Matt McWilliams has spent 20+ years running affiliate programs for startups, major companies, and legendary entrepreneurs. Then he wrote the book on it. AffiliateHQ is that playbook, coded into a platform that tracks, activates, and grows your program for you.
"AffiliateHQ is probably the 5th affiliate system I've used in the past few years. It's the only one I'll be using for the next decade."
Matt McWilliams has run affiliate programs at every scale for 20+ years. Four Affiliate Manager of the Year awards. He's run programs scaling from $0 to $1M a month, from $15M to $325M a year, and worked with legends such as Shark Tank's Kevin Harrington, Michael Hyatt, Shutterfly, and more.
Every time he sat down to manage a program, the software let him down. Whoever built it had never run a program for a living, so it tracked clicks and stopped there.
So he built AffiliateHQ. Every feature maps to what he teaches in The Book on Affiliate Management and has practiced for two decades. The activation sequences are not an add-on. They are the method, coded in.
Sound familiar?
You signed up to recruit affiliates, keep them producing, and pay them right. Then you found out the tool does almost none of that, and the rest lands back in your spreadsheet.
Built by developers who have never managed a real affiliate program.
$99 to $300 a month, and not one meaningful tool to keep affiliates engaged.
No way to see who has gone quiet, who is sliding, or who never sent a single click.
You do commission math, refund clawbacks, and tax docs by hand in spreadsheets.
You cannot email a segmented slice of your list from inside the platform.
You send affiliates to a separate course or doc they never finish.
Contests and leaderboards either do not exist or cost extra.
Activation sequences, the thing that keeps affiliates producing, are missing.
Links look like spam because the affiliate ID is a raw number nobody wants to share.
You find out something broke only after it is too late to fix it.
Matt hit every one of these for 20+ years. AffiliateHQ is what he built to end them.
"The affiliate program I run increased by over 200% in sales in my first 90 days and my affiliates have brought in record-breaking commissions. Affiliates who had been inactive for months have come back to life."
What no competitor can match
Other platforms can copy a feature list. They cannot copy 20+ years of running programs, and they did not write the book these tools come from.
Build a personalized promo plan for each affiliate around a specific launch: goals, commission structure, a day-by-day calendar, and a full mailing schedule. The platform auto-generates Aggressive, Balanced, and Conservative email-count recommendations from the promo length, using Matt's own formulas.
One master plan covers your whole roster, then you customize copies for top performers. Affiliates view it, fill in the blanks, commit with a click, and download it as a PDF or push it to Google Drive. It came straight out of the book, written by the person who built the platform.
Give it your product details and a few example emails, then give feedback round by round. It learns your voice and generates on-brand email swipe copy and social posts in bulk.
Social posts export as a scheduler-ready CSV for Buffer, Hootsuite, and similar tools. Everything saves into your creative library. No copywriter, no separate AI subscription. It is the same train-and-refine method Matt teaches in the book, built in.
AffiliateHQ has a native MCP server. Manage your entire program from Claude or any MCP-compatible AI client in plain English. Pull stats. Find inactive affiliates. Approve commissions. Send broadcasts. Post announcements. Create contests.
Over 20 tools cover every major section, and every write action asks you to confirm before it runs. Manage your affiliate program from Claude. Try saying that to any platform in this price range.
It audits your live program against Matt's book, his blog content, and your own historical data, then hands back a graded report by category. Specific findings, and the exact fix Matt recommends, on demand, once a week.
23% of your affiliates have never clicked their link.
Recommended fix: turn on the Activation Nudge sequence at the 7-day threshold to bring them back.
Every report is graded across the categories that decide whether a program grows or stalls:
No competitor can build this. None of them wrote the book.
Ask questions in plain English right inside your dashboard and get answers grounded in your own program data and Matt's method, the same source the Analyzer runs on.
It drafts, it advises, and it never takes an action on its own. You get a second set of eyes that has read the book and your numbers.
Run it your way
The enterprise tools are rigid, and you talk to a sales rep. AffiliateHQ runs the way you want to run your program, and the person who built it is reachable. Matt reads the feature requests himself, and because he ran programs for a living, he knows which ones matter. Built by a practitioner, shaped by the people using it, not by a committee.
Founding members get feature requests included. The people who shape the roadmap are the people on Founders Pricing.
Request a featureGoes to Matt, not a ticket queueThe full platform
The differentiators are why you switch. These are why you stay.
Three lightweight JavaScript snippets handle clicks, leads, and sales on any page in WordPress, ClickFunnels, custom HTML, and more. Cross-device stitching, UTM passthrough, first or last-click per event, and a cookie window you set to anything, including lifetime.
Affiliates get a vanity alias, so ?aff=matt works exactly like ?aff=10346. No redirects, no platform domain, no DNS setup. Clean links get shared more and stripped less.
EPC per 100 clicks and conversion rates on every report. Inactive flags, "down" alerts when traffic drops a set percent, and any report saved with its filters locked, pinned as a widget or scheduled as a weekly CSV or PDF.
22 configurable alert types watch your program around the clock. First sales, conversion drops, traffic spikes, suspicious chargebacks, and joined-but-never-clicked affiliates, color-coded by urgency with a live badge in the nav.
Seven fraud signals run continuously and flag for human review, never auto-penalty. Refunds and chargebacks reverse the commission automatically and cascade clawbacks through every level of a multi-level structure. Affiliates get a clear explanation, you get a full audit log.
Connect your own Stripe account and the platform creates commissions on every renewal, upgrade, and cancellation. Affiliates earn on every payment a customer makes, for months or for life. W9 and W8-BEN docs collected and stored encrypted, with a payout warning when one is missing.
Per sale, lead, or click. Tiers with automatic advancement, volume bonuses, product-specific rates, split commissions by click timing or tag, two-tier referrals, and multi-level up to four deep. Every rule stacks and the payout math never breaks.
A hosted public signup page plus iframe embed, configurable application fields, and auto-approval or manual review with terms logged by timestamp and IP. A seven-step wizard takes you from account to live tracking in one session.
The Training Hub holds videos, PDFs, quick start guides, and promo checklists in modules. Affiliates mark items complete, and a program-wide tracker shows you who is ready to promote. No Kajabi, no Notion.
Four built-in sequences (Welcome, Activation Nudge, First Sale, Re-engagement) with Matt's exact thresholds, plus a custom builder with 11 trigger types, day-level delays, merge tags that pull live stats, and exit conditions. Build any flow you want.
A separate affiliate dashboard with a link builder that checks the target page for a script, EPC stats, a creatives library, a promo calendar with .ics export, and a My Team downline view. Top affiliates can invite VAs with role-based access and hidden sensitive data.
Segmented broadcasts to any filtered slice with open and click tracking. Live leaderboards by any metric, a contest engine running ranked and threshold prizes at once, personal bonus targets that track themselves, and milestone badges that award automatically.
Head to head
The honest version. Where a competitor charges extra or limits a feature, the table says so.
Swipe sideways to see every column →
| Feature | AffiliateHQ | PostAffiliatePro | Tapfiliate | Rewardful | PartnerStack |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built-in engagement tools | Limited | ||||
| Activation sequences | |||||
| Training Hub for affiliates | |||||
| Commitment Plans | |||||
| AI swipe copy generator | |||||
| MCP server (run from Claude) | |||||
| Vanity affiliate links | Add-on | Limited | |||
| Recurring & subscription commissions | |||||
| Support from a practitioner | Sales rep | ||||
| Starting price | $99/mo | $129/mo | $89/mo | $49/mo | Custom |
Competitor pricing and features change. Check their sites for the current details before you decide.
"We manage dozens of affiliate programs for our clients and use about 10 different tracking systems. All of them have their strengths and weaknesses. AffiliateHQ has no weaknesses. Matt and his team have truly built the perfect system."
Why it works
The activation sequences use his exact thresholds.
The Commitment Plans are his ABC promo plan method.
The segmentation uses his criteria for at-risk affiliates.
The AI Swipe Copy Generator uses the train-and-refine process from the book.
The contest engine reflects how he ran record launches.
The fraud signals reflect two decades of pattern recognition.
It is what the book teaches, running automatically, instead of sitting in a chapter you have to remember to act on.
Founders Pricing
When AffiliateHQ launches its standard plans, the Full Suite will run $499 a month. Founding members get that same Full Suite for $99, the price the Starter plan will eventually cost. That is 80% off, $400 a month off, and the rate never goes up as long as you stay subscribed.
Billed $990 once a year
That's 80% off. You save $400 every month, for as long as you stay.
Founders Pricing closes July 15 at midnight Eastern
After that, the standard plans launch and the Full Suite goes to $499 a month. Founders keep $99 forever.
From clients, authors, and early users
"Matt is the best at what he does. Matt is the guy behind the biggest launches on the internet. When people like myself, Stu McLaren, and other elite entrepreneurs running the biggest launches online are hiring this guy, you should listen to him."
"There's a reason entrepreneurs and businesses all over the world trust Matt to help them start, grow, and scale their businesses. His methods and systems work."
"Our first public launch brought in close to 20,000 new leads and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, a result I wouldn't have achieved without Matt's help. I heartily recommend Matt and his team to help any online business take their sales to the next level."
"The affiliate program I run increased by over 200% in sales in my first 90 days and my affiliates have brought in record-breaking commissions. Affiliates who had been inactive for months have come back to life."
"I've been using AffiliateHQ for the past few weeks and WOW. I have never used a system like this before. It truly has everything I need, and some stuff I didn't even know I needed."
"Matt exemplifies what it means to be a professional affiliate manager. I've had the immense pleasure of working with him and could not be more impressed."
"We manage dozens of affiliate programs for our clients and use about 10 different tracking systems. AffiliateHQ has no weaknesses. Matt and his team have truly built the perfect system."
"AffiliateHQ is probably the 5th affiliate system I've used in the past few years. It's the only one I'll be using for the next decade."
"Just moved our program to AffiliateHQ. Best I've used by far. So easy to use and yet has all the tools I need."
"Our affiliate managers all agree this is the best platform they've used. You and your team actually listen. We've asked for a few things and you've been hyper-responsive to add them. Can't say enough about what you've built."
Questions
No. You drop three lightweight JavaScript snippets on your pages, the same way you add Google Analytics. No server-side work. Test mode lets you confirm the scripts fire before you go live.
Yes. The snippets drop onto any page on any platform, including custom HTML, WordPress, and ClickFunnels, with no special integration. If you can paste a script tag, you can track.
Yes. Run as many programs as you want from one account, each with its own settings, commissions, affiliates, and reports.
Seven signals run continuously: click flooding, order velocity, conversion anomalies, cookie stuffing, formulaic signups, and refund and chargeback rates above your threshold. Flagged events go to human review, never an automatic penalty, so a good affiliate never gets punished by a bot.
You connect your own Stripe account. The platform calculates every commission, including renewals and clawbacks, and exports a CSV for payment processing. W9 and W8-BEN tax docs are collected and stored encrypted, with a warning when one is missing before a payout.
Yes. Affiliates earn on every payment a referred customer makes, for a set number of months or for life. You set it program-wide with per-affiliate overrides, and renewals, upgrades, and cancellations create commissions automatically.
Yes. A top affiliate can invite VAs, assistants, or partners with role-based access (Full Access, Account Manager, View Only) and hide sensitive data from them.
It lets you run your program from Claude or any MCP-compatible AI client in plain English: pull stats, find inactive affiliates, approve commissions, send broadcasts, and more. You do not need it to use AffiliateHQ. It is there when you want to manage the program by typing a sentence instead of clicking through screens. Every write action asks you to confirm first.
It audits your live program against Matt's book and your own historical data, then returns a graded report by category with specific findings and the exact fix Matt recommends. You run it on demand, up to once a week per program.
Ask. Matt reads the requests himself, and feature requests are included for founding members. He ran programs for a living, so he knows which requests move the needle.
Most people set up their program in one session. A seven-step wizard takes you from account to live tracking, and you paste three script snippets the same way you add Google Analytics. No developer, no waiting on a sales call.
You can cancel anytime. Your program stays active through the end of your billing period. If you are on Founders Pricing and you resubscribe later, the founder rate applies only while you stay subscribed, so keeping the subscription is what holds the lifetime rate.
Those track clicks and pay commissions well. None were built by someone who ran programs for 20+ years, and none include activation sequences, a Training Hub, Commitment Plans, AI swipe copy, an MCP server, or an Analyzer that grades your program against a book. See the comparison table above.
You get the full Full Suite plan for $99 a month or $990 a year, instead of the regular $499 a month. That is 80% off, and you get the top-tier plan for what will become the entry-level Starter price. As a founding member, you keep that rate as long as you stay subscribed, even as prices rise. The lock is grandfathered in Stripe and written into the Terms of Service, so it is a real commitment, not marketing language.
The standard plans launch: Starter at $99 a month, Premium at $199, and the Full Suite at $499. Anyone who joined as a founder keeps the full Full Suite for $99 forever. After July 15, the founder rate is gone.
