Kickrail vs Rewardful: price, limits and what moving actually involves

Rewardful and Kickrail do the same core job: they track affiliate links for a SaaS product that bills through Stripe, credit the payments that follow, and work out what each affiliate is owed. The differences are in price as a program grows, how codes work, and how much you can hand to an AI agent.

Rewardful figures come from its pricing page, read on 19 October 2026. We make Kickrail, so weigh our side accordingly.

Price at the revenue you actually have

Both tools price on the monthly revenue your affiliates bring in, so the entry price matters less than the cap.

Neither tool takes a percentage of revenue. Rewardful's optional managed payouts cost 3%. Kickrail doesn't hold money at all: you pay affiliates yourself, by hand or through Stripe Connect on Growth.

What's included where

• Campaigns. Rewardful's entry plan has one campaign; Growth has unlimited. Kickrail Free has one; Starter and up have unlimited.
• Custom portal domain. Rewardful Growth. Kickrail Starter.
• API and webhooks. Kickrail Growth. On every Kickrail plan, including Free, you can report signups from your server and look a referral up.
• Billing systems. Rewardful supports Stripe and Paddle. Kickrail is Stripe only. If you bill through Paddle, stay where you are.

Codes

Both tools track coupon codes. In Kickrail every affiliate code is a real Stripe promotion code on your account, so when a listener types JANE20 at checkout, the code alone credits Jane, with no click and no cookie. If you change the campaign's discount, the codes move to the new coupon and keep their names. How codes work has the details.

Tracking that survives ad blockers

Kickrail's browser script is under 5 KB and handles Payment Links, pricing tables and signup forms without code. For the cases a browser can't be trusted with, one call from your server after signup ties the new user to the affiliate, and every later Stripe payment is credited from your webhooks. See reporting signups from your server.

Set up by an agent

Kickrail is also an MCP server. Point Claude Code or Cursor at https://kickrail.com/api/mcp and the agent can install tracking in your codebase, check it on your live site, set commissions and run the Rewardful import. Payouts and Stripe approval stay with you. See setting up with an AI agent.

What moving involves

Paste your Rewardful API secret into Kickrail's settings and it imports:

• campaigns, with their rates, holds, minimum payouts and Stripe coupons
• affiliates, approved or rejected to match their Rewardful state
• links, with the same tokens, so every ?via= link already shared keeps working
• codes, tied to the same Stripe promotion codes
• referrals with their Stripe customers, so renewals keep crediting the same affiliate
• commissions, and payouts you've already made, as paid history

The secret is used for that run and never stored. Running the import again updates what's there rather than adding copies, so you can run it once more right before you remove Rewardful's script. Affiliates get a Kickrail login only when you choose to email them. The full list is in the switching guide, and there's a step-by-step walkthrough in how to migrate from Rewardful.

Which to pick

• Stay on Rewardful if you bill through Paddle, or if your program is small, working and you don't want to touch it.
• Move to Kickrail if you're on Stripe and paying for Rewardful Growth mostly for the revenue cap, if your affiliates sell with codes on podcasts and video, or if you want an agent to do the setup.

You can try Kickrail with the import before you change anything on your site. New programs get 14 days of Growth with no card.