Stuck payouts
An earned balance sitting past the program's own stated minimum, aging past its payout cycle.
Get paid what you are owed
The money you earned is still sitting in their account.
Programs report the balance they owe you, then let it age past their own payout minimum. Affiliate Guardian watches every affiliate program you run and flags money that stopped moving, with the evidence attached and a confidence label on every finding.
The case it was built around
About $13,000 of my own money, unpaid across platforms for years. Single balances of $2,000 to $4,000, every one of them already past a stated $100 payout minimum.
Each balance was a number the platform reported itself. Nothing was broken. Nobody told me.
Every finding labeled
confirmed, inferred, or unknown
confirmed, inferred, or unknown
Nothing sent
without your approval
without your approval
⌁Findings feed
Product previewProgramFindingConfidence
In-house programBalance aging past payout minimumconfirmed
The platform reports a balance well past its own stated minimum, with no payout across the last several cycles. That balance is their number, not our estimate.
Eight SleepTracking intact through checkoutconfirmed
We followed the link through every redirect and your tracking survived to checkout. Nothing to do.
BON CHARGETracking token dropped on redirectinferred
The link works, but your tracking id disappears mid-redirect. Clicks land, credit does not. Worth a message to your affiliate manager.
AerSecurity challenge, held for reviewunknown
Their site challenged our checker, so we cannot see the truth yet. We hold it and recheck instead of guessing.
BiOptimizersEffective rate looks lowerinferred
Your settled commissions imply a lower rate than your agreement. Could be a promo mix shift, could be a quiet cut. Evidence attached either way.
AirDoctorWaiting on settled dataunknown
Recent commissions have not settled yet. Normal lag, not a leak. We wait for locked numbers before saying anything.
Every row carries its confidenceUnknown never fires a dollar alert
Running today
Five checks, live right now.
Everything on this list is shipped and running against real accounts. Work that is not built yet lives on the roadmap further down, never here.
Dead links
Links that stopped resolving, followed through the whole redirect chain before we call it.
Attribution loss
A link that still loads normally but drops your tracking token somewhere before checkout.
Expired codes
A discount code that stopped working, or still works and no longer credits your account.
Rate changes
A commission rate that moved away from your agreement, measured on settled money only.
Why I built it
I found $13,000 of my own money sitting unpaid across platforms.
Single balances of $2,000 to $4,000, aging for years, every one of them already past the platform’s own $100 payout minimum. The numbers were sitting in each dashboard the whole time. I only found them because I finally went looking, one platform at a time.
Other platform migrations broke tracking, detached my affiliate codes, and created repeated four-figure and occasional five-figure exposure.
I do not run ads on my site. Affiliate partnerships are a primary way the work gets funded. It was infuriating to put years into useful reviews and recommendations, then lose the compensation because no tool was watching the operational details.
Affiliate Guardian exists to make sure this happens to fewer publishers, and never sits unnoticed for years.
Built by a publisher. For publishers.
WHAT HAPPENED
The balance clears their minimum
The platform's own dashboard shows more owed than its stated $100 threshold.
The payout cycle passes
No payment arrives. Nothing flags it, because nothing is watching the balance.
It ages for years
$2,000 to $4,000 per program, sitting on the platform where I earned it.
I find it by hand
Only a manual audit across every platform surfaced the full $13,000.
A $10,000 payout found six months late
By the time I noticed the payment had never arrived, the company had gone bankrupt and the money was no longer collectible.
Tracking broke after a migration
A partner platform changed and attribution disappeared. The code still worked for the buyer; the sale no longer credited me.
The second story
A brand ran my ads without my affiliate link.
My work drove the traffic they paid for, and the agreement was violated with no broken link to find. Every page loaded. Every code worked. The attribution simply was not mine.
This one is not built yet. It is the hardest class to catch, and I would rather say that plainly than sell you a check that does not exist.
See where it sits on the roadmapTrust is the product
Every alert is real, or it does not send.
A tool like this is only worth running if you can act on every alert without double checking it. So it says unknown when the evidence is thin, rather than invent a number. Here is what that looks like in practice.
You always know how sure we are
Every finding is labeled confirmed, inferred, or unknown. An ambiguous signal is never dressed up as a confident dollar alert.
Nothing goes out without your yes
The product never emails a partner or takes an outward action on its own. A human approves each one first, every time.
A dead login cannot hide behind a green light
A source cannot show monitoring while its credential is silently broken. Read access is checked the moment you connect.
Pending commissions never cause a false alarm
Commissions settle 30 to 90 days after a sale. We wait for them to settle before we ever tell you a program dropped.
Your money math stays in one currency
Dollars, euros, and pounds are never added into one meaningless number. Each program is measured in its own currency.
A link that recovers clears itself
When a merchant comes back online, the alert resolves on its own. No stale broken flags sitting on your dashboard.
A security check is not a broken link
A Cloudflare or bot challenge is missing evidence, not a dead link. We hold it as unknown instead of crying leak.
A link can load fine and still drop your tracking
We follow the whole redirect chain and confirm your affiliate token survives to the end. A clean 200 that lost the tag still gets caught.
How it works
Connect the evidence. Go collect what is yours.
01
Bring your sources together
Connect supported networks and deliver the report emails or CSV exports your other programs already produce.
02
Find the money that stopped moving
Balances are checked against each program's stated payout terms, links are followed through every redirect, and codes, rates, and reporting history are compared against their prior state.
03
Work the highest-value finding
Read the evidence and the confidence label, confirm what is real, and go after the largest recoverable amount first.
Estimate your exposure
Use your operating numbers.
This estimates affiliate revenue worth reviewing. It is not a promise that the amount is lost or recoverable.
2. Programs driving most of your income
The handful of partners behind the bulk of your commissions.
↗
Revenue worth reviewing
$2,727to$6,364
Estimated annual exposure.
This estimate is driven by
15 programs
Enough that a quiet break can slip past you for weeks.
Enough that a quiet break can slip past you for weeks.
6-10 known issues
Your own break rate over the last year sets the range.
Your own break rate over the last year sets the range.
How this estimate works
We start from your annual affiliate revenue and your own rate of known issues, then scale it by how hard your portfolio is to watch by hand. More programs means a silent break hides longer before you catch it, which is exactly the gap this product closes. It prioritizes review; it does not claim the money was lost or can be recovered.
Coverage
Direct connections where available. Daily reports and exports everywhere else.
Report email and CSV delivery can be daily. Affiliate Guardian uses the source each program actually provides and shows its freshness instead of treating every source as equivalent.
| Source | Examples | Method | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct network connections | Awin, Impact, CJ, Refersion, GoAffPro, Post Affiliate Pro, GrowthHero and Everflow | Direct connection | Based on each network’s reporting cadence |
| Scheduled reports | Daily or periodic report emails from networks and direct programs | Email ingestion | As soon as each report arrives |
| Exports | Amazon Associates and other programs that provide CSV reports instead of a direct connection | CSV import | Whenever an export is uploaded or delivered |
On the roadmap
What we are building next.
These are in development, not live yet. We list them so you know where the product is headed. Founding members help decide the order.
In development
Agreement and termination monitoring
The class that cost me the most: a brand using your work without your link, or changing terms without telling you, cookie duration included. We are building a monitor that watches the agreement itself, not only the link.
In development
Platform-migration continuity
Brands move networks constantly. We are building a durable brand record so a program keeps its history and its dollar baseline through a move, instead of resetting to zero and firing false alarms.
In development
Custom landing-page verification
Many brands give you a dedicated page with no tracking in the URL. We are building checks that read the attribution baked into the page itself, so a vanity link is verified like any other.
In development
Click-verification probes
We are exploring probes that load your link and confirm the network actually recorded the click under your account. Opt-in only, behind your approval, never running on its own.
Least access by design
Affiliate earnings data is sensitive even when access is read-only.
Affiliate Guardian requests read-only scopes wherever a network offers them, confirms that read access actually works before it trusts a connection, encrypts each tenant’s credentials separately, and never returns stored credentials through the product. Read-only access limits what the system can do; it does not reduce how carefully the data is handled.
Read the security commitments25 founding places available
Apply for the founding cohort.
Accepted publishers receive lifetime founding pricing, priority onboarding, and a direct voice in what we build next through private roadmap voting and feedback.
Lifetime founding pricing
Priority onboarding
Private roadmap voting and feedback
How pricing works
A monthly subscription keeps the guard running. If you ask us to work a recovery for you, our share declines as the recovery grows: 10 percent of the first $1,000, 5 percent to $10,000, 3 percent above that. The same schedule applies on every plan.
Applications are open
Think Affiliate Guardian fits how you publish?
Tell us where revenue slips through today and what you want the product to solve first.