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