Siren 3.0 and Siren Lite: The Relaunch

Siren 3.0 is live. A rebuilt admin, a new free tier, a standalone Collaborator Portal, and a complete REST API, all on WordPress, all self-hosted.

Programs, commissions, and payouts work the same way they always have, and the attribution engine under them is unchanged. What’s new in 3.0 is everything around them. The admin. The collaborator experience. The API. The recipe system. The way you evaluate the product before you commit to it.

And, yes, the pricing story. Siren is now available as a free tier, Siren Lite, with unlimited programs, affiliates, and conversions.

But the rebuild isn’t really a feature release. It’s the version where Siren finally feels like what it was always meant to be.

What 3.0 actually shipped

• A rebuilt admin with flow diagrams on every lifecycle, activity feeds on every record, contextual tooltips, dark mode, server-side filtering, and CSV export
• A standalone, branded Collaborator Portal on Essentials and above, living on the front end of your site in the block editor
• Siren Lite, a free, uncapped tier with unlimited programs, affiliates, and conversions
• A complete REST API available on every tier, Lite included
• Recipe import, preview, and export, so a full program configuration can land in one click
• A new LearnDash integration, adding course and lesson completion as engagement triggers
• A live demo with real data, so evaluators can see Siren running without installing it first

The full 3.0.0 changelog has the itemized list. The sections below are why any of it matters.

What the 3.0 admin is for

Months of feedback from operators running real programs made one thing clear. Visibility was what they needed most. Not more features. They wanted a way to see what Siren was doing at any time, understand why, and find the evidence without asking for support.

We built the 3.0 admin to pay off that. Flow diagrams on every lifecycle, activity feeds on every record, contextual help, and a manual override path that keeps a full audit trail when judgment calls override automation. The deeper dive on the rebuild covers how those pieces fit together.

Siren is infrastructure, not an affiliate plugin

Siren is a foundational layer for any website that needs to automatically track what it owes other people. It sits in the same category as WooCommerce for commerce, LifterLMS for course delivery, or WordPress itself for content management. You install it because the thing it handles is core to how your business operates, not because you wanted one more plugin to try.

That framing matters because Siren is not only an affiliate engine. The same core system runs creator royalties, revenue shares, profit pools, performance bonuses, sales-team bonuses, lead-gen payouts, refer-a-friend programs, and structures that haven’t been invented yet. It works when those programs run side by side, compete for the same conversion, or stack on top of each other. The programs model and the distributors mechanic exist to make all of that expressible in one system.

What 3.0 changes isn’t the capability. It’s the experience of trusting it.

Records that explain themselves

Picture a partnerships lead at a 40-vendor WooCommerce marketplace. A coupon-based creator emails asking where her commission went, citing a specific order from last Tuesday. In old Siren, resolving that email was a ten-minute tour. Open the order. Find the conversion. Open the conversion. Click through to the engagement. Tab over to the transaction. Hope the obligation detail shows the answer.

In 3.0, the first record she opens, whichever one, carries an activity feed that reads like a chronological log of everything Siren did to that record, and to every other record the event touched. A refund that reversed that conversion on Monday shows up on the obligation’s feed, the conversion’s feed, and the transaction’s feed, with the same timestamp and the same reason. She walks in from any of them and ends up in the same story. She replies to the creator in two minutes instead of ten, and her reply points at a recorded timeline instead of volunteering her recollection.

That’s the shift from “the system works” to “the system works and you can see it working.” It’s what turns weekly reviews from a chore into a habit, because the evidence is sitting one click away on any record, not reconstructed across five admin screens every time you want to answer a question.

Flow diagrams make the lifecycle visible

A new program owner onboarding at a course platform opens an obligation detail page for the first time. In old Siren, she’d see a status pill reading “Pending” and a row of fields. Whether the obligation could move to another state, and what would trigger that move, was information you’d internalized from the docs or learned the hard way.

In 3.0, the same detail view renders the draft-pending-fulfilled path as a visual flow diagram with the current state highlighted. Open a fulfillment and the same thing happens with its lifecycle. Open an engagement and again. Tooltips and slide-out drawers live where the decision points are. The help system fires next to the settings that have real consequences, not as an empty ”?” icon that opens documentation in a new tab.

You aren’t asked to hold the state machine in your head. The system shows you what it’s doing. That’s a different kind of software to work in, and over a payout cycle it saves more time than any of the individual features do on their own.

Beacon turns plain language into installable recipes

Beacon, Siren’s free MCP server, reads the documentation and generates installable recipes from plain-language descriptions. Describe “a tiered program that pays more on renewals than on first orders” and Beacon returns a recipe you install in a click. Describe “a refer-a-friend program that gives the referrer store credit the day after checkout” and you get that one too. It’s the closest thing Siren has to a configuration co-pilot, and it’s available on every tier, paid or free.

Most of the time you’re picking a starting point, not inventing one. The recipe library already covers most of the program shapes real businesses run.

When automation gets it wrong

When automated attribution isn’t the right call, the manual attribution path lets you credit a collaborator against a specific transaction and writes the action into the transaction’s activity feed alongside the rest of its history. Three months later, you can still read why you overrode the system.

None of those are new capabilities on their own. Siren has been recording this data, running these programs, and paying correctly for a long time. What’s new in 3.0 is that you can now see the system doing its job, and you can trust it enough to build on top of it.

The Collaborator Portal lives on the front end now

The other visible shift in 3.0 is the Collaborator Portal.

The portal is one of the things customer conversations kept surfacing. Partners wanted a dashboard that looked like the brand they were working with, not a corner of wp-admin, and program owners wanted a way to hand partners a self-serve experience without giving them a WordPress login they didn’t need.

So Siren Essentials now includes a standalone Collaborator Portal. It lives on the front end of the site as a block in the block editor, picks up your theme’s Global Styles automatically, and exposes branding controls for background, text, accent, and logo. Collaborators log in and land in an experience that belongs to your brand, not to wp-admin.

There is a second, deeper reason this matters.

The moment you stop thinking of Siren as an affiliate plugin and start thinking of it as infrastructure, the idea of a “default affiliate dashboard” starts to break down. Siren runs programs for affiliates, but it also runs them for instructors, vendors, creators, sales reps, refer-a-friend customers, and in some cases organizations receiving donations per purchase. Those collaborators aren’t the same people doing the same job. Their dashboards probably shouldn’t look the same either.

That’s why the portal is opinionated for the common case and open for the uncommon one. Most operators get a polished, branded default out of the box. Teams running unusual programs have a full REST API and the option to build a custom front end that fits the collaborator they actually have.

Siren Lite, free and uncapped

Siren Lite is free, and it isn’t a stripped-down evaluation version.

It ships with unlimited programs, unlimited affiliates, unlimited conversions, percentage and fixed commissions, referral-link tracking, coupon-code tracking, end-to-end payout tracking, and full REST API access. Every supported integration, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, LearnDash, Gravity Forms, and NorthCommerce, works on Lite, because every integration ships with every tier. You can run a real affiliate program on Lite, in production, indefinitely.

On payouts specifically, Siren tracks what’s owed, records the state of every obligation through the fulfillment lifecycle, and exports clean records you pay against. You disburse through whatever channel you already use, PayPal, ACH, Stripe, or a spreadsheet handed to a bookkeeper, and mark the obligations fulfilled when the money moves. Siren is the ledger and the audit trail. It isn’t the bank.

The reason Lite is a free tier rather than a timed trial is that foundational decisions aren’t trial-shaped. Siren sits at the foundation of how a business pays people. You aren’t deciding whether the UI is nice. You’re deciding whether you want this system handling money, obligations, and attribution at the foundation of your business for the next several years. That decision deserves longer than 14 days, and it deserves real data from your actual site, not a sandbox with made-up numbers.

Lite is the version of Siren where you prove the model. The paid tiers, Essentials, Plus, and Pro, are where you scale that model with stacked programs, program groups, distributors, the branded Collaborator Portal, and the advanced attribution strategies most mature programs eventually need.

The paid tiers start at $199/year for Essentials. There’s a dedicated deep-dive on Lite if you want the full picture of what’s in the free tier, what isn’t, and when it makes sense to upgrade.

Two obligations, one transaction

“Programs run side by side” is abstract until you see the math. Picture a course platform selling a $100 program where the instructor who authored the course earns a revenue share and an affiliate who referred the buyer earns a commission. Two programs, one sale.

• A standard affiliate program pays 10% to the partner who sent the buyer.
• A creator-royalty program pays 60% to the instructor who owns the course.

On that single $100 sale, Siren records two separate obligations, one for $10 to the affiliate and one for $60 to the instructor. Both attach to the same transaction, both carry their own activity feed, and both move through their own payout schedule independently. If the customer refunds in full next week, both obligations reverse on the same timestamp, with the refund visible on every feed it touched. If the refund is partial, say the buyer returns one of two courses purchased in a bundle, each obligation reverses proportionally against the refunded line, and the activity feed records which lines drove the reversal. The math stays consistent whether the transaction is whole, partially refunded, or fully reversed.

Under the hood, each program evaluates the conversion independently and records its own obligation. That’s why two programs produce two obligations with no special configuration required. They aren’t competing. They’re different jobs on the same sale.

Program groups, available on Essentials and above, come in when programs would actually compete. A VIP-tier rate and a standard-tier rate both qualify on a conversion, but only one should pay. A program group is where you express that rule. For the marketplace-plus-affiliate example above, you don’t need a group at all.

Obligations don’t have to be cash

If the Siren 3.0 story has one sentence, it’s this. Siren is the system layer for incentive and obligation logic on owned web properties.

“Obligations” is the word worth sitting with. The obvious case is cash commissions. But there’s no reason the obligation has to be cash. Consider an outdoor-apparel brand running a donation-per-purchase program with a coastal conservation nonprofit: every sale of the branded collection generates a $5 obligation to the nonprofit, tracked on its own record, with an activity feed showing the originating transaction, the refund window, and the payout once the quarter closes. Nothing about that flow is cash-to-affiliate. The obligation is real, the audit trail is complete, and nobody is reconciling a spreadsheet at quarter-end.

Store credit, fulfillment commitments, future-payment records, revenue splits, and non-cash rewards all fit the same obligation model. The point is not that Siren pays affiliates. The point is that Siren tracks what a website owes other people automatically, whatever shape that obligation takes, and lets you trust the record.

We’re not quite ready to reveal what’s coming, but we have some really awesome features coming in future versions that will explore this much, much more.

3.0 is the version where that posture becomes usable.

Start with Lite

If you want the shortest path into the current product story:

• Try the demo, a live environment, real data, no signup
• Install Siren Lite, free, uncapped, works with the real integrations
• Browse the recipe library, see the program shapes other businesses already run
• Read the release changelog, the full list of what changed

If you have only seen Siren through older posts or a quick look at the product page, this is the version of the story that matters now. The product is rebuilt, the interface matches the ambition, and the free tier lets you prove the model before you commit.