Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on a self-hosted affiliate tracking tool after running into a common issue with existing solutions like Rewardful or FirstPromoter.
Most of them require full read-access to your billing provider (Stripe/Paddle) and operate as closed, managed services. That means handing over sensitive financial data and trusting a black-box system for attribution.
I wanted something different:
self-hosted transparent privacy-first
So I built RefearnApp — a self-hosted affiliate tracking engine.
🧠 Why this approach No third-party data access → everything runs on your own infrastructure **Transparent attribution logic **→ affiliates can verify how tracking works **Full data ownership **→ all relationships and logs stay in your database **No forced subscriptions **→ you can run it without ongoing costs ⚙️ Deployment Docker-ready Works with Coolify or any VPS Lightweight enough to run alongside existing services 🔓 Open source model
The core engine is AGPL-3.0 and fully self-hostable.
I’m following an open-core approach:
core functionality is free and open optional paid features support ongoing development 🔗 Repo
https://github.com/ZAK123DSFDF/refearnapp
I’d really appreciate feedback from people here — especially around:
setup experience architecture decisions anything missing for a self-hosted workflow
yeah some parts are vibe coded but i checked most of the main parts and review the code before i push to main!!
Here is some advice from an old fart: if you reach v1.0 with ONLY one merge request, something is deeply wrong with your development process.
Also, you don't push to main, ever.
Pushing to main is fine before MVP. No real point in feature branches before that, or 1.0, especially for small and solo dev projects.
(And reaching 1.0 in one commit is fine for very small projects, like single-file utilities. But this is not that small.)
thank you good advice. yeah i will implement that previous i was the only one who developed the project that is why i didnt create any branch!
Lol