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Plans and billing

Sprout Affiliate is billed through Shopify. There is no separate card on file and nothing to cancel outside Shopify. Every charge appears on your regular Shopify bill, and you approve the plan on Shopify's own charge-approval screen before anything is billed.

Pricing has two parts on a paid plan: a base fee charged every 30 days (or once a year if you buy a yearly plan), and a transaction fee that is a percentage of the referral sales your affiliates drive. The free plan has neither.

The plans

All prices are US dollars. The subscription and the transaction fee are both charged in USD regardless of what your store sells in.

Higher plans cost more per month and take a smaller percentage of each referred sale, so the bigger base pays for itself once your volume is high enough. The crossovers follow from the prices above: Professional costs less than Growth once your referral sales pass $8,000 a month, and Enterprise costs less than Professional past $14,000 a month. The Plans page has a slider: drag your monthly referral sales (0 to $50,000) and it prices every plan at once, so you can check that against your own numbers.

The 14-day free trial

Growth, Professional, and Enterprise each carry a 14-day free trial, and so do the two yearly plans, Professional Annual and Enterprise Annual. The trial applies to the plan's recurring fee. The transaction fee works differently: the app records it against referred sales as soon as your subscription is active, so sales made during the trial still accrue the percentage.

How the transaction fee works

The percentage is charged on each referred sale as the sale comes in, not in one lump at the end of the month, and not when you pay your affiliates. Charging at sale time is deliberate: it means the fee always lines up with the referral orders shown in your reports, and it cannot be avoided by settling with an affiliate outside the app.

Points that surprise people:

• Refunds credit back. If a referred order is refunded in whole or in part, the share of the fee that was really charged on the refunded amount is banked as credit. That credit is spent against your next fees before anything new is billed. The Plans and Billing pages both show the credit you are holding.
• Rejecting a referral removes its fee. A rejected referral pays no commission, so it costs no fee. If you later restore it, the fee is owed again and the credit is taken back. If that credit has already been spent on other sales, the difference is added to your next charge rather than written off.
• Only fees that were actually charged are credited. An order that was tracked but never billed (the free plan, a fee the monthly ceiling held back, a failed charge) credits nothing, because nothing was taken.
• Unsettled orders carry no fee. Test orders, cancelled orders, and orders whose payment is pending, voided, or expired never approve themselves and never cost a percentage. They are still attributed and still listed, so you can approve one by hand and pay commission on it, and it still carries no fee when you do.
• Order edits work both ways. If an order is edited upward after it was billed, the difference is charged, because commission is paid on the new amount. If it is edited downward, the drop is treated exactly like a refund: the part of the fee charged on the difference is banked as credit.
• Currency. The percentage is worked out in the currency the sale happened in, then the fee is converted to USD, because USD is the currency the subscription charges in. When the sale happened in another currency, that invoice line names the currency and the conversion rate used. A USD sale converts nothing, so its line names only the referral sales the percentage was taken on.
• Very small fees are carried, not dropped. Shopify will not accept a usage charge under one cent. Sales whose fee falls below that are held and joined to the next charge, so they accumulate rather than disappearing.

The monthly ceiling on fees

A usage charge is Shopify's name for a variable fee billed on top of a subscription, and it is how the transaction fee reaches your bill. Every usage charge needs a ceiling you have approved in advance, and Sprout Affiliate sets that ceiling at $10,000 per 30-day period.

It is the figure you approve when you subscribe. At the Growth rate of 2% it covers $500,000 of referral sales in a month. The app does not repeat the figure on its own pages, because Shopify states it at the moment you agree to it.

If you approach the ceiling, the app bills whatever still fits under it and holds the rest. If the ceiling is already used up, nothing is billed for the remainder of that cycle and the sales are held. Either way the held sales join a later charge rather than being lost. Be aware of the limitation: the app does not show you a message for reaching the ceiling itself, so the fee simply lags behind the sales until the cycle rolls over.

The free plan's 200-referral limit

On the free plan, only the first 200 referral orders in a calendar month are attributed. Referrals already paid out that month count toward the 200. Gifts and refund adjustments do not.

Referrals beyond that are not attributed and no commission is calculated for them. They are not deleted. The Payouts page shows a warning headed "Some referrals weren't counted" with the number that went over, and the app recalculates attribution every time it reads your orders, so upgrading lifts the limit and those referrals can be picked up.

The practical limitation: the app works from a rolling window of recent orders (59 days), so referrals that fell over the limit long ago will eventually drop out of range. If you are hitting the cap and want those orders to count, upgrade while they are still inside that window.

One safeguard worth knowing. If the app cannot read your plan at the moment it attributes orders, it treats you as uncapped rather than blocking attribution, because a billing hiccup must never quietly cost an affiliate a sale.

The free plan also allows one program, payouts are tracked and paid manually, and bulk email is limited to 100 affiliates a day. Automatic PayPal payouts, affiliate chat, the customer referral program, your marketplace listing, and white-label emails all start at Growth.

Yearly billing

Professional and Enterprise can be bought yearly. A year costs ten months' worth of the monthly price, about 17% off. Growth is monthly only, so it disappears from the cards when you switch the toggle to yearly.

The transaction fee is unchanged on a yearly plan. Usage bills on Shopify's 30-day cycle whatever the recurring interval is, so a yearly subscriber still pays the percentage as sales come in rather than in a lump at renewal. On the Plans page a yearly card shows the price as the monthly equivalent, with the real yearly charge stated underneath, so it can be compared with the monthly cards.

Shopify identifies a subscription by its plan name, and a yearly plan is a separate name ("Professional Annual", "Enterprise Annual"). The different name matters only if you are reading your Shopify billing screens and wondering why it does not match the one on the plan card.

Changing or cancelling your plan

1. Open Plans in the app.
2. To move up or down between paid plans, choose the plan you want. Shopify shows its approval screen.
3. To stop paying, use Downgrade to Free. The app asks you to confirm, then cancels the Shopify subscription with proration, so Shopify credits back the unused part of the period you have already paid for.

Downgrading to Free has two consequences worth knowing before you click it. The first is your programs. Free includes one, so the app keeps your oldest active program and pauses the rest. Paused programs keep their affiliates and their history, they just stop taking new signups and referrals until you reactivate them.

The confirmation dialog tells you how many will be paused. The second is features. Everything your paid plan added goes away, which from Growth means automatic PayPal payouts, unlimited programs, the customer referral program, affiliate chat, your marketplace listing, and white-label emails.

Promo codes

If you have a promo code, enter it in the "Have a promo code?" box on the Plans page and press Apply. A promo gives you a plan free for however many months that code carries, counted from today, and it is held by the app rather than by Shopify, so there is no subscription and no card involved. Each code can be redeemed once per store.

A promo has a ceiling tier. You start at the top of what the code covers, and while it is running you can switch between the covered plans as often as you like, including back to Free, without burning the remaining time. Going above the ceiling means subscribing normally.

Redeeming a second, different code extends from the current end date rather than restarting from today, and keeps the higher ceiling of the two. The redeem box is hidden while a promo is running. When the promo lapses you fall back to Free and are asked to subscribe.

Where to check what you are being charged

Two pages answer two different questions. Plans answers "which plan should I be on": it is where you choose and compare, and it carries a "Your billing this cycle" card showing your base plan, sales counted this cycle, the fee so far, and the date your cycle renews.

Billing answers "what am I going to be charged this month": the base fee, the percentage line with the referral sales it was figured on, the running total, how many of the 30 days have passed, and a straight-line estimate of where the full cycle lands. The estimate assumes the rest of the month runs like the part already counted, so treat it as a projection, not the amount you will be charged.

Referral sales on those pages are shown in your store's currency. Anything Shopify charges is shown in USD.

When billing goes wrong

If Shopify rejects a usage charge, the Plans page shows the reason it gave, along with a prompt to approve a higher usage limit for Sprout Affiliate in your Shopify billing settings. The app records the failure and puts those sales back in the queue, so the next time it reads your orders it tries the same fee again, and it keeps trying until the charge goes through. Nothing is written off, and a failed charge never eats credit you had banked.

If the app cannot read your plan from Shopify at all, it keeps serving the last answer it successfully got rather than treating you as unsubscribed. A temporary Shopify outage will not silently drop you to the free plan or hide features you are paying for. A scheduled PayPal payout in that window is not run against the wrong plan either: it is skipped for that pass and retried on the next one.