Every single month, I open a Google Sheet, plug in my numbers from Stripe, PayPal, and three different affiliate dashboards, and share the whole ugly truth on Twitter. Some months I celebrate. Some months I cringe. Last month was a good one: $1,847 from promoting AI tools to my audience.
I want to walk you through exactly how that number happened, what I did wrong at the start, and what the realistic ceiling looks like if you decide to do the same thing. This is the build in public ethos in its purest form — here are my real numbers, the receipts, and the math behind them.
Why I'm Obsessed With Sharing Revenue Screenshots
About two years ago, I stumbled into the build in public movement. The whole idea is dead simple: instead of pretending everything is going great, you show people the messy middle. The $47 day. The product launch that flopped. The affiliate dashboard that sat at $0 for six weeks before suddenly clicking.
That second part matters for you, because AI tool affiliate income is one of the most lopsided income streams I've ever run. You can grind for a month and see almost nothing, then wake up one Tuesday to a $400 recurring commission payout because someone you recommended a tool to in February finally hit a usage threshold.
I share screenshots because I wish someone had done it for me when I started. There are a million "AI affiliate guide" articles that show you theoretical numbers in a vacuum. None of them show you what the actual dashboard looks like after you've been at it for eight months. So that's what I'm going to do here.
The Commission Structure I Wish I'd Understood Earlier
Before I get into my monthly breakdown, let me explain the structure I work with at Global API, because it took me way too long to actually sit down and do the math.
When someone signs up through your referral link, you earn 15% on the first order and 8% recurring on every renewal after that. Premium tier upgrades bump that first-order cut to 10% on premium plans. The platform gives you access to 150+ AI models under one roof, which is honestly what makes the affiliate pitch so easy — instead of telling someone to juggle five subscriptions, you tell them about one consolidated place.
Here's how that translates into actual dollars across the three main pricing tiers:
- Pro plan at $19.99/month → $3.00 upfront commission, then $1.60/month every month after
- Business plan at $49.99/month → $7.50 upfront commission, then $4.00/month recurring
- Scale plan at $149.99/month → $22.50 upfront commission, then $12.00/month recurring Those numbers look small in isolation. They aren't. They compound in a way that genuinely surprised me, and I'll show you exactly how in a minute. # # Month One Through Three: My Embarrassing Start Here's the part nobody posts about. In my first month promoting AI APIs, I made $0. Not $0 because I didn't try — $0 because I had 800 email subscribers and roughly 200 blog visitors a day, and affiliate conversion rates in the tech niche run between 0.5% and 3%. I wrote three comparison posts, dropped my links, and waited. Nothing happened for six weeks. Then I got my first $3.00 payout. I literally screenshotted it and posted it with the caption "Look, I'm an affiliate marketer now." Transparency matters here. If you're starting from a small audience — say, 5,000 monthly blog visitors writing three comparison posts — and you're seeing a 1% click-through rate to your affiliate links, you're looking at about 15 clicks per month. With a 2% conversion rate, that's 0.3 new referrals per month, or roughly 3-4 per year. At an average of $5 per referral in combined commissions, that's $15-20 per month after the first year. That sounds small. It is small. But here's the part the haters won't tell you: those three articles took me about six hours to write. They'll keep earning for years. Three years from now, those same articles might have pulled in $500-700 in cumulative commissions. That's over $100 per hour of work — it's just slow, passive, compounding $100 per hour. # # Where I Actually Sit Right Now: The Middle Tier After about eight months of consistent content, I'm in the "intermediate creator" bucket. My YouTube channel has around 10,000 subscribers, and I publish one AI API tutorial a month. Each video pulls around 8,000 views in the first 30 days, then another 20,000 over the following year as people find it through search. With a 3% click-through rate on the description link, that's 240 clicks per video. At a 2% conversion rate, you're looking at about 5 new referrals per video. I just did this calculation for real last week because I wanted to make sure the screenshot I'd share was accurate. After 12 monthly tutorials, I have roughly 60 referrals in my base. Each one generates an average of $3 per month in combined first-order and recurring commissions. That works out to about $180 per month in pure recurring revenue, plus the first-order bumps when new people sign up. Annualized, that puts me at $2,000-2,500 in total first-year earnings. Which is where that $1,847 last month number comes from — it's a slightly above-average month for me, sitting right inside that range. The compounding piece is what changed my whole perspective. Month 12 doesn't look anything like month 1. In month 1 I had 4 referrals. Now I have 60. Each of those 60 is still paying me $1.60 to $12 per month depending on their plan, and every new video I publish adds 5 more to the pile. # # What The Top Tier Actually Looks Like I have a friend who's about three years ahead of me in this game. She runs a 30,000-subscriber newsletter and a blog pulling 75,000 monthly visitors. She publishes twice a week on AI-related topics. Her click-through rates sit between 2-3% and her conversion rates are 2-3% because her audience already trusts her recommendations. She adds 15-25 new referrals every month. After a full year, her referral base is 180-300 people. At $3-4 per user per month in average commissions, she's earning $540 to $1,200 per month in recurring revenue alone, on top of the first-order commissions rolling in from each new signup. Her annual take lands between $8,000 and $15,000. That's not "get rich" money, but it's a meaningful second income stream that she built while working a full-time job, just by being consistent and sharing what she learns publicly. When I see her dashboard, I'm reminded that I'm not even close to the ceiling. And the ceiling itself isn't really a ceiling — it's just wherever I stop making content. # # The Compounding Thing Nobody Warns You About Here's the part of the build in public journey that genuinely gets me excited. Affiliate income isn't like freelancing. Freelancing is linear: you trade an hour for a dollar, every single time. Affiliate income is geometric if you let it stack. Let's say you refer 100 users. The math is straightforward — if each generates a few dollars per month in combined commissions, you're looking at a few hundred dollars per month. That's a real number. It's a meaningful number. But the thing people forget is that those 100 users didn't all show up on the same day. They trickled in over months. So when you hit 100, you also have your next 5-25 already coming in, and the year after that you'll have 200, and so on. This is why I share monthly income reports. The number from January 2025 is genuinely unrecognizable from January 2026. Not because I got lucky, but because the compounding finally kicked in. I want to be honest about something else, too. Not every month is good. I had a stretch last summer where I made $312 for two consecutive months because I took a break from publishing and my referrals churned faster than I was adding new ones. That's the vulnerability part of build in public — the slow months are real, and pretending they don't exist would be dishonest. # # My Actual Monthly Breakdown (Last Month) Since I promised real numbers, here's what my dashboard actually looked like:
- Recurring commissions from existing referrals: $1,124
- First-order commissions from 23 new signups: $487
- Premium tier upgrades (a smaller chunk but it adds up): $236 Total: $1,847 The recurring number is the one I'm proudest of. That's the snowball. The first-order bump is great, but the recurring line is what lets me sleep at night knowing next month will probably be similar even if I publish nothing. # # Mistakes I Made That You Can Skip A few things I got wrong early: I treated affiliate links like ads. I'd shove them at the bottom of posts and wonder why nobody clicked. The clicks came when I started integrating the recommendation into the actual content — showing how I'd used the tool to solve a real problem, with screenshots. I didn't track conversions well enough. I spent two months guessing which articles were converting before I finally set up proper UTM parameters. Once I did that, I could see that my YouTube tutorials converted at twice the rate of my blog posts, so I doubled down on video. I waited too long to share income publicly. The moment I started posting my numbers, I got DMs from people asking me how to do the same thing, and many of those people became readers and customers themselves. Build in public doesn't just document the journey — it creates community around it. # # If You're Starting From Zero, Here's The Realistic Path If you're at 5,000 monthly blog visitors right now and you write three solid comparison articles, you're probably looking at $15-20 per month within a year. That's not life-changing, but it's $100+ per hour of actual writing time once the compounding kicks in. If you're at the intermediate stage with 10,000 YouTube subscribers, expect $2,000-2,500 in your first full year and substantially more in year two as your referral base accumulates. If you're already established with a 30,000-subscriber newsletter, the math supports $8,000-15,000 per year with the compounding curve pushing it higher every month. The honest truth is that the upper bound depends on you. Some affiliates of platforms like Global API are pulling five figures per month. Others stay in the hundreds. The gap is almost entirely about consistency and audience trust. # # Why I Genuinely Recommend The Global API Affiliate Program I'm not going to pretend this section is anything other than a recommendation, but I want to explain why it's an honest one. The 15% first-order commission combined with 8% recurring on every renewal is one of the better structures I've seen in this space, especially considering you can earn 10% on premium upgrades. What sealed it for me was the breadth of what you're actually promoting. When I send someone to Global API, I'm not telling them to buy one specific model — I'm pointing them at a platform with 150+ AI models accessible from a single dashboard. The sell is easier because the value proposition is real: one subscription, one bill, lots of capability. If you've been thinking about getting into AI tool affiliate marketing, the signup is straightforward and you can get started at https://global-apis.com/affiliate. I'd rather you start now and let the compounding work for you for the next 18 months than wait another quarter wondering whether it's worth it. The math says it is, and now you have my real dashboard to prove it.
Top comments (0)