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
Vibe coded? I see that in the contribution file:
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.
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!