TL;DR: The average household now spends £200 to £270 a month on subscriptions, mostly on software, streaming, VPNs and digital services. Mainstream cashback sites pay almost nothing on these categories despite the underlying affiliate commissions being some of the highest in the industry. The gap between what cashback sites earn on a SaaS signup and what they pass to you is bigger than anywhere else in cashback. Once you understand why, it changes how you think about subscription spending entirely.

Here’s a number that should stop you scrolling. The average American household spends $273 a month on subscriptions, but estimates they spend around $111. That’s a $1,944 annual gap between what people think they’re paying and what’s actually leaving their account.

In the UK, the picture is similar. Gen Z subscribers in particular average £305 a month, roughly three times what Gen X spends. And across age groups, 54.9% of people admit to having at least one subscription they don’t use.

Subscriptions, in other words, are now a major personal finance category. Not a hobby, not a luxury, but a core monthly outgoing on the same scale as a phone bill or a council tax payment. And here’s the strange part: the cashback industry has barely noticed.

The mismatch nobody talks about

Open any major cashback site and look at the front page. You’ll see deals for fashion retailers, supermarkets, electronics stores, holidays, and insurance. Then dig three levels deep into the categories menu and you might find software, occasionally tucked under “Office” or “Services” with rates that look suspiciously low.

This is odd. Affiliate commission rates for SaaS, VPNs, web hosting, and digital subscriptions are routinely 30 to 70%. Compare that to the 1 to 3% commissions paid by most physical retailers. On a like-for-like basis, a software subscription generates 10 to 50 times more affiliate revenue per pound spent than a high-street purchase does.

So why don’t the mainstream cashback rates reflect that? Two reasons, neither of them flattering.

Reason one: their audience grew up shopping

Rakuten, TopCashback and Quidco built their brands during the e-commerce boom of the 2000s and 2010s. Their entire user acquisition strategy, their merchant relationships, their email cadence, their browser extensions, all of it was designed around physical retail. A user signs up because they’re about to buy a sofa or book a holiday. The subscription economy didn’t really exist yet, and by the time it did, the muscle memory was set.

This isn’t speculation. Look at any of the big cashback sites’ homepages and you can see what they expect users to do: search for Argos, John Lewis, eBay. The subscription categories are an afterthought because the product was designed for shoppers, not subscribers.

Reason two: they keep more of the commission

Here’s the bit that gets uncomfortable. When a cashback site earns a 50% affiliate commission on a software signup, they have a choice about how much to pass through to you. Pass through 90%, and you’re getting 45% back on a £100 annual subscription. Pass through 10%, and you’re getting 5%, while they bank the rest.

The mainstream sites tend to keep a bigger percentage of high-commission categories. The reason isn’t usually stated, but the maths is obvious: SaaS users don’t shop around the way deal-hunters do, so the cashback site can be less generous without losing them. There’s no public data on this. There’s just the gap between what the affiliate networks pay out and what shows up on the consumer-facing rate.

The maths that changes the picture

Let’s run actual numbers, because this is where the manifesto lands.

A typical UK household with eight active subscriptions might spend something like:

  • A streaming bundle: £40/month
  • Mobile and broadband add-ons (cloud storage, password manager, security): £15/month
  • A music service: £11/month
  • Productivity tools (Notion, Google One, etc.): £15/month
  • A VPN: £8/month
  • A fitness or learning app: £15/month
  • One or two trial-converted services they forgot about: £20/month

That’s £124 a month, or roughly £1,500 a year. The actual averages are higher, but let’s stay conservative.

Now imagine you got 10% cashback on the renewable parts of that spend. Not on signup, not as a one-off, but every year. That’s £150 a year back, indefinitely, on services you were going to pay for anyway. Over five years, you’re looking at £750.

Now imagine the cashback rate were 25%, which is well within the range that the underlying affiliate commissions can support on certain SaaS products. That’s £375 a year. Over five years, £1,875. We’re now in the territory of “this is a meaningful line item in your household finance,” not pocket change.

But here’s the punchline: the actual rates the mainstream sites pay on most of these categories are closer to 1 to 3%. So the £1,500 a year of subscription spend generates around £30 in cashback. The structural opportunity is sitting right there, untapped, partly because nobody’s chosen to lean into it.

Why subscriptions are the perfect cashback target

Beyond the commission rates, subscriptions have three properties that make them genuinely better-suited to cashback than retail.

Recurring spend is predictable

Retail cashback is lumpy. You earn a chunk when you book a holiday, then nothing for three months, then a small amount on a clothing order. Forecasting your annual cashback as a retail user is basically impossible.

Subscriptions don’t work like that. If you’ve got eight active subscriptions and they’re all in cashback-eligible categories, your earnings smooth out into something close to a monthly drip. You can budget against it. You can include it in financial plans the way people include credit card rewards.

Tracking is cleaner

We covered this in our piece on how cashback websites actually work, but it’s worth repeating here. The biggest reason cashback fails to track on retail purchases is the messy buyer journey: people open multiple tabs, compare prices, click on coupon pop-ups, abandon carts, come back later. Each of these breaks the tracking cookie.

Subscription purchases are usually the opposite. The user has decided they want NordVPN, they click through, they sign up. Linear path, single session, clean attribution. Industry data we’ve seen suggests subscription affiliate transactions track successfully at significantly higher rates than retail ones do.

Renewals stack

A retail cashback transaction is one-and-done. You buy the jumper, you get your 2% back, the relationship ends. A subscription transaction with recurring cashback is a perpetual machine. You’re earning on year one, year two, year three, all the way until you cancel. The lifetime value of a single subscription signup, from a cashback perspective, can be ten times what a retail purchase delivers.

This is also why some affiliate programmes specifically pay recurring commissions on subscriptions, not just first-month payments. NordVPN, for example, pays affiliates 30% on every renewal, not just the initial signup. That economic structure is what makes subscription cashback genuinely different.

The obvious objections

If this argument is so clean, why hasn’t it already happened? Fair question. Here are the honest answers.

“Subscriptions are smaller-ticket than retail”

Sometimes true, but increasingly not. A two-year VPN deal can be £150 upfront. An annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription is £600. A small business hosting package can be £200 a year. Once you start adding these up, the per-transaction value of subscription cashback isn’t far off retail, and the recurring nature makes it bigger over time.

“Lots of SaaS programmes ban incentivised traffic”

Genuinely true, and this is the operational reason mainstream cashback sites struggle in this space. Many SaaS affiliate programmes have terms that exclude cashback or coupon traffic specifically, because they want the affiliate to be doing genuine recommendation rather than bribing users to click. A site that wants to do SaaS cashback properly has to be selective about which programmes they work with, and present themselves as a content-led affiliate rather than a pure incentive site. That’s a different operating model.

“Why hasn’t anyone done this already?”

The honest answer is that some have, just not at scale and not with consumer-friendly terms. There are corners of the affiliate world where SaaS cashback exists, but they’re either trade-only platforms aimed at agencies, or sketchy referral schemes that pay you in vouchers and have terrible UX. Building a clean, consumer-facing version of this requires merchant relationships, content, trust, and a conscious decision to run on lower margins than the established players. Until recently, there hasn’t been much pressure on the incumbents to bother.

What this means for you, today

Most people reading this aren’t going to overhaul their entire shopping behaviour overnight. But there’s a much smaller, very useful action you can take right now: audit your subscriptions and find out which ones offer cashback through any channel.

A few practical steps:

Check your last bank statement and list every recurring charge over £5. Most people are surprised by what they find. The data says 54.9% of people have at least one subscription they’re not actively using.

For the ones you’re keeping, check whether any cashback site offers meaningful rates on the merchant. Don’t just look at the headline cashback site, look at three or four, because the rates vary wildly. We’ve seen the same merchant offering 2% on one site and 25% on another for identical products.

When subscriptions come up for renewal, that’s the right moment to actually act. Cashback only triggers on a signup or upgrade in most cases, not on existing rolling renewals. So note the renewal date, then sign up via the cashback site shortly before it.

Be honest about which subscriptions you’d cancel anyway. Cashback isn’t a reason to keep paying for something you don’t use. The biggest single source of subscription overspend, by every available study, is auto-renewal on services people would have cancelled if they remembered. Cashback won’t fix that.

Where this is going

Step back, and there’s a bigger pattern here. The subscription economy is now valued at over $900 billion globally and growing at roughly 13% a year. The Software and Technology segment alone is forecast to grow at 15.8% a year through 2033, faster than any other vertical in the subscription economy.

If you assume subscriptions keep eating a bigger share of household spending (which every dataset suggests they will), the question of how cashback rewards subscription spending becomes a much bigger deal than it currently is. The current setup, where cashback sites largely ignore the category that’s driving spending growth, is not stable. It’s going to change.

The cashback we offer on SaaS subscriptions at Rewardio is one version of that change. There will be others. The point of this article isn’t to argue that we’re the answer; it’s to argue that the gap is real, the maths is real, and if you’re paying attention to your subscription spending, this is a category worth watching.

The best-kept secret isn’t going to stay secret much longer.

FAQ

What is cashback on SaaS subscriptions? Cashback on SaaS subscriptions means earning a percentage of what you spend on software, streaming, VPNs, hosting, and other recurring digital services back as cash. The mechanism is the same as retail cashback: you click through a cashback site to sign up, the merchant pays the cashback site an affiliate commission, and the cashback site shares a portion with you.

Why do most cashback sites pay so little on software subscriptions? Two reasons. First, the major cashback sites grew up around retail and never optimised for subscription categories. Second, software affiliate commissions are higher than retail, so the cashback site can keep a bigger margin while still appearing competitive. The user-facing rate often doesn’t reflect the underlying commission.

How much cashback can I realistically earn on subscriptions? It depends entirely on the merchant and the cashback site. On mainstream cashback sites, software subscriptions typically pay 1-5%. On specialist sites, the same merchants can pay 15-30% or more, because the underlying commissions are 30-70%.

Are SaaS cashback offers usually one-off or recurring? This is merchant-specific. Some pay a one-off cashback on signup or first payment. Others (like NordVPN and certain hosting providers) have recurring affiliate commission structures that, in principle, can support recurring cashback to the user. Always check the terms before assuming.

Will using a cashback site affect my subscription price? No. The price you pay at checkout is the same whether you go through a cashback site or directly. The cashback comes from the merchant’s marketing budget, not from your wallet.

What’s the catch? The same catches that apply to all cashback. Tracking can fail if the cookie doesn’t take properly, the validation period can be 30-120 days, and some merchants exclude cashback purchases from other promotions. We covered the broader trust questions in our piece on are cashback sites legit.

Should I cancel subscriptions just to repurchase them through cashback? Generally no. Cashback typically only applies to new signups, not existing customers, and most merchants have terms that exclude cancel-and-rejoin patterns within a certain window. Use cashback at the natural moments: when you’re starting a new subscription, when you’re switching providers, or at major renewal points where you have to actively re-sign up.