38% of Key Affiliate Program Terms Go Unpublished, Study of 252 SaaS Tools Finds

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A researcher manually reviewed affiliate program pages for 252 developer and SaaS tools, recording five key terms for each, including commission rate, cookie window, and payout method. Of the 1,260 total data fields collected, 483 — roughly 38% — were not publicly disclosed by vendors. The most commonly hidden details were minimum payout thresholds (missing for 65% of programs), cookie windows (52%), and payout methods (45%), which the researcher notes are the terms that determine whether earnings are actually received. Cookie windows ranged from 14 days to lifetime attribution among those that disclosed them, while minimum payout thresholds varied from $5 to $450. The full dataset has been published at affiliateprogramterms.com, with source URLs and check dates included for each field to ensure verifiability.

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