Case study · 01 of 03
Affiliate tracking, owned not rented. A full SaaS competing with Everflow and Tune, built solo in six months.
Overview
Trcker is a production affiliate tracking platform. Brands run their affiliate programs on it, partners track clicks and conversions through it, and a fraud detection layer scores every postback before it's accepted.
It does what Everflow and Tune do, at a fraction of the price, with an MCP server bolted on so AI agents can pull fraud signals through a public API.
The problem
Affiliate tracking platforms charge enterprise rates. Everflow, Tune, Impact all start at $500–2k a month before you've sent your first click. Startups running their first affiliate program can't justify that.
The alternatives are bad. Open-source trackers lack production polish and fraud features. SaaS link shorteners don't handle postbacks. Building it in-house takes a team a year.
There's a missing tier between hobbyist and enterprise. That's what Trcker fills.
The approach
Click in, conversion out. The rest is decoration. The core tracking pipeline is ~650 lines across 8 files. Everything else is built on that core.
Every brand offer has a signing secret. Postbacks without a valid HMAC are rejected at the edge. No exceptions, no quiet failures.
Trcker Radar scores every conversion against patterns (IP velocity, user-agent anomalies, sub-ID stuffing, geo mismatches). Brands see a risk score with the conversion, not after the fact.
The fraud detection is exposed as an MCP server so AI agents (Claude, GPT) can query it. Same data also lives behind a REST API. Build partners hook in directly.
Stack
Results
6mo
Solo build, idea to production
38+
SEO pages ranking
~650
Lines in core tracking pipeline
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