Paying 40 affiliates every Friday BY HAND — I'm done, what replaces me

Okay so this is a good problem to have but it is killing my Fridays.

Started the year with 9 affiliates. I'm at 41 now and it's growing every week, which is HUGE, but the payout process has not changed at all since it was 9 people. Spreadsheet, open the wallet, paste address, check the amount twice, send, mark it paid, next one. Takes me three and a half hours and last week I fat-fingered a decimal and sent someone 10x. He sent it back, good guy, but that's luck not process.

So what are you all using to push a batch of payouts out once a week without doing it one at a time? Doesn't need to be pretty. Needs to not be me.

how much per payout and what are they asking to be paid in. that's the entire answer and you left both out

Fair. Average is about $180, biggest single one last week was $2,400. Total goes out around 7-9k a week.

They're all over — a lot of Brazil and Indonesia, handful of EU, two in the US.

At that spread of geographies you want one balance you can send from in a few different coins, not a payout rail that only speaks one.

Cryptomus is what I'd look at first. You take in through the same account, the balance sits there, and you can push withdrawals out from it including in batches — and because there's a mini exchange bolted onto the same login you can pay the Brazil people in USDT on Tron and the two US ones in whatever they want without moving funds to a third place first. Fee is 0.4 to 0.8 depending on the coin, which at 8k a week is noise next to three and a half hours of your Friday.

The caveat is the one everybody skips: it's a custodial balance. Whatever sits in there is theirs to freeze while they ask you a question. Sweep it down to a working float right after each payout run and don't let a month of revenue pile up in it. Treat it as a payout buffer, not an account.

NowPayments does payouts too but the batch tooling is thinner last time I looked.

Careful with this one. I use Cryptomus two year no problem, then November they lock balance and ask source of funds. Not big amount, 3100 USDT. Take eleven day and two email before they release.

Nothing was wrong, i send them invoice, they say fine, done. But eleven day is eleven day. If that was payout Friday i have 41 angry people.

Anyway is still what i use. Just never leave more than one week payout inside.

Why is a gateway in this at all. You're sending usdc to 41 addresses once a week — that's a batch transfer, not a payment product. One transaction on base, forty one recipients, costs you less than a dollar total and nobody can freeze the middle of it because there is no middle.

FWIW this is the right answer but it needs the boring half attached: the failure mode is the address list, not the send.

Whatever you do, generate the batch from the same table that holds the earnings, never from a copy-paste. And dry-run it against a testnet or a 1-cent-per-recipient run first, because a bad address in a batch is not recoverable and you will not notice which of the 41 it was.

# sanity pass before any batch goes out
awk -F, 'NR>1 { if (length($2) < 30) print "SHORT ADDR line " NR ": " $0 }' payouts.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 { s+=$3 } END { printf "total %.2f across %d rows
", s, NR-1 }' payouts.csv

If the total doesn't match what your dashboard says you owe, stop. BTCPayServer has a payouts/pull-payment flow that does most of this for you if you're already self-hosting the receive side, and then the affiliate claims it themselves and you never touch an address at all. That's the bit people miss — the safest batch is the one where they enter their own address.

The pull payment thing is a game changer, I didn't know that existed. They claim it themselves = not my typo anymore!

Eleven days — what were the dates, and was that on a withdrawal or on the balance itself?

Balance. 14 November lock, 25 November release. Withdrawal after that was normal, forty minute.

Whichever rail you land on, keep the per-affiliate annual total somewhere you can query it; at 41 people and growing you are past the point where reconstructing a year of payouts from a wallet explorer is a weekend's work. Nobody enjoys this advice until the first time they need it.

Reporting back six weeks later since people asked me in DMs.

Went with the pull payment route. Affiliates get a claim link on Friday morning, they enter their own address, it settles when they claim it. Fridays are now about twenty minutes of checking the totals line up. Four of them still haven't claimed from three weeks ago which is somehow also my problem, but that's a different thread.

Kept a small balance elsewhere for the two people who genuinely could not work out what a wallet address is. Still paying those two by hand. Two is fine. Forty one was not.