Affiliate Platform Overview

What Is It?

The Affiliate Platform is a web-based tool that manages affiliate marketing links for content creators on MoneyMatchup (moneymatchup.com). Content creators — mostly personal finance YouTubers and social media personalities — promote financial products to their audiences (credit cards, loans, savings accounts, etc.). When their audience signs up through a creator's link, the creator earns a commission.

The platform handles everything in the middle: creating unique trackable links per creator, routing traffic to the right affiliate networks, tracking clicks and earnings, and giving admins tools to manage offers and approvals.

Two Sides

The platform has two distinct sides:

• Creator side — What creators see when they log in: their dashboard, their links, their earnings, and their analytics.
• Admin side — What Creators Agency staff see: full management of offers, approvals, creator accounts, analytics data, and background jobs.

How It Works (High Level)

Each creator gets unique links in the format secure.moneymatchup.com/{slug}. When someone from their audience clicks one of these links, the platform's routing system automatically sends them to the correct affiliate provider (Impact, PartnerStack, RedVentures, etc.) using the right tracking parameters. The click and any resulting conversion is recorded and attributed to that creator. → DB: The slug is stored in AffiliateLink.slug. Click and conversion data is written to affiliate_analytics (affiliateLinkId, clicks, conversions, earnings).

Key Concepts

• Offer — A financial product available for creators to promote (e.g. SoFi personal loans, QuickBooks) → DB: Offer table (name, brand, category, description, slug)
• Provider — The affiliate network or company that actually tracks and pays commissions for an offer (e.g. Impact, PartnerStack, RedVentures) → DB: OfferProvider table (offerId, dataSource, defaultWeight, active)
• Affiliate Link — A creator's unique link for a specific offer on a specific channel/platform → DB: AffiliateLink table (userId, offerId, slug, platform, channelId)
• Slug — The unique identifier in a creator's link URL (e.g. caleb-sofi-youtube) → DB: AffiliateLink.slug — used for routing and matched back to creators in analytics pulls
• Tier — A classification assigned to each creator by admins that affects their platform access → DB: User.tier (values: 1, 2, 3)

Technology

Built as a modern web application (SvelteKit framework), hosted on Vercel, with a PostgreSQL database (Neon). Two separate environments exist: staging (for testing) and production (live).