typical pattern is this: you join a network, put links and creative materials somewhere, and wait. Nobody recruits publishers, nobody tracks what works, and nobody answers publishers’ questions. Publishers choose programmes that have a clear offer and where someone replies to messages. An empty programme goes unnoticed in the listings.

There is also a limit to programme size. On Zoner’s page, the general lower threshold for launching a new affiliate programme is at least €500,000 in online sales over the past 12 months, and according to the page the affiliate model doesn’t usually work for very early-stage growth. Moody Media’s Adtraction article says that the criteria vary, but as a rule an online store’s annual revenue should be at least €500,000. I treat these as benchmarks, not absolute rules. Still, they say the same thing: until there is a foundation for the programme, the fixed cost doesn’t pay for itself.

Affiliate vs. paid advertising: where the cost structure differs

In Google and Meta advertising, you pay for visibility. The budget is spent while the ads run, and it is spent also when you are testing which message, audience or country works. Learning costs media budget.

In affiliate, the fixed part pays for the work, and commission is paid only on realised sales. Publishers are a sales team you pay for results, not an ad channel you switch on. If a publisher doesn’t sell, they aren’t paid.

This doesn’t mean affiliate replaces paid advertising. They do different jobs, and most growing online stores have both. But the cost structure is different: in affiliate, a small fixed part and the rest from actual sales. Keep that in mind when you compare the monthly fee with a media budget.

Next step: calculate your own situation

Enter your sales level and margin in the calculator to see what the programme would cost with each package: calculator. If you’d like to go through the numbers with me, get in touch.

Sources

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