Cowral's affiliate program: earn 30% for a year, and how to disclose your link the way the FTC wants

If you’ve ever told your audience about a tool you use, you already know how this goes. Someone asks “what do you use to plan your videos?”, you answer in the comments, and the company never knows you sent them a customer.

Starting today, Cowral pays you for that. Anyone with a Cowral account can join our affiliate program, get a personal link, and earn 30% of what the people they refer pay us for a full year. The people you refer get 20% off their first three months of Pro.

This post covers how it works, what one referral is actually worth, and the part most affiliate programs skip: how to share your link so you stay on the right side of the FTC.

The deal, in plain numbers

What	The details
Your commission	30% of every payment, tax excluded
How long	Each customer’s first 12 months, starting from their first payment
Your audience’s discount	20% off their first 3 months of Pro
Who can join	Anyone with a Cowral account, including the free plan
How you’re paid	Monthly, to your bank through Stripe
Minimum payout	$50
Refund hold	30 days per payment
How long your link remembers someone	60 days from their last click

The full terms live on the program page. They’re short, and worth reading before you share anything.

What one referral is worth

Pro is $19 a month. Someone who signs up through your link pays $15.20 a month for their first three months (that’s the 20% discount), then $19 a month after that.

Over their first year, that’s $45.60 for the discounted months plus $171 for the other nine, or $216.60 in total. Your 30% of that is about $65.

So ten Pro customers who stay for a year is about $650. That isn’t a promise. It depends entirely on how many people upgrade and how long they stay, and some people will cancel early. But it’s the real math, and you can watch every sign-up and dollar come in from your dashboard.

How to join

You’ll find the program in your Cowral dashboard under Earn 30%. If you don’t have an account yet, the free plan is enough. You don’t need to pay for Pro to be an affiliate.

When you join, you pick the code for your link, so it can match your handle: cowral.com/?ref=yourname. Leave it blank and we’ll suggest one.

Your link works on any Cowral page, so you can point people at the homepage, a free tool, or a blog post that fits your video. As long as the link has your code, they’re attributed to you for 60 days.

How you get paid

Payouts run through Stripe. When you set them up, Stripe takes you through its own onboarding page, where it handles identity verification and your bank details. Cowral never sees your bank account.

Each commission is held for 30 days, because people can ask for a refund. If a payment is refunded, its commission is reduced or removed. Once the hold is over, it’s ready to pay. At the start of each month, if you have at least $50 ready, we send it to your bank. If you have less, it rolls over to the next month.

Affiliate commissions are income. If you’re in the US, they can affect your taxes, including whether you need to make quarterly estimated payments. We keep the current IRS thresholds, with links to the official pages, in our Creator Rules Tracker. This isn’t tax advice, so check with a tax professional if you’re unsure.

Disclose your link the way the FTC wants

This is the part that trips creators up, and the FTC is direct about it.

The FTC’s guidance says that if you earn money from a link, you need to tell people, clearly. And it specifically says the label “affiliate link” might not do the job, because people don’t always know what it means.

So write it in plain words. For example:

• “I earn a commission if you upgrade through my link.”
• “Paid link: I get a cut if you sign up for Pro.”

According to the FTC’s Q&A, the words “paid link” placed right beside the link should be enough, while “commissionable link” probably isn’t clear to most people.

In videos, say it in the video

If you mention Cowral in a video, the disclosure belongs in the video itself. A line in the description isn’t enough on its own.

The same FTC guide says people are more likely to notice a disclosure that’s both spoken and on screen, since some viewers watch without sound. A spoken line like “I earn a commission if you use my link” plus a short on-screen note covers both.

Other rules that apply to Cowral links

• Put it where people will see it. The FTC says disclosures hidden in a profile, at the very end of a video, or behind “more” are likely to be missed.
• Keep it in the same language as your post. If you post in Spanish, disclose in Spanish.
• Only recommend Cowral if you mean it. The FTC’s rules are about honest endorsements. If you haven’t used it, try it first.

Our program terms also rule out a few things that would get your commissions cancelled: spam, bidding on “Cowral” in search ads, posting your link on coupon sites, misleading claims, paying people to sign up, and referring yourself.

Where creators tend to share it

What works depends on your audience, but these places fit how people actually look for tools:

• A pinned comment on a video where you show how you plan or script content.
• Your video description, next to a spoken disclosure in the video.
• A “tools I use” page or a link-in-bio list.
• Your newsletter, if you write one, especially in an issue about your workflow.

The recommendations that convert best usually show the tool doing something real, like a script it wrote for your next video or a trend it caught early in your niche. Telling people a tool is great is easy. Showing it working is what they believe.

Frequently asked questions