So the affiliates obviously get 25%.

30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%

Interesting, may I ask what network exactly you used?

We don't use one. Got connected through with the first affiliates in a paid/private community in that particular niche

This is helpful. Just to clarify, so you had created your own affiliate network and run this manually? Tracking, payouts, etc?

There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent

Can you recommend this software? It's definitely not considered an ad, but just to understand what exactly you find useful.

If you search something like saas affiliate marketing software it's the first non ad result

yes - please recommend affiliate software that is actually good, lots of people here woudl love it to get off the ground