What Is an Offer Cap? Daily Caps Explained

Key takeaways

An offer cap is a limit on conversions, clicks, payout or revenue for an offer over a set period, applied to everyone, to one publisher, or to a group of offers.
When a cap fills, tracking platforms usually redirect new clicks elsewhere, and conversions that arrive late may be held, declined or paid depending on the offer terms.
Caps reset at midnight in a specific time zone, so knowing that time zone and spreading traffic over several offers protects your earnings.

What is an offer cap?

An offer cap is a limit an advertiser or network puts on how much of an offer can be used in a given period. The limit can count conversions, clicks, payout or revenue, and it can run per day, per week, per month or for the whole life of the offer. It can apply to all publishers together (a global cap) or to one publisher on its own. When the cap is reached, the offer stops accepting new traffic until the cap resets or is raised.

A daily cap is the most common version: for example, “100 leads per day”. A conversion cap counts approved actions, while a budget cap counts money. In CPA marketing, caps are normal. They are not a sign that something is wrong with your traffic. If you are new to how CPA offers are priced, start with What is CPA? and What is a CPA network?

Why advertisers cap offers

An advertiser pays per result, so in theory more results are always good. In practice, there are several reasons to set a ceiling:

Budget control. A monthly marketing budget is fixed. A payout or revenue cap stops a busy day from spending what was meant to last two weeks.
Fraud control. A sudden spike from one source is a classic sign of bots or fake leads. A per-publisher cap limits the damage before anyone has time to review the traffic. Affise’s help center lists “prevention of fraudulent activities and click spamming” and conversion rate control among the reasons to cap. Our guide to ad fraud and bot traffic covers the warning signs.
Quality testing. When an advertiser starts with a new publisher or a new country, it often sets a small cap, checks how those users behave (retention, refunds, deposits), and raises the cap only if the quality holds.
Operational capacity. Some offers need people behind them: a call center that phones every lead, a lender that reviews applications by hand, a trial with limited seats. A cap keeps volume at what the team can handle.
Pacing. A daily cap spreads results evenly over the month instead of using everything in the first few days.
Geo targeting. An advertiser may want 500 sign-ups from Germany but only 50 from a test market, so it caps each country separately.

Types of offer caps

Caps combine three choices: what is counted, over what period, and for whom. The table shows the common ones.

Cap type	What it limits	When it resets	Typical reason
Daily cap	Conversions, clicks, payout or revenue in one day	Midnight in the cap’s time zone	Pacing and fraud control
Weekly cap	The same counts over a week	Start of the week (the day depends on the platform)	Smoothing out weekend spikes
Monthly cap	The same counts over a calendar month	The first day of the month	Monthly budgets
Total (lifetime or global) cap	Everything the offer will ever take	Never	Fixed campaigns, limited stock or seats
Per-publisher cap	What one publisher can send, on top of any offer-wide cap	Follows its period	Testing a new source, limiting risk
Per-geo cap	What one country (or region) can send	Follows its period	Different budgets or tests per market
Group (shared) cap	One limit shared across several offers	Follows its period	One budget for several versions of a product
Per-goal cap	One step of a multi-step offer	Follows its period	Limiting the expensive final step

These are not theoretical. The Everflow help article on managing caps describes offer-level, partner-level and group-level caps with daily, weekly, monthly and global durations, where a global cap “never resets”. Affise’s caps for offers guide adds caps by country, by goal and by affiliate, and caps on impressions, clicks, conversions and payouts. TUNE’s OfferConversionCap API model has separate daily and monthly caps on conversions, payout and revenue for each affiliate on each offer. (Checked on October 21, 2026. Features can change and some depend on the platform plan.)

Conversion caps vs budget caps

A conversion cap of 100 means 100 approved actions, whatever they cost. A payout cap of $500 means the offer stops once $500 of payouts are recorded. On a multi-event offer with several payouts per user, a budget cap can fill much faster than the number of users suggests, because one user can trigger three or four payouts.

Hard caps vs soft caps

Most caps are hard: traffic stops when the limit is reached. Some platforms also offer soft caps that only send an alert. Everflow’s article describes soft caps as sending an alert “but traffic continues flowing normally”, and notes they are not enabled by default.

What happens when an offer is capped

The exact behavior depends on the tracking platform and the offer terms, but the pattern is similar everywhere.

New clicks go somewhere else

Once a hard cap is full, new clicks are no longer sent to the advertiser. They are redirected instead:

Everflow sends them to a “Fail Traffic” destination or a blank page, and logs them as invalid clicks with the message “Cap has been exceeded”.
Affise redirects clicks to a trafficback URL when its Overcap option is on.
The Voluum offer cap article describes redirecting visitors to a chosen backup offer once the daily limit is exceeded, and returning traffic to the main offer at midnight.
CAKE’s caps documentation sends traffic to a campaign, offer, vertical or global redirect.

On an offerwall or in a CPA network’s catalog, the visible effect is usually simpler: the offer is paused or disappears from the list until it resets.

Conversions that arrive after the cap

This is where publishers lose money without noticing. A user can click while the cap is still open and finish the offer an hour later, after it has closed. Platforms handle these overcap conversions differently:

Everflow records them as Pending with the error “Over Caps”, and the advertiser can approve or reject them by hand.
Affise, with Overcap turned off, declines them with the comment “[Cap is reached]”.

So an overcap conversion may be paid, held or never paid. The only reliable answer is in the offer terms or the network’s publisher agreement. If they do not say, ask before you send volume to a tightly capped offer.

Caps are never exact

Caps are checked by systems with a short delay, so a few extra conversions can slip through. Everflow’s article gives an example of a 100-conversion cap ending at 101 to 103 because of a processing delay of about two minutes. Voluum says redirection can lag by up to five minutes during traffic spikes, and Affise mentions a cache of about one minute. For the publisher, this means the moment you see “capped” in a dashboard is not always the moment the advertiser stopped counting.

Do not keep pushing a capped offer

Sending paid or promoted traffic to an offer that is already capped means you pay for clicks that cannot convert, and any late conversions may be rejected. Do not try to get around a cap either, for example by sending the same users through a different link or account. Advertisers usually treat that as a breach of the offer terms.

Cap resets and time zones

Daily caps reset at midnight, but whose midnight? It is the time zone set on the offer or the platform, not yours. Everflow notes that daily caps reset based on “the Offer’s Timezone setting, not necessarily your account timezone”. Affise uses a cap time zone and falls back to the account’s general time zone. Voluum recommends that the cap time zone in Voluum match the time zone your affiliate network uses.

Illustrative example. An offer has a daily cap that resets at midnight UTC. You are in Los Angeles, which is seven hours behind UTC during daylight saving time. For you, the offer opens again at 5 pm local time, not at midnight. If your audience is most active from 6 pm to 11 pm, you get the fresh cap at the right moment. A publisher in Singapore (eight hours ahead of UTC) gets the reset at 8 am, and if their users are busy in the morning, the cap may be gone before the publisher in Los Angeles even sees a click.

Monthly caps reset on the first day of the calendar month on most platforms, and weekly caps on a fixed weekday, which varies: Everflow counts Monday to Sunday, while Affise resets at 00:00 every Sunday.

How publishers should plan around caps

Read the offer terms first. Look for the cap size, whether it is global or yours alone, the time zone, and what happens to conversions after the cap. If any of these are missing, ask your network.
Diversify. Never depend on one capped offer. Keep two or three similar offers in each country you serve, so when one caps out, your users still have something to do. On an offerwall, this is the main reason a broad catalog matters. How to choose which offers your users see explains how to manage your list.
Watch your reports by hour and by offer. If an offer’s conversions always stop at the same time of day, it is almost certainly capping. How to read your dashboard and reports shows where to look.
Compare EPC before and after the cap. When a top offer caps, your eCPM and EPC often drop for the rest of the day. That is a signal to promote a different offer at that time, not a sign your traffic got worse.
Time your promotions. If you send a push notification, an email or a Discord announcement, send it after the cap reset, not two hours before it.
Watch for reversals. Conversions declined as overcap usually show up the same way as other rejections. Publisher earnings, settlement and reversals explains how those flow through.
Ask for a higher cap with data. Advertisers often raise caps for publishers whose users stick around. A short summary of your conversion rate, retention or refund rate is far more persuasive than “please raise my cap”.

A quick check for any capped offer

Before you promote it, you should be able to answer four questions: how big is the cap, is it shared, when does it reset in your local time, and are overcap conversions paid? If you cannot answer all four, you are guessing.

If you send traffic through a single link that rotates between several offers, What is a smartlink? explains how that routing works, and CPA marketing for beginners puts caps in the wider picture.

How advertisers set caps

If you run offers, a cap is a risk control, not just a budget line. A practical approach:

Start every new source small. A low per-publisher daily cap during the first week lets you check quality before money is at risk.
Pick the right unit. Use a conversion cap when your capacity is about volume (a sales team, a fixed number of seats). Use a payout cap when the limit is money, especially on multi-step offers.
Leave a buffer. Because caps leak by a few conversions, set the cap slightly under the true limit if overspend is not acceptable.
Decide the overcap rule in advance and write it in the terms: are late conversions paid, held for review, or rejected? Publishers trust offers whose rules are clear.
Set the time zone on purpose and tell publishers what it is.
Use alerts. Everflow, for example, can email you when an offer reaches a set share of its cap, with 90% as the default. Raise caps for good sources before they hit the ceiling, not after.
Cap by country when the same offer has very different values in different markets. How to choose countries for your campaign helps with that split.

Caps work alongside the conversion window: the window decides how long after a click a conversion can still count, and the cap decides how many can count at all.

A worked example of a capped day

Sample figures only. An app install offer pays publishers $2.00 per install and has a global daily cap of 300 installs, resetting at midnight UTC. On a normal day:

From 00:00 to 14:00 UTC, publishers across Asia and Europe send 300 installs, and the cap fills.
Between 14:00 and 14:05 UTC, about 6 more installs arrive from clicks made before the cap closed. Depending on the terms, those are paid, held for review or declined.
From 14:05 UTC, new clicks are redirected, so publishers in the Americas see the offer as unavailable for most of their day.

A publisher in the Americas who relied on this one offer earned almost nothing from it. A publisher with three similar offers in the same category kept earning, because the other two had not capped yet. You can model how much a smaller or larger catalog changes your income with the offerwall earnings calculator.

How caps work on Sharklio

Sharklio is a pay-per-result affiliate network. Offers on Sharklio can have a daily cap on revenue or leads, set by the Sharklio team. Which offers your users see also depends on their country and device, so two users can see different lists at the same moment. Your dashboard and reports break results down by country, offer and sub ID, so you can see which offers drive your earnings and when they slow down. See how the wall works or get in touch with questions about a specific offer.

Frequently asked questions

What does “capped” mean in affiliate marketing?

It means the offer has reached its limit of conversions, clicks or budget for the current period. New traffic is redirected or the offer is paused until the cap resets or the advertiser raises it.

What is a daily cap on a CPA offer?

A daily cap is the maximum number of conversions, or the maximum payout, an offer will accept in one day. It resets at midnight in the time zone set on the offer, which may not be your own time zone.

Do I get paid for conversions after an offer is capped?

It depends on the offer terms and the platform. Some platforms hold overcap conversions for the advertiser to approve or reject, and others decline them automatically, so check the terms or ask your network before sending traffic.

What is the difference between a global cap and a publisher cap?

A global cap is shared by every publisher running the offer, so other publishers can use it up. A publisher cap applies only to your traffic, and it can sit under a global cap, in which case whichever fills first stops you.

Why would an advertiser cap a high-performing offer?

Usually because of a fixed budget, limited capacity to handle leads, or a need to check the quality of new traffic before paying for more. A cap is often raised once a source proves its users are real and valuable.

How do I know when an offer cap resets?

Check the offer details or ask your network for the cap time zone, then convert midnight in that zone to your local time. Your reports will often confirm it: conversions on a capped offer stop and restart at the same time each day.

Can I get an offer cap raised?

Often, yes, if your traffic converts well and the users stay. Ask your network or the advertiser and include your conversion rate and quality figures, since a cap raise is a decision about trust.