OpenPartner vs Affonso: open-source attribution vs all-in-one hosted SaaS

Affonso has done a real job packaging affiliate program software for indie SaaS. €15/month to start, multi-PSP support across Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Creem, and Dodo, a white-label partner portal in 14 languages, and tax-form collection built in. If you need to launch a SaaS affiliate program by Friday and you bill on Paddle, Affonso is a defensible answer.

OpenPartner takes a different bet. Same buyer in many cases, different opinion about what the next ten years of partner attribution should look like. This post is the honest comparison — including the parts where Affonso is currently stronger.

Where Affonso wins today

Three things genuinely:

• Lower entry price. €15/month with no transaction fees beats our $49/month + 1.5% on monthly recurring revenue from a partner program of any meaningful size. If you’re pre-revenue or just sanity-checking the channel, that gap matters.
• Multi-PSP coverage. Affonso plugs into Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Creem, and Dodo Payments. OpenPartner’s payout path is Stripe Connect Standard. If your billing lives on Paddle, that’s a deciding factor — we’d be doing you a disservice to pretend it isn’t.
• Built-in i18n + tax compliance. Affonso ships W-8/W-9 collection, self-billing invoices, and a partner portal in 14 languages. We can ship some of these on a roadmap; Affonso has them today.

Three is enough. If those are the deciding inputs, Affonso is the right call.

Where OpenPartner wins

Four areas where we’re built differently, and the difference compounds as the program matures:

1. Open-source core and data portability

OpenPartner is MIT-licensed. You can self-host the full stack — Postgres, click router, API, admin portal — on your own infrastructure with the Docker Compose template we ship. Affonso is hosted-only.

That alone isn’t the point. The point is what self-hosting guarantees: the data is yours. Every click, identity, event, and commission lives in your Postgres. Even if you stay on our hosted plan, Settings → Export data gives you a zip containing CSV, JSON, and a pg_dump-compatible SQL file with the full schema and every row. The CLI accepts that zip back as input on a different instance and re-derives attribution losslessly.

Affonso is a closed platform. Your attribution data lives inside their database, exposed through their API on their schedule. You cannot pick it up and rebuild it elsewhere.

Most attribution platforms collapse raw events into a single attribution decision and store only that. When you export, you get a snapshot of decisions — not the data those decisions were made from.

If you ever want to run a custom attribution model, audit historical commissions, or move off the platform, the difference between “we own the raw events” and “the platform owns the raw events” is the difference between an afternoon’s work and a project.

2. Multiple attribution models out of the box

OpenPartner ships four attribution models: last-click (default), first-click, linear, and position-based (40/40/20). You can change models in the admin and run the Re-derive job to recompute history under the new model. Original attributions stay as historical rows.

Affonso’s documentation describes a click-to-conversion model that maps to last-click. That’s the right default for most B2B SaaS. It is not the right model for every program — content-heavy programs with multiple touchpoints often want linear or position; brand-led programs sometimes want first-click. If you outgrow last-click, you’ve outgrown Affonso.

3. Direct payouts with no skim on creator earnings

OpenPartner pays partners via Stripe Connect Standard transfers from the brand’s Stripe account directly to the partner’s. We don’t handle the money. We don’t take a cut of what the brand pays the partner. The brand sees the gross commission, the partner receives the gross commission, and Stripe’s payout fees are passed through with no markup.

Affonso consolidates partner payouts through their platform via wire or PayPal. That’s a different shape — convenient if you don’t want to think about it, but it means there’s a third party in the money flow with their own economics, FX handling, and timing.

4. Three explicit integration paths, including partner postbacks

OpenPartner exposes three integration surfaces:

1. Server SDK — your backend pushes authoritative conversion events to us
2. Outbound webhooks — we notify your stack when commissions accrue, approve, or pay
3. Partner postbacks — we notify the partner’s tracker (Voluum, Binom, RedTrack) when their click converts

That third path — partner postbacks — matters specifically for affiliate-marketing partners who run their own click trackers and need real-time conversion S2S pings into their existing reporting stack. Affonso’s API and SDK cover the brand side. Whether they support partner-side postbacks for affiliates running tracker stacks is unclear from their public docs; if you’ve got partners running a Voluum stack, ask both vendors directly.

The honest decision tree

Pick Affonso if:

• You bill on Paddle, Polar, Creem, or Dodo
• You need W-8/W-9 collection and self-billing invoices in the first month
• You want a multilingual white-label portal out of the box
• The program is small enough that €15/month vs $49 + 1.5% is the deciding gap

Pick OpenPartner if:

• You want to be able to self-host or migrate cleanly later
• You want raw attribution data in your own Postgres for audit, reporting, or custom models
• Your partners include affiliates running their own tracker stacks (Voluum, Binom)
• Last-click won’t be your final attribution model and you want to switch without migrating
• You bill on Stripe (we’re best-in-class for Stripe-native programs)

The only wrong answer is picking the platform that doesn’t match the buyer you actually are. Both products are built to do the job; we just disagree about what “the job” looks like at the five-year mark.

If OpenPartner sounds like the right call, start on Revshare with no monthly fee or read the self-host quickstart to run the open-source build on your own infrastructure.