Lifetime vs 12 Month Affiliate Commissions

Every program calls it recurring. Almost none of them tell you how long it runs. We counted.

Published August 17, 2026 · Computed from 81 recurring programs · Tables rebuild from live data on every deploy

Recurring is not a duration

Read enough affiliate pages and you start to treat recurring as a single category, the good one, sitting opposite the one time bounty. It is not a single category. It is a payment shape that can hide wildly different amounts of money behind identical wording.

Two programs both advertise 20% recurring. The first pays for as long as the customer stays subscribed. The second pays for twelve months and then stops, whether or not the customer stays for a decade. Nothing in the phrase 20% recurring distinguishes them, and on a customer who sticks around three years the first pays exactly three times what the second does. Same rate, same traffic, same effort, triple the money.

That is the whole reason this page exists. The affiliate industry has settled on a word that describes how you get paid while quietly omitting the variable that decides how much. So rather than argue about it, we counted every recurring program in the directory and sorted them by what they actually disclose.

The measured split

The middle row is the one most people expect to be the biggest, and it is not. The programs that behave like textbook software affiliate deals, twelve months of revenue share and then the merchant keeps the customer, are outnumbered nearly three to one by programs that never put a number on it at all.

The 11 that pay for life

These state lifetime or for life terms in their published commission structure. While the referred customer keeps paying, the commission keeps arriving, with no month counter running in the background.

A pattern worth noticing: lifetime terms cluster around smaller and newer companies rather than the household names. Distribution is the scarce thing for a young product, and an uncapped commission is the cheapest way to buy it, because the cost only lands if the affiliate actually succeeds. Established brands with their own demand rarely need to offer it, which is why you will not find the biggest names on this list.

The 18 that publish a cap

These tell you exactly how long the money lasts. That deserves credit even when the cap is short, because a stated limit lets you price the referral properly before you write a word.

Twelve months dominates this group, which matches how the design is usually justified. A year is long enough to make a partner feel rewarded and short enough that the merchant keeps the profitable tail of a long retention curve. The outliers are the interesting part. Twenty four month caps effectively double the ceiling on identical traffic, and the shortest cap here runs just six months, which is a materially different proposition dressed in the same vocabulary.

Why twelve months, and why some companies pay for life anyway

Caps are not arbitrary and they are not spite. Understanding the arithmetic on the merchant's side tells you which programs are likely to cap before you even read their terms.

A software company spends money to acquire a customer and wants that cost back inside a defined window. Paying an affiliate 30% for twelve months means the first year is thin but the customer becomes fully profitable in year two, right when retention curves flatten and the account turns into reliable margin. Twelve months is not a random figure, it is roughly the point where most subscription businesses consider a customer paid back. That is why the cap clusters there so tightly, and why finance teams like it: the liability per referral is knowable and finite, which matters when you are forecasting.

Lifetime terms break that model deliberately. A company offering them is trading permanent margin for immediate distribution, which only makes sense when distribution is the harder problem. That is the situation a young product is in. It has no brand, no search presence, and no queue of affiliates, so it buys them with terms nobody established would match, and the cost only materialises if the affiliate actually delivers. Look again at the first table and the pattern is visible: uncapped terms sit with smaller and newer names, not household ones.

Two practical conclusions follow. First, an uncapped rate from an unproven company is not straightforwardly better than a capped rate from a stable one, because a lifetime commission is only worth anything if the company survives long enough to pay it. Second, expect terms to tighten as a product matures. A program offering lifetime today because it needs partners may well cap for new affiliates once it does not, which is one more reason to check terms you agreed to a year ago rather than assume they still read the same.

The 52 that never say

This is the largest group and the reason to read the whole page. Each of these advertises recurring commission on its public terms without stating a duration. That is not proof of a hidden cap. Plenty of them may well pay for life. The point is that a partner cannot tell, and cannot price the offer, without asking a human.

We are not accusing anyone on that list of hiding anything. Some of these programs disclose the duration inside a partner dashboard, in a terms document behind a login, or in an email from a manager. The criticism is narrower and fairer: the number that decides an affiliate's income is not on the page where the affiliate decides whether to join.

What the cap does to your money

Percentages feel comparable. Durations are what make them incomparable. Take a $99 a month subscription and a 20% commission, and change nothing except the duration.

Read across the bottom row and then across the top one. On a customer who stays three years, lifetime pays six times what a six month cap pays, from the same referral. Now read down the first column. For the first twelve months every option except the six month cap pays identically, which is exactly why caps are easy to miss: the difference does not show up in your dashboard until month thirteen, long after you decided which program to write about.

This also reframes a comparison people get wrong constantly. A 30% commission capped at twelve months looks better than 20% for life, and for the first year it is. It pays $356.40 against $237.60 on our example customer. Cross into year two and lifetime overtakes it. By year three lifetime is ahead by double. Whether the higher rate or the longer duration wins depends entirely on how long that product retains its customers, which is a question about the product, not about the commission.

Which one should you actually chase

The instinct is to say lifetime, always. That is too simple, because duration only pays off through retention.

Lifetime is worth chasing when the product is genuinely sticky. Billing software, email platforms, hosting, anything holding a customer's data or workflow. People do not casually migrate those, so the tail is real. WHMCS is the clearest example in this directory: hosting companies run their entire billing on it and almost never move, so 15% for life is worth more than a bigger rate with a counter attached.

A cap barely matters when the product churns anyway. If the average customer lasts eight months, a twelve month cap costs you nothing, and you should simply take the highest rate available. Paying attention to duration on a high churn product is optimising a number that never arrives.

Volume businesses should prefer the rate. If you publish constantly and acquire steadily, front loaded money compounds into more content faster than a slow tail does. Duration rewards patience, and patience is only an asset if you can afford it.

Our recurring versus one time breakdown works the neighbouring question, which is when a flat bounty beats any recurring deal at all.

How to find the real duration before you promote

Four steps, in the order that actually saves time.

• Read the terms page, not the landing page. The rate is marketing and lives up front. The duration is legal and lives in the terms. Search that document for months, duration, term, period, and lifetime.
• Search the word lifetime specifically. Its absence is informative. Programs that pay for life say so loudly, because it is their best recruiting line. Silence rarely means uncapped.
• Ask in writing, and keep the reply. A one line email to the affiliate manager asking how many months commissions run for gets an answer, and having it in writing matters later if the dashboard disagrees.
• Trust the dashboard over everything. Once you are in, the only real source is when commissions actually stop attributing to a customer. Terms describe intent; the dashboard reports behaviour.

Lifetime rarely means forever

One honest caveat, and it applies to every program in the first table. Lifetime describes the absence of a month cap on a customer. It does not freeze the terms.

Nearly every affiliate agreement reserves the right to change rates or end the programme, and some reserve it with no notice at all. We have watched it happen in this directory. Our public changelog records commission changes with the date each one was caught, and our piece on commission cuts documents how the pattern usually plays out. A lifetime rate is a promise about duration, not a contract that cannot be rewritten.

That is not a reason to avoid lifetime programs. It is a reason to treat any single program as one income stream rather than a pension, and to re-read terms you agreed to a year ago.

Methodology

Every table here is computed at build time from the 81 programs in the affiliatejob directory currently flagged as recurring, so the counts cannot drift from the underlying data and regenerate on every deploy. Classification reads the commission terms exactly as each program publishes them: any mention of life or lifetime counts as uncapped, an explicit figure in months, a first year, or a payment count counts as capped, and anything else counts as undisclosed. Phrases such as first month bonus, monthly, and annual describe plan types rather than commission durations, and are deliberately not read as caps.

The limitation is worth stating plainly. This measures what programs publish, not what they pay. A program in the undisclosed group may well pay for life and simply not advertise it, and a stated cap could be applied inconsistently in practice. Terms also change, which is why every change we detect lands on the changelog. Grades shown are the trust layer described in our methodology, which rates documented terms and is never influenced by placement or referral revenue.

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