Tax and KYC collection — W-9 for US affiliates, the appropriate W-8 for non-US ones — with a payout gate and 1099 reporting, is listed as a Pro-only feature in the plugin’s own free/Pro comparison. The free plugin has no tax-form collection screen, no stored form data, and no year-end payee export. If you are paying US affiliates at any scale, that gap is the reason to look at Pro rather than build around it.
Where the gate would attach#
The free build already ships the seam this kind of gate needs, even though it ships no tax-form logic of its own: every payout batch is built by grouping unpaid referrals into one filterable set, and a single filter — applied to the whole set of affiliates a batch is about to pay, not affiliate by affiliate — decides which of them are actually eligible to be paid in that run. It’s described in the plugin’s own code as exactly the seam “a tax form on file, a verified identity, a minimum balance” would use, applied once per batch rather than as a query per affiliate. Held affiliates aren’t dropped from the batch calculation — they simply wait for the next one, so the money doesn’t quietly vanish from a report anywhere in between. That’s the mechanism a tax-form gate is built on top of: it’s real in the free plugin, but nothing hooks it there.
What this would mean in practice, based on how the plugin is described#
Affiliates would complete a W-9 (US) or the appropriate W-8 (non-US) in their portal, with the form stored against the affiliate record and visible to the affiliate who submitted it. With the payout gate enabled, an affiliate without a completed form would be excluded from a batch — their balance would continue to accrue and remain visible to them, alongside the reason they can’t be paid yet, which is the difference between a gate and a mystery. At year end, a threshold-filtered payee list — affiliates paid at or above the reporting threshold in the calendar year, with the details their form provided — would be something to hand your accountant, not a filing in itself; the plugin wouldn’t submit anything to a tax authority on your behalf.
What this is not#
It is not tax advice, whatever shape it eventually takes. Thresholds would need to be configurable because they change and because your obligations depend on where you and your affiliates are. Ask an accountant what you owe; a tool like this exists to tell you who you paid, not what you’re liable for.