From Café Orion to launch: the story behind Affilibee

Affilibee is live. Before this blog fills up with feature announcements and development updates, I want to tell you how it came to be. It started long before the first line of code, with two colleagues, one very busy project, and a cup of coffee in Borås.

Two colleagues, one big transition

A few years ago, Johan and I worked at the same company, as part of a larger team. I was one of the developers and Johan was a project manager. The company was in the middle of moving to a new ERP system, which meant integrations and workflows across the business had to be rethought and rebuilt, often while the old ones were still running. At the same time, the team was building a new multi-brand platform for selling wallpaper, with a headless CMS at its core.

A project like that shows you very quickly who you work well with. Johan and I kept ending up on the same pieces of work, with him keeping the plan together and making sure things were built in the right order, while I spent my days deep in the code. We complemented each other well, and together with the rest of the team we got the platform out the door.

The search that came up empty

Somewhere in the middle of building that platform, I went looking for an affiliate system. I assumed it would take an afternoon.

It didn't. Every option I found fell into at least one of these traps:

• Bloated. Dashboards packed with modules, reports, and settings we would never touch, but would still pay for.
• Expensive. Pricing built for large enterprises, with a monthly bill that was hard to justify for a growing business.
• Heavy on the storefront. Most tools wanted a large JavaScript snippet on every page to track visitors and conversions. We had worked hard to keep the platform fast, and adding someone else's script felt like a step backwards.
• Confusing. Interfaces so crowded that simple tasks, like inviting a partner or checking a commission, took far too many clicks.

There was also the experience for the affiliates themselves. We didn't want them to feel like they were being sent off to a big, separate system run by a third company. They should sign up on our own site and follow their commissions there too, so the whole program felt like part of our brand. And behind the scenes, the system should take care of paying the affiliates for us.

What I actually wanted was something small and focused: a headless affiliate system with a good API, where our own platform stays in charge and simply reports when a purchase has happened. I couldn't find one. It looked like a real gap in the market and, more personally, like a tool I would love to work with myself.

A coffee at Café Orion

A few months after the platform launched, I was headhunted by a Swedish software development company that works with big fashion brands. It was a great opportunity, but it also meant no longer working with Johan every day, and that was genuinely sad.

We are good friends, though, so we didn't let it end there. We met up at Café Orion in Borås, and over coffee the conversation turned into a question: what if we built something together, on the side, that we would own ourselves?

I told Johan about the affiliate system I couldn't find. He saw the same gap, and by the time we left the café, we had decided to build it.

Why a bee?

The name comes from how affiliate marketing actually works. It is never one person doing everything. Think of a merchant as the hive and the affiliates as the bees: many individuals flying out in different directions, each bringing something back. For bees, that is honey. For an affiliate program, it is sales, and the commission is the honey everyone gets a share of.

Many people working together, each contributing a little, adding up to something much bigger. That is Affilibee. Our codebase is even named apis-mellifera, Latin for the western honey bee.

What we set out to build

From the start we agreed on a few principles, and they still guide every decision we make:

1. Simple to use. Stay with the core: affiliates, commissions, orders, and payouts. If a feature doesn't clearly help a merchant run their program, it doesn't go in.
2. Fairly priced. Leaving out the features nobody uses means nobody pays for them either. Affilibee should be an affordable choice, not an enterprise contract.
3. Headless, with an API that is actually useful. Affilibee doesn't need to own your storefront. Your platform captures the affiliate link, keeps it through checkout, and reports the completed order to our API. How Affilibee works walks through the whole flow.
4. Nothing extra on your pages. No third-party tracking script slowing down your storefront. Purchases are reported from your backend, where you stay in control of what is sent and when.

From planner to pair programmer

The first commit landed on 28 December 2022, in the quiet days between Christmas and New Year, and by the end of that day there was already a dashboard.

In the beginning, our roles looked familiar: I wrote the code, and Johan planned and managed the project. That didn't last long. Johan wanted to learn programming himself, and soon we were working as a pair, with Johan on the frontend and me tinkering away in the backend. He took to it so well that, looking at the commit history today, he has made about twice as many commits as I have. I have decided to be proud of that rather than competitive ;)

Building at side-project speed

When you build something on the side, you build it around your life, and life happened. There were stretches where the project moved fast and long stretches where almost nothing happened. Johan became a father and bought a house. I needed time away to take care of family matters.

But the idea never went away. We kept coming back to it, with a big push in the autumn of 2024 and more waves through 2025 and into this year. Every time we picked it up again, the core idea was still exactly what we wanted to build.

We're live

And here we are. Affilibee is launched, it is live, and we are loving it. It is the affiliate system I was looking for back then: lightweight, headless, and focused on the things that matter.

If you are a merchant or a developer, the best place to start is Getting started or the API introduction. You can connect your platform and test everything against the sandbox with a testing token before a single real order goes through. See Authentication and Testing your integration for how.

This blog is where we will share what we build next, how things work under the hood, and what we learn along the way. Thanks for reading, and if you have questions or ideas, we would love to hear from you.

— Edward & Johan