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
God no, that's insulting.