An affiliate is someone who shares your event with their own people and earns a cut of what they sell — a teacher whose students would come, a venue's mailing list, a friend with a podcast. You set the commission when you build the event, they get a tracked link, and BrightStar records what each of their sales earned them.
This article covers the last step: actually sending them the money. Releasing a payout is one click from your dashboard, and the money comes out of your own Stripe balance rather than sitting with BrightStar first. That distinction matters — BrightStar is not holding a pool of affiliate money on your behalf. It is passing your instruction through to your own connected Stripe account, which is why the checks below exist before anything moves.
How the commission is set
Commission is set per event, in the affiliate step of the event builder. You choose whether it is a percentage of the ticket sale or a flat amount per sale, and whatever you set there overrides any default commission you keep on your account. That lets you run a lean rate for a small kirtan circle and a richer one for a retreat where a single promoter's list is doing most of the selling.
Every commission BrightStar records also carries a release date, set automatically to when the event ends — not when the sale happened. This is not an arbitrary delay. Refunds and cancellations mostly happen in the days and weeks before a gathering, while people are still deciding whether they can make it. If commission were payable the moment a ticket sold, you would regularly be paying a promoter for a sale that gets refunded a week later, and then asking them to send the money back. Waiting until the doors have closed means the sales behind a commission are settled before you ever have to release it.
Releasing a payout
When you are ready to settle what a promoter has earned, the process is the same whether you are paying one commission or clearing a whole event.
- 1Open the Commissions page in your dashboard, or the affiliate section on the specific event you want to settle.
- 2Find the promoter. Their earned commissions are listed with the amount owed and the current status of each one.
- 3Select what you want to release — a single commission, or a batch of everything they've earned.
- 4Press the pay button. BrightStar runs through the conditions below before it creates the transfer.
- 5The money moves from your connected Stripe account to the promoter's, and those commissions are marked paid. The transfer description carries the event name and the promoter's email, so you can identify it later in your Stripe statement.
What conditions block a payout?
BrightStar checks a set of things before a transfer is created. If any one of them isn't true, the payout is stopped rather than attempted.