Roundups Review: AI-Powered Affiliate Articles Worth $59?

What Is Roundups and How Does It Work?

Roundups is a lifetime deal available on AppSumo that uses AI to generate affiliate comparison articles. The core workflow is straightforward: connect your Amazon Associates or AppSumo affiliate account, pick out some products, and Roundups creates a full article comparing those products — complete with your affiliate links already embedded.

The big selling point here is the frictionless experience. You don't need to manually hunt through the finished article swapping in your affiliate links. Once your account is connected, the links are baked in from the start. The tool handles the writing, the product images, comparison tables, and even generates an FAQ section at the bottom of each article.

For anyone running an affiliate site or looking to scale up content production, the pitch is compelling: go from zero to a published comparison article in under three minutes.

Pricing and Tier Breakdown

Roundups starts at $59 for the base tier on AppSumo, with options scaling up to $500 depending on how much content you plan to produce. The main differentiator between tiers is the number of articles (called "roundups") you can generate per month and how many products you can include in each one.

Tier 1 gives you 10 articles per month with up to 10 products per roundup. Tier 2 bumps that to 50 articles and 25 products per roundup. Tier 3 unlocks unlimited articles with up to 50 products each. For most affiliate marketers, Tier 1 at $59 should be more than enough — and honestly, keeping your roundups to a manageable number of products tends to convert better anyway. Too many choices and readers get analysis paralysis.

What the Generated Content Actually Looks Like

The output quality is honestly not bad. Each generated article includes a headline, an intro section, a "top picks" summary, individual product breakdowns with images and affiliate links, an FAQ section, and a comparison table at the bottom.

The design has a clean, tech-review-site feel to it. It's not going to win any design awards or match the polish of something like Wirecutter, but it looks professional enough that most readers wouldn't bat an eye. The comparison tables are particularly useful — they give readers a quick side-by-side view of pricing, pros, and cons without scrolling through the entire article.

Roundups also supports multiple article formats: single product reviews, head-to-head comparisons, three-column layouts, and ranked lists. Each format adjusts the comparison table layout accordingly, which is a nice touch.

Publishing Integrations and Export Options

Once your article is generated, you have several options for getting it onto your site. Roundups integrates directly with both Ghost and WordPress, so you can push articles straight to your blog without leaving the platform.

If you're not on either of those platforms, you can download the raw HTML and drop it into whatever CMS you're using. You can also copy the formatted text directly, which is useful for pasting into other editors. There's even an option to host the content directly on Roundups itself if you just want a shareable link for social media.

Setting Up Your Affiliate Links

Before you create any content, the first thing you should do is head over to the integrations section and connect your affiliate accounts. This is important — and it ties directly into one of the tool's biggest bugs.

For Amazon, the setup is dead simple: just paste in your Amazon Associates affiliate ID. For AppSumo, you'll need to connect through Impact (AppSumo's affiliate tracking platform) by granting API access with your account SID and auth token. There are step-by-step directions within the tool to walk you through it.

Here's the critical part: if you generate articles before connecting your affiliate account, the comparison tables at the bottom of each article will use Roundups' own affiliate links instead of yours. And even after you connect your account, those tables don't get retroactively updated. The product links in the body of the article will update, but the comparison table won't. There's currently no way to manually edit the table either, so you're stuck. The fix is simple — just connect your accounts first — but it's a frustrating gotcha if you don't know about it.

The Image Sizing Problem

The second major gripe is image sizing. Product images pulled into the article are displayed at their full resolution with no option to resize them. On a desktop monitor, a single product image can fill the entire viewport, which is way too large for a comparison article.

The built-in editor doesn't offer any image resizing controls either. A simple fix would be setting a maximum width — say 600 pixels — so images are automatically constrained to a reasonable size. As it stands, the oversized images make the articles feel unpolished and can hurt readability, especially when you're comparing multiple products and each one has a massive image taking up the full screen.

Creating a Roundup: Step by Step

Building a new article follows a clean five-step wizard. First, you choose your source — Amazon or AppSumo — and define your target audience. Roundups lets you provide an audience avatar, which helps the AI tailor the writing to your readers.

Next, you pick your focus by selecting a product category. For AppSumo, you're limited to their existing categories (like "Calendar & Scheduling"), while Amazon gives you more flexibility to type in custom categories. The tool helpfully surfaces some SEO data alongside each category, showing search volume and competition level for related keywords. You can even select specific keywords to work into the article, which is a nice built-in research feature.

From there, you configure the writing style — tone (conversational, persuasive, humorous, sarcastic, etc.), language (roughly 50 options), point of view (first, second, or third person), and article format. You'll also decide at this stage whether to include comparison tables.

Writing Style and Headline Generation

The style configuration is more robust than you might expect. Beyond just picking a tone, you're making decisions about point of view and format that genuinely affect the output. First person reads more like a personal review blog, while second person feels more like a buying guide.

Once you've locked in your style, Roundups generates several headline options based on your audience avatar, chosen category, and tone. The headlines are decent but not spectacular — and they're generated before you pick your products, which means they can't include specific product names. For single product reviews or head-to-head comparisons, you'll almost certainly want to write your own headline that calls out the actual products by name.

You can regenerate headlines if you don't like the options, or type in your own. If you change the tone, the headlines regenerate automatically, which is handy for experimenting.

Selecting Products for Your Article

Product selection is where the experience gets a bit clunky. For Amazon, you can paste in direct product links, which is great if you already know what you want to review. For AppSumo, there's no search box — you browse through the available products in your chosen category and select them from a list.

You can sort results by price, rating, number of reviews, or popularity, but the lack of a simple search field makes finding specific products unnecessarily tedious. If you already know you want to compare TidyCal and ZCal, you shouldn't have to scroll through a category list to find them.

Another missing feature: there's no way to filter out sold-out products. When you're creating fresh content, it doesn't make much sense to include products readers can't actually buy. These are relatively minor UX issues, but they add friction to what should be the simplest part of the process.

Article Generation and the Editor

Once you've selected your products and confirmed your settings, Roundups generates the full article in about one to three minutes. You'll get an email notification when it's ready, so you don't need to sit and watch it process.

The finished article includes everything: intro, product breakdowns with images and affiliate links, badges like "Best Overall" and "Best Value," an FAQ section, and the comparison table. The AI makes its own judgment calls about which product gets which badge, and they don't always make sense — in one test, the more expensive product was labeled "Best Value." Fortunately, everything is editable.

The built-in editor is a standard WYSIWYG affair. You get heading levels, code blocks, quotes, and the ability to attach images. It's functional but basic. You can also drag and drop products to reorder them and regenerate the content, which is useful if you want to change the ranking without starting from scratch.

Featured Images and Open Graph

Roundups automatically generates an Open Graph image for each article, which is what shows up when you share the link on social media. You can choose which product's image to feature in the preview, and it regenerates quickly.

The downside is that the generated image includes the Roundups logo rather than your own branding. For anyone trying to build a recognizable affiliate site, this is a missed opportunity. Letting users swap in their own logo would make the feature significantly more useful. That said, once you publish to WordPress or Ghost, you can replace the featured image with whatever you'd like.

Final Verdict: A 6.7 Out of 10

Roundups delivers on its core promise: it generates passable affiliate comparison articles quickly and with minimal effort. The affiliate link integration is genuinely frictionless once set up, the SEO keyword suggestions are a nice bonus, and the variety of article formats gives you flexibility.

But the rough edges add up. The comparison table bug with affiliate links is a real problem. The oversized images hurt presentation. The product selection process needs a search function. And the inability to customize the Open Graph branding feels like a missed opportunity.

At $59 for the base tier, it's not a bad deal if you're producing affiliate content at scale and you go in with realistic expectations. It's a solid starting point that'll save you time, but you'll likely need to do some manual cleanup on each article before publishing. Overall, it earns a 6.7 out of 10 — functional and useful, but with room to grow.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.