It’s natural for your guard to go up when you hear that PerkSpot is a no-cost solution for employers. In most cases, “free” comes with tradeoffs: hidden fees down the road, pressure to upsell employees, or monetization strategies that quietly shift value away from the people the benefit is meant to serve.
That skepticism is fair. That’s also exactly why PerkSpot was built differently.
PerkSpot is 100% free for both our customers and their employees. There are no setup fees, no licensing costs, and no surprise charges introduced later. Employees are never asked to pay for access, upgrade to premium tiers, or trade their data for savings.
While PerkSpot is a for-profit company, our revenue model is intentionally structured so that cost and risk never fall on employers or employees. We are merchant-funded, meaning our success is tied directly to the value we help deliver, not to fees charged to customers or users.
How Merchant Funding Works
In practical terms, merchant funding means PerkSpot earns revenue from the brands employees already know and shop, not from employers or their people.
Here’s how it works:
PerkSpot partners with merchants who want to reach a large, highly engaged employee audience. When an employee chooses to make a purchase through the PerkSpot platform, the merchant pays PerkSpot a small commission after the transaction is completed. There is no cost to browse, no requirement to buy, and no obligation on the employee’s side.
This model is similar to affiliate marketing, but purpose-built for employee benefits and delivered at scale. Merchants pay for visibility and demand, funding PerkSpot because it drives new or incremental business. Those costs are never passed back to employees through inflated pricing. Because revenue is tied directly to completed transactions, PerkSpot only succeeds when employees find real value and choose to use the benefit. If no one saves, no one pays.
What This Means for Employers
- No cost, no compromise. Because PerkSpot is merchant-funded, there are no fees to approve, no contracts driven by pricing, and no financial risk to manage, now or in the future.
- Complements your total rewards strategy. The model allows PerkSpot to sit alongside your existing benefits without competing for budget or displacing other important offerings.
- Built on transparent economics. PerkSpot only generates revenue when a merchant benefits from a completed transaction, never from employer spend, employee fees, or behind-the-scenes monetization.
What This Means for Employees
- Free access – always. There’s no cost to join, browse, or save with PerkSpot, and there never will be.
- Savings without strings attached. Employees are never required to buy, upgrade, or subscribe. They choose when, and if, they want to use the benefit.
- Clear, transparent model. The goal is simple: help employees keep more of their money, without changing the rules or adding friction over time.
A Shared Alignment that Drives Success
Our merchant-funded structure creates natural alignment between PerkSpot and the employer. You want employees actively using the program and experiencing real savings, and we’re incentivized to drive strong engagement because utilization fuels the merchant relationships that fund the benefit.
At the end of the day, our success is tied to one simple outcome: helping employees save. When employees find value, merchants see incremental demand, and that shared alignment is what keeps the program free, sustainable, and transparent for more than 20 million U.S. workers.