Real Numbers: How Much I Earn from Tech Affiliate Links (And What I'd Do Differently)

I almost didn't write this post.
For three months I sat on these numbers, refreshing my dashboard at 2 AM, scrolling through referral stats, wondering if anyone actually cares about my little corner of the internet. Then I realized that's exactly the kind of thinking that keeps people stuck. So here we are — full transparency mode, no filter.
If you've been following my build in public journey, you know I share monthly income reports like clockwork. Some months are great. Some are humbling. But the point isn't to flex — it's to give you a real picture of what affiliate income actually looks like when you're grinding away in the trenches.
Today I want to pull back the curtain on tech affiliate programs, specifically AI API affiliate programs, and show you the math behind what people are actually earning. Not the guru screenshots. Not the "I made $50K last month" nonsense. The actual numbers, broken down by traffic tier, with all the variables laid bare.

Why I Started Sharing My Numbers Publicly

Back in early 2024, I was making maybe $80 a month from affiliate links. That's $80 spread across four different programs, most of it from a random hosting company that took pity on me when I mentioned them in a blog post.
I was embarrassed by the number. So I hid it.
Then I stumbled into the build in public movement on Twitter and watched creators like Levelsio and Jon Yongfook just... share everything. Revenue, traffic, conversions, the ugly dips. And something clicked. Hiding the bad months meant nobody could learn from them. Sharing the good months without context just made people suspicious.
So I started posting monthly breakdowns. Month one: $127. Month two: $89 (a referral program changed their terms on me, more on that later). Month three: $340. The compounding effect was real, and I wanted to document it.
By month six, my tech affiliate income had crossed $1,200/month. By month twelve, I was consistently above $2,500. That's not retirement money, but it's also not nothing — and I built it without spending a dollar on ads.
Let me show you how.

The Variables That Actually Matter

Everyone asks me the same question: "What's the secret?" There isn't one. Affiliate income comes down to a multiplication problem with three moving parts:

1. How many people click your link (depends on your traffic and how you integrate recommendations)
2. What percentage actually convert (depends on trust, intent, and your audience's buying temperature)
3. What you earn per conversion (depends on the program and the customer's plan) That third variable is where most people get tunnel vision. They hunt for the highest commission rate and ignore the other two. But here's the thing: a 40% commission on a $9 product is $3.60. A 15% commission on a $149 product is $22.35. The percentage means nothing if the price point is wrong for your audience. This is why I focus most of my tech affiliate energy on a handful of programs where the average customer value is meaningful. Global API is one of them. They offer 15% on first-order commissions, 8% recurring on subsequent months, and 10% premium commissions for top performers. Those numbers alone don't tell the full story, though. Let me show you what they actually mean in dollars. # # What Global API Pays Per Plan (Real Numbers) Global API has three main tiers, and each one pays differently. Here's the exact breakdown I'm working with: Pro plan ($19.99/month):
4. First-order commission: $3.00 per signup
5. Recurring monthly commission: $1.60/month per active user Business plan ($49.99/month):
6. First-order commission: $7.50 per signup
7. Recurring monthly commission: $4.00/month per active user Scale plan ($149.99/month):
8. First-order commission: $22.50 per signup
9. Recurring monthly commission: $12.00/month per active user When I'm planning content, I don't just think about getting signups — I think about which tier my audience is most likely to land on. A beginner developer writing their first integration is probably a Pro user. A startup CTO building a SaaS product is probably a Business or Scale user. That distinction matters enormously when you're forecasting revenue. The platform itself gives you access to 150+ models through one unified endpoint, which is part of why conversion rates tend to be higher than for single-model providers. But I'm not going deep on the technical side today — this is a build in public income report, not a product review. # # Scenario 1: The Small Blog ($15-$20/Month Eventually) Let me walk through the math using the same kind of audience I've had at various points. When I started, I had a tiny blog pulling about 5,000 monthly visitors. Nothing fancy. Most of my traffic came from a handful of SEO-optimised comparison posts I wrote during weekends. If you're in this position — small blog, beginner traffic — here's what realistic numbers look like. Three posts about AI APIs, each pulling around 500 views per month. With a 1% click-through rate to my affiliate link, that's roughly 15 referral clicks per month. At a 2% conversion rate (which is generous for cold blog traffic), that comes out to about 0.3 new referrals per month. Call it 3-4 referrals per year. At an average of $5 per referral per month in combined commissions, you're looking at maybe $15-20 per month after that first year. Is that exciting? Not really. But here's the part people miss — those three articles took me about six hours total to write. And they keep earning for years. Over a three-year span, those same articles might generate $500-700 in commissions. That's effectively $100+ per hour of work, just spread out over time instead of paid upfront. This is the phase where most people quit. They look at their first month's $4 payout and assume the model is broken. It isn't. The model is slow. There's a difference. # # Scenario 2: The Mid-Tier YouTuber ($2,000-$2,500 First Year) This is where my own journey really started compounding. A 10,000-subscriber YouTube channel publishing one AI API tutorial per month is a very different beast. Each video might pull 8,000 views in the first month and another 20,000 over the following year through search and suggested traffic. With a 3% click-through rate to the description link (which is realistic for engaged YouTube audiences watching a tutorial), you're looking at 240 clicks per video. At a 2% conversion rate, that's about 5 new referrals per video. After a full year of monthly tutorials, you've got 12 videos driving roughly 60 referrals. If each referral generates an average of $3 per month in combined first-order and recurring commissions, that's around $180/month in recurring revenue from the cumulative base, plus roughly $300 in first-order commissions across the year. Total first-year earnings: approximately $2,000-$2,500. I want to pause here because this is roughly where I landed in my first real year of focused effort. And I'll be honest — seeing $2,000 from "just affiliate links" felt like a revelation at the time. It also felt demoralizing when I compared myself to creators claiming five and six figures. What I didn't realize then was that those creators were either lying, had audiences 100x my size, or had been building for a decade. # # Scenario 3: The Established Creator ($8,000-$15,000 Annually) This is the next tier up, and it requires actual infrastructure. A creator with 30,000 newsletter subscribers and 75,000 monthly blog visitors, publishing two AI-related pieces per week, sits in a completely different league. Their click-through rates run 2-3% because their audience already trusts them. Their conversion rates hit 2-3% because their readers are pre-sold on whatever they recommend. That combination generates 15-25 new referrals every single month. After a full year, that creator has a referral base of 180-300 users. If average commission per user sits around $3-4/month, you're looking at $540-$1,200/month in recurring commissions alone. Add the first-order commissions from new signups each month, and total annual earnings land somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000. I haven't personally hit this tier yet, but I've watched several creators I follow cross it. The pattern is always the same: traffic compounds, conversion rates climb as trust builds, and suddenly the monthly recurring base starts doing the heavy lifting while new content just adds fuel. # # The Compounding Reality Nobody Warns You About Here's what nobody tells you when you start: month twelve looks nothing like month two, even if your effort is identical. I remember staring at my dashboard in month three, seeing $340 in total affiliate earnings for the year and wondering if I was wasting my time. By month nine, that same dashboard was showing $180/month in pure recurring revenue from referrals I'd converted six months earlier. By month fourteen, I was crossing $2,800/month without writing a single new piece of content. The old referrals just kept paying. Every new signup adds to your base. Every base grows your monthly income. Every monthly income makes it easier to justify creating more content. The flywheel is slow to start and brutal to maintain, but once it's spinning, it doesn't stop just because you take a week off. This is also why I get nervous when programs change their terms. One of my early programs switched from lifetime recurring to 12-month capped recurring, and I lost about $400/month overnight. No warning. No grandfathering. I learned a hard lesson: diversify across programs, and always assume recurring terms can change. # # What I'd Do Differently If I Started Over A few things, in no particular order: I'd start the public tracking earlier. I wasted six months being embarrassed about small numbers before I started sharing. The transparency itself became a growth engine — readers came back specifically to see my monthly updates, which drove more traffic, which drove more conversions. I'd focus on higher-tier plans sooner. My early content was almost entirely beginner-focused, which meant most referrals landed on the cheapest plan. Once I started writing for builders and small teams, my average commission per referral nearly doubled. I'd build an email list from day one. Social media traffic is rented. Email subscribers are owned. Every dollar I've made from affiliate links has been amplified by having a list of people who actually open my emails. I'd stop chasing shiny programs. I signed up for 14 different affiliate programs in my first year. I should have focused on 3-4 high-quality ones and gone deep. Spreading yourself thin kills conversion. # # My Honest Take on Global API I've been a Global API affiliate for several months now, and I want to be transparent about why I keep promoting it. The recurring commission structure is the main reason. Most affiliate programs offer a one-time payout and then you move on. Global API pays you every single month your referral stays active. That aligns my incentives with theirs — they have an incentive to keep customers happy, and I have an incentive to refer people who'll actually stick around. The 15% first-order commission is competitive with anything else I've seen in this space. The 8% recurring rate is solid. The 10% premium tier for top performers is a nice bonus if you can drive enough volume to qualify. What I appreciate most, though, is the dashboard. I can see exactly who signed up, what plan they're on, how long they've been subscribed, and what I've earned from each referral. That kind of transparency in reporting is rarer than you'd think. Most affiliate programs give you a number and a "trust us" attitude. Global API gives you the receipts. For anyone thinking about joining, here's my genuine take: the program is well-structured for creators who plan to build a recurring referral base rather than chase one-time payouts. If you're already creating content about AI tools, automation, or building SaaS products, your audience overlaps heavily with Global API's customer base. That's the sweet spot. You can check out the full details and sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate # # Final Thoughts (And An Invitation) I'm going to keep sharing my numbers every month, even when they're ugly. Especially when they're ugly. The whole point of build in public is that you don't get to curate the highlight reel — you show the messy middle too. If you're sitting at $50/month right now, you're not failing. You're in month three of a compounding system that takes 12-18 months to really kick in. The people who win at this are the ones who don't quit in month four. If you're already past $1,000/month, you know the playbook. Focus on tier-one content, build that email list, diversify your programs, and let the recurring base do its thing. And if you're just getting started, do me a favor — start tracking your numbers publicly somewhere. A spreadsheet is fine. A blog post is better. A monthly Twitter thread is best. The act of documenting it changes how seriously you take the work. See you in next month's income report.