I'd been running affiliate programs for client WooCommerce stores on AffiliateWP for years. It's solid software, well-supported, deserved its market position. But I kept hitting the same three walls and watching client after client run into them.
The first wall was add-on stacking. Two-tier referrals — the thing every serious affiliate program eventually wants — was a paid add-on. Per-product commission rates were another. Bank-CSV payouts another. A clean A/B email testing layer didn't exist in the AffiliateWP catalogue at all. Admin impersonation ("View as Sarah") was another paid add-on. By the time you'd added the half-dozen add-ons most growing programs actually need, the annual bill ran past $900. For a single-site licence.
The second wall was the cart restriction. AffiliateWP is excellent for WooCommerce. It's adequate for Easy Digital Downloads via a $79/yr add-on. It has nothing for Surecart at any price. As more clients moved digital products to Surecart and course sales to EDD, we kept getting asked: "Can the affiliate program track that store too?" Increasingly the honest answer was no.
The third wall was the missing differentiators. AI-generated swipe copy for affiliates didn't exist anywhere. Cloud-assist fraud detection — sharing SHA-256 hashed signals across stores so a new shop benefits from every prior shop's blacklist — didn't exist. Stripe Connect Express direct payouts at 0.25% (instead of PayPal's 2% mass-pay flow) didn't exist in any WordPress affiliate plugin. None of these were on any vendor's roadmap that I could find.
So I thought: someone should build this. Self-hosted, no SaaS lock-in. Two-tier MLM in core, not an add-on. AI swipe-copy out of the box. WooCommerce + EDD + Surecart adapters in the same plugin with the same admin. Cloud-assist fraud as an opt-in network effect. Stripe Connect Express as the default payout. Priced at the $149/yr that lets a small store actually afford the full feature set.
We built it. Asteris Affiliates is what I would have wanted to install five years ago — at a quarter of what we were paying then.
The pricing decision
$149/yr for one site (Starter). $299/yr for three (Pro). $549/yr for ten (Agency). Every tier unlocks every feature — the tier just changes site count and support level. There's no founder discount, no lifetime deal, no upsell, no bundle. The regular price is the price. Pricing details →
Pricing lock: as long as your subscription is active, you pay what you signed up for. When we raise prices in the future (and we will, as the feature surface grows), existing customers stay at the rate they joined at. Cancel and re-subscribe later and you pay the then-current rate.
The architecture decision
Self-hosted. No cloud calls during normal operation. Every affiliate, every click, every commission, every payout, every email log stays in your wp_asteris_* tables on your own database. The one optional exception is cloud-assist fraud detection — opt-in, off by default — which sends SHA-256 hashed signals (no IPs, no emails, no order data) to a shared network for cross-store fraud-pattern matching. Disable it and there is literally zero outbound traffic from the plugin.
If you cancel your Asteris licence, the plugin keeps working. You stop receiving updates and you can't reach support, but the affiliate program itself continues running indefinitely on the last installed version. Your data is on your server. Your code is GPL-2.0+. Nothing is held hostage. Why this matters →
The build team
Asteris is built by a small team in Sydney, Australia. The legal entity is My Cosmic Message Pty Ltd, registered in NSW (ACN 652 358 159, ABN 30 652 358 159). I'm the founder and primary developer. The team writes the code, answers the support email, and ships the releases — there's no offshore Level-1 support funnel to bounce off. If you email support@asterisaffiliates.com you're emailing one of three people who know the codebase end-to-end.
Asteris Affiliates is part of a wider product family: Asteris for WooCommerce (a 31-module utility plugin for WC), Asteris for WordPress (SEO + AI for WP sites), Asteris Cart (a dedicated checkout replacement) and Asteris Blocks (a free Gutenberg block library). All four ship from the same codebase principles — self-hosted, no SaaS lock-in, GPL-2.0+, your data forever.
What's next
The public roadmap tracks queued work. The themes for 2026 are: deeper reporting and analytics, broader cart adapters (a SureCart adapter is shipping, BigCommerce is being evaluated), a no-code visual fraud-rule builder on top of the cloud-assist signal feed, and a much richer AI swipe-copy generator that learns from your existing customer email tone.
How to reach me
If you have a question that the docs or pricing page doesn't answer — feature request, integration question, pricing edge case, "would Asteris work for our weird setup" — email me directly: nick@asterisaffiliates.com. I read every email. If it makes sense to spend 30 minutes on a video call, I'll book one with you. We're at the stage where founder-to-customer contact is still possible and we want to keep it that way as long as we can.
— Nick Lord. nick@asterisaffiliates.com · Sydney, AU