Field reports, field arguments, and the occasional rant — written by us, edited under duress, never ghosted.
The default in affiliate is a sixty-day hold. We think the default is a swindle dressed as a fraud-protection feature. Here is the math — and what we ship instead.
The default in affiliate is a sixty-day hold dressed up as fraud protection. We think it is just a swindle, sleeping in good fonts. Here is the math.
If you have ever shipped an affiliate program, you have seen the same paragraph. The platform tells you, in language calibrated to sound exactly as serious as a hospital intake form, that commissions are subject to a sixty-day hold for fraud review.
This sounds like a feature. It is not. It is a float. The platform is borrowing your publishers' money — interest-free, for two months — and calling the borrowing a service.
Take a mid-sized program: $1.2M routed in a year, 8% commission, 60-day hold. That is roughly $16,000 of your publishers' cash, sitting in someone else's account, every single day. Multiply across the network and the float is the business.
We pay our publishers in under sixty seconds. Not because we are heroic. Because there is no good reason not to.
The objection is always fraud. Real answer: a sixty-day hold does not detect fraud. It compounds it — the bad publisher's hold expires the same day the good publisher's does. Real fraud detection is signing, attestation, and a refund window measured against the merchant's own returns ledger.
If you are a publisher reading this, you can stop reading agreements that hold your money. If you are a merchant, you can stop apologizing for them. We built the alternative; it is in the receipt above.