Keep the sale on your processor: ThriveCart pricing, the affiliate center, and what you still handle

You have seen the one-time price and a checkout with no platform fee, and you want to know if a partner can promote the offer. They can, once the account is on Pro+. The buyer's payment still lands in your Stripe or PayPal account, and you send the ThriveCart affiliate commission yourself.

The monthly bills and the one-time Standard license are in the plan table further down. Set them next to each other before you pay a year up front.

Compare the monthly bill with the one-time license

You still handle refunds, tax, and affiliate payouts

The affiliate setup article says you are the merchant of record. Customer funds go to the processor you connect, and ThriveCart does not hold them. The buyer's card statement shows the name on the processor account you connected. Refunds and chargebacks are handled in that same processor account.

List the same product on ClickBank or Digistore24, and the network's name is what the buyer sees on the card. That company also splits the sale with the affiliate. JVZoo can deposit a sale to your processor and still charges its own platform fee for the listing. On a ThriveCart sale, the fee for moving the money is the one your processor charges. CopeCart is the EU reseller option: the buyer pays CopeCart, and CopeCart is the company on that order.

When the company that charges the card must remit the tax and pay the affiliates, a network listing does that work. ThriveCart runs the order form, the bump, and the upsell on the processor you already use.

What you get before anyone becomes a ThriveCart affiliate

The homepage lists one bump offer, one-click upsells and downsells, sales tax automation, and unlimited products and funnels on Standard. Pro+ adds the affiliate center, more than one bump, custom domains, subscription dunning, and JV contracts.

The bump and the one-click upsell are included in the plan you can use without partners. The affiliate center is what you add when a partner's link must get credit for a sale. That person joins your program, and the account has to be on Pro+ or a legacy plan that includes affiliates.

What the public comments describe

Readers are talking about two different purchases. One is the software subscription you buy from ThriveCart. The other is the checkout your customer uses.

On r/digital_marketing, a buyer said a refund for the software purchase, requested within the refund window, took weeks to arrive. They treated whether the checkout works as a separate issue from the refund.

A martech thread about choosing a cart includes a seller who said outages left buyers unable to finish paying. The same thread includes a seller who had Stripe problems with SamCart, and who said staying with ThriveCart had been the right call. Read the two comments together. One is about whether the order form stays up. The other is about which company a seller trusted after a processor dispute.

ThriveCart pricing: monthly, annual, and the one-time license

New plans include a 30-day trial. Standard subscriptions include a ThriveCart Academy Starter plan. The pricing post lists that plan next to the Standard rates, and it is also the source for the annual Pro+ rate. The month-to-month figures appear on the live checkouts: Standard and Pro+. The one-time Standard option is on the lifetime checkout. The yearly upgrade for people who already hold that license is in the Pro+ article.

Ten months at the month-to-month Standard rate come to $470, which is still less than the one-time license. The eleventh payment brings that total to $517, which is more than the one-time license. This comparison uses only the higher month-to-month rate. The annual price is a separate row in the table.

Use the monthly trial if you still need to see how the bump behaves on a live checkout. Buy the one-time license if you already expect to keep the checkout for more than eleven months. Add Pro+ in the month you enroll the first partner. Standard already carries the bump and the upsell, so the upgrade is the affiliate center, the extra bumps, custom domains, dunning, and JV contracts.

The ThriveCart fees page places this software bill next to what the networks take out of a sale.

The ThriveCart affiliate center requires Pro+

Affiliate promotions start on Pro+. A new account gets them by upgrading to Pro+. A legacy Pro or Client account already includes them. ThriveCart affiliate setup, for a new account, starts with that upgrade.

You pay your partners yourself. You receive the customer's payment, minus processor fees, and the commission goes from your account to the affiliate.

The ThriveCart affiliate link partners have to share

Affiliate links use this host pattern: https://affiliateid--vendor.thrivecart.com/product-name/. The host is the affiliate id, two hyphens, and your account name. The product slug is the path. ThriveCart affiliate tracking follows that address.

The address a browser shows after the redirect, the one carrying an affiliate query parameter, does not record the sale. A partner who copies that redirected URL sends traffic that will not be credited. Give partners the dashboard link, the one with the double hyphen in the host, and treat any other format as a missed commission.

ThriveCart affiliate commission and the PayPal payout

ThriveCart affiliate payouts go through PayPal. Once PayPal is connected, it can send each commission on its own or wait until you release it. Stripe and Authorize.net can take the customer's payment. They cannot send the affiliate commission from inside the tool. Paying the partner outside ThriveCart, and keeping your own record, is allowed.

You fund that commission from revenue that has already reached your processor. The customer pays you, and you pay the affiliate.

Tax automation adds its own percentage

The processor fees page states a 0% fee for ThriveCart. You still pay the processor. On that same page, the tax automation line is 0.5% per eligible transaction on Standard and 0.35% on Pro+. That line is the fee for the calculation. It sits on top of the zero platform cut.

Each network takes a percentage of the sale. Several of them also hold funds for a period before you can withdraw. Put a sample order through the affiliate network fee calculator, then read the payout timeline for the reserve. Those hold periods belong to the networks. On a ThriveCart charge, your processor pays you.

The SamCart comparison sets the two hosted checkouts side by side. The SamCart review covers the other cart, for vendors who want bumps and a private affiliate program. The review index lists every network and cart covered here. Use the fees page above when you want this software bill in the same list as those network cuts.