Recurring, lifetime and tiered commissions are all free-plugin features, not Pro upsells — the plugin’s own feature comparison lists all three as available on both tiers. What Pro adds on top is multi-level topology options, covered below.
Recurring#
A recurring commission follows a subscription for as long as it renews, not just the first payment. It’s off by default — the squad_affiliate_recurring filter has to be switched on — because a merchant who has never touched it should see renewal behaviour stay exactly as it was before the setting existed. Once it’s on, a renewal with no fresh cookie or coupon of its own falls back to whichever affiliate the customer is bound to, so the affiliate who signed the customer up keeps getting paid on every billing cycle without having to re-click anything.
MemberPress is the clearest example of this in practice: it fires the same status hook, mepr-txn-status-complete, on a member’s first payment and every renewal after it, so recurring commission there needs no separate logic at all — each firing is its own transaction with its own referral, and the recurring filter decides whether an unattributed renewal still falls back to the bound customer’s original affiliate.
Lifetime#
A lifetime commission pays the affiliate for everything a referred customer ever buys, on any product, forever. Like recurring, it’s gated by its own filter (squad_affiliate_lifetime) and off by default. It relies on the same customer-binding fallback as recurring — the customer is tied to the affiliate rather than to a cookie that will eventually expire — and the binding is permanent and first-touch: once a customer is bound, a later link or coupon from a different affiliate cannot take them over.
It is the most generous setting in the plugin and the one to model before enabling. A customer with a decade of orders is a decade of commission, and because the binding never expires or gets renegotiated, there’s no natural point where it winds down on its own — you either accept that on every future order from that customer, or you don’t turn it on.
Tiered#
Tiers raise the rate as an affiliate crosses thresholds you set, on one of two measures: lifetime referral count or lifetime earnings. Two decisions matter more than the numbers:
- The window is always lifetime, not rolling. There’s no setting for “referrals in the last 90 days” — a performance-tier rule matches against an affiliate’s running total, so tiers only ever go up as volume accumulates, never down because a slow month passed.
- Retroactivity. Tiers reprice what follows, not what already happened — a referral is stamped with the rate that was in effect when it was created, so crossing a threshold today does not reach back and reprice last month’s sales. That’s the same rule that governs any commission-rate change, tier or otherwise: see Setting commission rates.
When an affiliate has crossed two tiers at once — say thresholds at 50 and 100 referrals, and they’re past both — the higher one wins. The engine doesn’t rely on which rule happens to be checked first; it explicitly compares the two thresholds and keeps the higher.
Signup and performance bonuses#
Two one-off and periodic bonuses sit next to rate-based commission, both off by default and both recorded as ordinary referrals so they show up in the same reports and the same payout batches as any other commission:
- Signup bonus — a single flat amount paid the moment an affiliate becomes active, whether that’s through auto-approval or you approving their application. It only ever fires once per affiliate: the awarder checks the affiliate’s own referral history for an existing signup-bonus row before creating a new one.
- Performance bonus — a flat amount paid once an affiliate’s earnings inside a calendar month clear a target you set. It’s capped at one per affiliate per calendar month — the month itself is written into the referral as the idempotency key, so a burst of sales landing in the same minute can’t accidentally award it twice — and the bonus itself never counts towards the target that triggers it, which stops a large enough bonus from qualifying an affiliate for the next one and paying itself in a loop.
Both are filters (squad_affiliate_signup_bonus, squad_affiliate_performance_bonus and squad_affiliate_performance_target) rather than settings-screen fields in the free build, so turning either on means adding a small filter in a site-specific plugin or via a code snippet, not just checking a box.
MLM structures#
Multi-level override commissions — an affiliate’s recruiter, and their recruiter’s recruiter, each earning a smaller percentage on a referral’s sale, up to ten levels deep — already ship in the free build, gated behind the squad_affiliate_network_enabled filter (off by default). Turn it on and a new affiliate who signs up through another affiliate’s link is automatically recorded as that affiliate’s recruit, and every sale they make pays an override up the chain according to whatever per-level percentages you configure.
What Pro adds is not the override math itself, but named matrix topologies — Unilevel, Binary and Forced Matrix — for shaping and capping how wide or deep a downline is allowed to grow. The free build’s network is a plain, unlimited tree; Pro’s topologies constrain that tree to one of the classic MLM shapes. Check your jurisdiction before you build one either way — the legal line between multi-level marketing and something regulated is not drawn by your plugin settings.