AI Tool Affiliate & Referral Program Tracker

For each major AI dev tool, detect whether a public affiliate or referral program exists — then extract commission rate, cookie window, payout method, and restrictions in one click.

What does AI Tool Affiliate Tracker do?

There is no canonical directory of affiliate programs in the AI dev tool space. Creators, SaaS affiliate networks, and partnership teams spend hours hunting through pricing pages, legal sub-pages, and Twitter rumors to find out whether Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Windsurf, Vercel, or Supabase has a referral program — and what the commission actually looks like.

This Actor automates that hunt. It probes ten likely affiliate URL paths for each tool in your input list (/affiliates, /referral, /partners, /refer-a-friend, /legal/affiliates, etc.), follows redirects, and uses HTML heuristics plus regex extraction to determine:

• Does a public affiliate or referral program exist? (true / false)
• If yes: what is the commission rate, cookie window, payout method, and any restrictions?
• A 500-character raw excerpt of the program page, so a human can verify

Built for Apify — scheduling, integrations, proxy rotation, monitoring and structured dataset output are all included by default.

Why use this Actor?

• Content creators and influencers: build a vetted affiliate stack before recording a tools roundup
• SaaS affiliate networks (Partnerstack, Impact, Tolt, Reditus): scout which AI tools have a self-serve program and which need direct outreach
• Partnership teams: monitor when a competitor launches or changes their referral terms
• Comparison sites: keep your "AI tool review" pages stocked with current referral commercials
• Journalists and analysts: track the commercialization of the AI dev tool space over time
• Indie hackers: rank programs by commission to decide where to spend writing time first

How to use AI Tool Affiliate Tracker

1. Open the Input tab and review the default list of 15 AI tools
2. Add, remove, or edit {name, domain} entries to match your watchlist
3. Click Start
4. Watch the run logs — each tool's probe and verdict is logged in real time
5. Download the dataset (JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML) from the Storage tab

Input

• toolsToCheck (array, default 15) — each entry is { "name": "anthropic", "domain": "anthropic.com" }. domain should be a bare hostname (no scheme, no trailing slash).

Output

Each item in the dataset represents one tool:

{
  "tool": "anthropic",
  "domain": "anthropic.com",
  "checkedAt": "2026-05-21T07:25:00.000Z",
  "affiliateProgramFound": true,
  "programUrl": "https://www.anthropic.com/affiliates",
  "commissionRate": "10%",
  "commissionFlatUsd": null,
  "cookieWindowDays": 30,
  "payoutMethod": "paypal",
  "restrictions": "first-month-only",
  "raw": "First 500 chars of the program page text...",
  "attempts": [
    { "url": "https://anthropic.com/affiliates", "status": 200, "looksLikeProgram": true }
  ]
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data table

Field	Type	What it means
tool	string	Tool name from input
affiliateProgramFound	boolean	True if a real program page was detected
programUrl	string	Final URL of the program page (after redirects)
commissionRate	string	Extracted percentage (e.g. "10%")
commissionFlatUsd	number	Extracted flat-fee payout in USD, if any
cookieWindowDays	number	Attribution window in days
payoutMethod	string	PayPal / Stripe / Wise / Tipalti / Partnerstack / etc.
restrictions	string	First-month-only, self-referrals-prohibited, US-only, etc.
raw	string	First 500 chars of program page text for human verification
attempts	array	All probed paths and their status (audit trail)

Pricing / Cost estimation

This Actor runs in roughly 1-3 compute units for the default 15-tool list. On Apify's free tier you can run it on-demand without burning monthly credits. Run it weekly and you'll spend well under one dollar per month even on the Personal plan.

How much does it cost to scrape affiliate programs across the AI ecosystem? Effectively free — the bottleneck is rate-limit respect, not compute. Per-tool fetches are 1 HTTP request to up to 10 paths, so total network volume per run stays small.

Tips or Advanced options

• Schedule weekly via Apify Scheduler to catch program launches the moment they happen
• Integrate with Slack, Telegram, or Discord via Apify integrations to alert partnership teams
• Extend toolsToCheck with vertical AI tools (e.g. video generation, voice cloning, embeddings infra) — the heuristics are domain-agnostic
• For programs gated behind a login or pop-up, the raw field will be empty even when affiliateProgramFound is true — open programUrl manually
• Combine with the companion Actor github-issue-bounty-finder to track paid contribution opportunities alongside affiliate revenue

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Why are some affiliateProgramFound: true results missing commission rate?

Some vendors only disclose commercials inside the partner portal after signup. The Actor reports programUrl so you can apply directly.

Why didn't the Actor find Cursor / Windsurf / OpenAI?

These vendors may not run a public self-serve program (yet). The attempts array shows which paths returned 404 — that's an audit trail, not a bug.

Is this scraper legal?

It only fetches publicly served HTML pages over standard HTTP, respects redirects, sends a descriptive User-Agent, and does not bypass authentication or scrape personal data. Use responsibly and respect each vendor's robots.txt and Terms of Service.

Known limitations

• Only HTTP-fetchable pages — JavaScript-only SPAs may render an empty body
• Commission and cookie regex covers ~80% of common phrasings — edge cases need human verification
• We do not (yet) detect affiliate programs hosted on third-party networks (Partnerstack, Impact, Reditus) when the vendor's own site does not link to them
• No retries or proxy rotation by default — add Apify Proxy if you need to bypass aggressive bot filtering

Support

Open Issues in the Actor's Issues tab for feature requests or bug reports. Custom solutions are available — reach out via the author profile.

Built by Ian Mu — author of verify-before-stop, a Claude Code hook that forces post-task verification. Find more dev-ecosystem Actors under the same author on Apify Store.