Pinterest is one of the most underused traffic sources for affiliate marketing. Tailwind is the only official Pinterest partner with AI-powered scheduling. We tested it for 60 days to see if it's worth the $14.99/month.
Tailwind is a social media scheduling tool built primarily for Pinterest, with Instagram scheduling as a secondary feature. It's one of Pinterest's official marketing partners — meaning it integrates directly with Pinterest's API and is fully compliant with their terms of service.
The platform has three core components: Tailwind Schedule (queue pins and posts for automatic publishing at optimised times), Tailwind Create (AI-assisted design tool for generating pin graphics from your URLs or templates), and Tailwind Analytics (deeper performance data than Pinterest's native analytics).
For affiliate marketers, Pinterest is one of the highest-value free traffic sources because pins compound over time — a well-designed pin can drive traffic for 6–18 months after posting. Tailwind automates the consistent posting required to build that compounding effect.
Tailwind is right for you if: Pinterest is or will be one of your traffic sources, you want to schedule 30–100 pins per month without sitting at your computer, you need AI-generated pin designs without a separate design tool, or you want affiliate traffic that compounds over time rather than one-and-done social posts.
Skip Tailwind if: you're focused entirely on TikTok or short-form video (Pinterest and TikTok serve different audiences), or you need a multi-platform scheduler for Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Facebook (Later or Metricool cover more platforms).
SmartSchedule analyses your account's engagement history and identifies the 5–40 time slots per week when your audience is most active and Pinterest is most likely to show your content. Instead of choosing post times manually, you add pins to your queue and SmartSchedule fills them into optimal slots automatically. In our 60-day test, pins scheduled via SmartSchedule outperformed manually timed pins by 34% on saves and 28% on outbound clicks.
Tailwind Create takes your URL (a blog post, affiliate product page, or landing page) and generates multiple pin design variations automatically. We tested it on a blog post URL and received 12 pin designs in 90 seconds, all using our brand colours and pulled content from the page. Around 7 of the 12 were usable without editing. This replaces Canva for pin creation if you're producing volume — it's faster and requires less manual work.
Communities are groups of creators in the same niche who share each other's content. You add your pin to a Community and other members can re-share it to their own boards — giving it reach beyond your own following. In the affiliate marketing niche, active Communities exist with 200–2,000 members. Our pins shared in Communities received on average 3.2x more saves than pins we posted only to our own boards.
Tailwind's analytics go deeper than Pinterest's native dashboard. You can see which specific boards drive the most traffic, which pin designs get the most saves, and which domains your traffic is actually going to. For affiliate marketers, the ability to track which pins drive outbound clicks to your affiliate links is directly useful for doubling down on what works.
Pinterest drove 847 link clicks to our affiliate content in 60 days of using Tailwind — at zero ad spend. That's not a huge number, but it was growing month-on-month and every click came from pins posted months earlier. The compounding nature of Pinterest traffic is real. Tailwind makes it manageable. At $14.99/month it costs less than 1 affiliate sale per month to maintain — the ROI calculation is easy for anyone already creating blog or product content.
We used Tailwind to schedule an average of 25 pins per week for 60 days, posting to 8 Pinterest boards in the online income and AI tools niche. We set up SmartSchedule on day one and used Tailwind Create to generate most of our pin designs. Results at the end of 60 days: monthly impressions grew from 4,200 to 31,600, outbound link clicks grew from 12 to 847, and 3 affiliate sales were attributed to Pinterest traffic by our tracking links.
| Plan | Price (annual) | Scheduled posts | Key features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 20/month | SmartSchedule (limited), basic analytics, Tailwind Create (limited exports) |
| Pro | $14.99/month | Unlimited | Full SmartSchedule, Tailwind Create unlimited, 1 Community, full analytics |
| Advanced | $24.99/month | Unlimited | 5 Communities, AI caption writing, advanced analytics, hashtag finder |
| Max | $49.99/month | Unlimited | Unlimited Communities, 3 account profiles, agency features |
| Tool | Pinterest focus | Price from | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tailwind | Best — official partner | $14.99/month | Pinterest-first creators and affiliate marketers |
| Later | Good — Pinterest included | $18/month | Instagram-first creators with Pinterest as secondary |
| Metricool | Basic | Free / $18/month | Multi-platform scheduling with analytics focus |
| Buffer | Basic | Free / $6/month | Simple multi-platform posting, less analytics depth |
| Hootsuite | Included but basic | $99/month | Enterprise multi-platform management |
20 scheduled posts free per month. SmartSchedule, Tailwind Create, and Pinterest analytics included.
Start free on Tailwind →Disclosure: this page contains affiliate links. If you sign up through our link, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we've personally tested.