Two years ago, I almost quit trying to build side income online.
Not because the money wasn't there. Because the whole space felt gross to me. Every developer YouTuber was shilling the same five tools, every blog post ended with a "click here for my special discount," and nobody in those communities seemed to actually use what they were pushing. I watched people in my own discord lose trust in creators they'd followed for years, all because one too many hollow recommendations broke the camel's back.
That moment changed how I think about making money on the internet.
I run a small developer community — about 3,400 people in my discord, a few thousand more hanging out in my newsletter and on a private forum I set up. I'm not a big name. I don't have a million subscribers. But what I do have is a group of people who trust me enough to ask "hey, what are you actually using?" — and I owe them an honest answer every single time.
So when I started stacking side hustles again, I made a rule for myself: I will only recommend things I would tell a friend about over coffee. No more, no less. The income that followed came from that rule, and I want to walk you through the entire stack — the real numbers, the real hours, and the real conversations that shaped each decision.
The Five Streams That Actually Pay My Bills
I want to be upfront about everything because I think hiding income sources is one of the biggest problems in the side hustle world. Here is every dollar I earn outside my day job, in order of how much I depend on each one.
Freelance contract work brings in the most per hour — somewhere between $100 and $150 depending on the client. But I have complicated feelings about it. If I take a Wednesday off to go hiking, I make $0 that day. There's no leverage. No compounding. It's just me trading my life away in hourly chunks. Last year I burned out for the second time doing too much freelance, and that's what kicked off this whole side-hustle-stack overhaul.
My SaaS product earns $800 to $1,200 a month on a bad-to-good month. It took me six months of evenings and weekends to build, and it still needs about five hours a week of customer support, bug fixes, and the occasional feature request from power users. The per-hour math is okay, but the upfront cost in my life was enormous. I wrote about the launch in my newsletter, and honestly, the most valuable thing it gave me wasn't the money — it was the credibility that comes from having shipped something people pay for.
Blog ad revenue from my tech site generates $200 to $400 a month. I get around 50,000 page views a month, and to keep those numbers stable I have to publish four to eight articles. Each one takes me two to four hours, which means ad revenue is basically a content treadmill with a low ceiling. I've watched my RPMs bounce around year to year, and the honest truth is that ad revenue keeps shrinking as a share of what I earn. I include it here for completeness, not because I think it's a winning strategy in 2026.
YouTube sponsorships range from $500 to $1,500 per video. I put out two videos a month, and each one eats about 15 hours when you count scripting, recording, editing, thumbnails, and the endless cycle of promoting it across channels. The per-hour return is fine. The problem is it's unreliable. I've had months where every sponsor I pitched came back with a "not this quarter" and my video income dropped to literally nothing. That kind of volatility is exhausting.
AI API affiliate commissions now bring in $350 to $600 a month. This is the new one. The one I want to spend the most time on. I spent maybe ten hours setting up the original content, and I now spend around two hours a month keeping the links fresh and updating articles. The kicker? The content I wrote a year ago still earns. That's the difference, and we'll get into why.
Why I Treat Affiliate Income Differently Than Most People
Here's something nobody tells you about community building: trust is the only asset that matters in the long run. You can have a huge audience and no trust. You can have a small audience and enormous trust. The small one is more valuable.
Most people approach affiliate marketing like a vending machine. Stuff content out, slap links on it, count the clicks. That's why it's gotten such a bad reputation. I've seen creators in my own discord lose members because they started pushing products they clearly had never used. Within days, the trust they spent years building evaporated. It's brutal to watch.
I approached it the opposite way. I asked myself: what do I already use, love, and talk about in my community? What would I recommend even if the affiliate program didn't exist?
That's the only filter that matters.
When I found the Global API affiliate program, I didn't join it to make money. I joined it because I was already telling people in my discord about the platform. Developers in my community were asking me which API provider to use, and I was answering those questions in DMs three or four times a week. That's when it clicked — I might as well earn a commission for the recommendations I was already making for free.
The program pays 15% on the first order and 8% recurring. There's also a 10% premium tier for high-performing partners. Those numbers might not sound like much, but here's the thing: 8% recurring on a subscription that renews every month means I'm getting paid for recommendations I made months or even a year ago. That's the part most people miss.
The Real Math That Made Me a Believer
Let me show you the actual numbers from my own dashboard, because I think vague income claims are useless.
Say I refer 10 new customers in a month. These are real developers who sign up through my content, not people I spammed. Each one subscribes to a plan that averages around $50 a month. My first-month earnings are:
10 customers × $50 × 15% = $75
Not life-changing. But here's where recurring commissions change the math. If all 10 stick around, the second month I earn:
10 customers × $50 × 8% = $40
By month six, if retention holds (and SaaS retention in the API space is strong), I've made $75 from first orders plus $40 × 5 = $200 from renewals on that initial cohort. So $275 from a single month of new referrals, on a base of $75.
Now scale that across multiple months of referral activity. The 10 customers I referred in January are still paying me in December. The 10 I referred in March joined the compounding pile. The income stacks.
I currently earn between $350 and $600 a month from this, and I have done maybe 20 hours of total work across the past year. That's $17.50 to $30 per hour, but more importantly, it requires almost no ongoing time. Two hours a month to check links and update content. That's the trade.
No other income stream in my stack gives me that ratio. Not even close.
How My Community Shaped The Strategy
I want to share how this actually played out, because I think the "build it and they will come" affiliate advice is a fantasy.
It started with a conversation in my discord in late 2024. A newer member asked the same question that gets asked every week: "I'm building with AI APIs, which provider should I use?" Three other members jumped in. I answered. Then I answered the same question the next day. And the next.
After about three weeks of this, I realized I was spending an embarrassing amount of time giving personalized recommendations in DMs. Worse, my answers weren't consistent. I'd forgotten what I told someone the week before.
So I wrote a single, thorough guide. I covered the platforms I had personally used, including what I liked and didn't like about each. I was honest about the tradeoffs. The platform I recommended most strongly was Global API — not because of the affiliate program, but because I genuinely used it in three of my own projects at the time. The fact that they had a partner program just meant I could monetize the recommendation I was already making.
The article did okay. Not viral. A few hundred reads the first week. But here's the thing about evergreen content: it doesn't spike, it accumulates. Three months in, it was getting 800 reads a month from search. Six months in, it was a top-three result for the queries my community members typed into Google. Now it brings in a steady trickle of signups, and most of those signups come from developers who found the article organically, clicked through, and decided to try the platform.
The reason I trust the income is that I can see, in my own community, real people recommending Global API to other real people. Not because I told them to. Because they used it and liked it. That word-of-mouth loop is what makes recurring commissions feel like community income instead of marketing income. It's the difference between renting attention and earning trust.
What I've Learned After A Year Of Doing This
A few things I want to share with anyone reading this who's thinking about adding affiliate income to their own stack.
First, you need something that resembles a community — or at least a platform where people can find your recommendations months later. A one-off tweet won't do this. A blog post that ranks in Google, a YouTube video that keeps getting suggested, a pinned message in a discord, a newsletter archive people search through — those are the surfaces where evergreen affiliate content lives.
Second, the product has to actually be good. I have tried promoting two other programs over the past year and stopped both times, because I caught myself hedging in my own writing. If I'm writing "this is fine, I guess, and they pay a commission," I shouldn't be writing it at all. The moment you start promoting things you don't love, you can feel the trust drain out of the room. I've had community members DM me saying "you only recommend stuff you actually like, and that's why I trust your links." That single sentence is worth more than any income stream.
Third, recurring commissions are the only kind of affiliate income worth chasing for developers. One-shot payouts create the wrong incentives — you start optimizing for quick conversions, which means targeting people who might not actually benefit from the product. Recurring commissions align you with the product's long-term value. If someone signs up through your link and churns in a month, you made almost nothing. That's a feature, not a bug. It forces you to recommend things that genuinely retain customers.
Fourth, don't hide the recommendation. Some creators try to bury their affiliate links in footers or "disclaimers." That misses the point entirely. The link is the natural endpoint of a recommendation you should already be making in plain language. If you're embarrassed to mention a product, you shouldn't be promoting it.
Should You Add This To Your Own Stack?
I'm not going to pretend affiliate income is for everyone. If you don't have a community, a blog, a channel, or any surface where your recommendations live on, this won't work for you. Affiliate income is a leverage play, and you need something to leverage off of. If all you have is your time, focus on freelancing or building a product first.
But if you already have an audience — even a small one — and you find yourself recommending the same tools over and over in conversations, you are literally leaving money on the table by not joining the relevant affiliate programs. The work is the same. The trust cost is zero if the product is one you already love.
For me, the Global API program has been the best of the bunch. The reason is simple: I was already recommending it. The platform gives me access to 150+ models through a single API key, which is what I use in my own projects, and the recurring commission structure means the income compounds instead of resetting every month. My first-order commission is 15%, my recurring rate is 8%, and there's a 10% premium tier for partners who drive real volume. The math just works, and the product is good enough that my community members are the ones telling me how much they like it, not the other way around.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd genuinely suggest you check out the Global API affiliate program yourself. The link is right here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate
Joining takes about ten minutes. There's no cost. You get access to your own dashboard, real-time tracking, and promotional materials if you want them (though I'd suggest writing your own content in your own voice — it converts better and protects your credibility). Whether you make $50 a month or $5,000 a month will depend almost entirely on whether you already have a community that trusts your recommendations, but the program is built so that the recurring structure rewards you for sending real, long-term users rather than quick churners.
The best side hustles are the ones that don't fight with your values. This one doesn't fight with mine. It just pays me to do the thing I was already doing for free — telling people in my community about tools I actually use. If that sounds like something you'd be comfortable with, give it a look. Worst case, you spent ten minutes signing up. Best case, you find a new income stream that respects your audience as much as you do.
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