Affiliate programs are infrastructure

Affiliate programs are infrastructure. When I wrote this in 2017 it felt niche. By 2025 it is a real product category. Think @dubdotco. Links to attribution to compliance to payouts. Treat it like systems work. 🔗👇

I found a note from Aug 4, 2017 while digging through my notes. Context. We were building Agastya at Oswald Labs. A web accessibility plugin. I wanted an affiliate program. Then I realized the bigger idea was a platform any developer could run.

2017 reality. UTMs with GA goals and coupons glued together. Stripe or PayPal exports for manual payouts. 30 day cookies. Compliance came last. The hard part was attribution and payouts at scale. Safari ITP and GDPR pushed teams to first party events and server side postbacks.

2025 reality. Platforms treat affiliates as an attribution plus payments problem. Modern tools bundle short links, first party events, billing webhooks, partner ledgers, and one click payouts with tax and KYC. They ship program builders and discovery. Dub shows that arc.

What still feels open. Private cross device attribution without fingerprinting. Refund aware lifetime commissions that partners trust. Multi touch credit that aligns content and product.

Here’s the original note from 2017: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/notes/blob/main/notes/2017/agastya-affiliate.md