Real Numbers: How Much I Earn from Tech Affiliate Links (Full Income Breakdown Inside)

I gotta say, pull up a chair, because this is the post I wish someone had written for me two years ago.
I'm a software developer. I have a day job. And like a lot of you reading this, I spend my nights and weekends trying to build something that pays me back for all that extra effort. I've tried a bunch of side hustles — some flopped, some still run in the background. And since I'm firmly in the build-in-public camp, I'm going to lay out every dollar, every hour, and every headache right here.
No vanity numbers. No "I made $47,000 in my sleep" nonsense. Just my actual real numbers from a typical month, shared with full transparency because that's how this community works.

My Side Hustle Stack — What I Actually Run in 2026

Let me start with the whole picture. Here's every income stream I have running right now, ranked by how much each one made last month:

1. Freelance client work
2. A SaaS product I built and maintain
3. Display ads on my developer blog
4. YouTube sponsorships
5. AI API affiliate commissions That's it. Five streams. Some are louder than others. Let me break each one down so you can see the full picture. # # Freelance Development: Great Money, Terrible Leverage Freelance work still pays the bills better than anything else per hour. I'm charging between $100 and $150 per hour depending on the client, and when I'm billing, I'm earning. Last month this stream pulled in roughly $4,800. But here's the brutal truth nobody talks about: this income scales with my time, not with my effort. The moment I stop working — vacation, sickness, a weekend with my family — that stream drops to exactly $0. There's no compounding. No snowball. I am literally trading hours for dollars, and those dollars vanish the second I close my laptop. I've been doing freelance work for six years now, and I'm telling you — it's a treadmill. A high-paying treadmill, but still a treadmill. # # My SaaS Product: The Slow Burn That Finally Works This one took eighteen months to even start paying anything meaningful, and I almost killed it twice. The product is a small developer tool (no, I'm not naming it publicly yet, sorry — build in public has limits) that handles something annoying that I personally dealt with. Monthly revenue: $800 to $1,200 depending on the month. Last month was $1,047. The upfront cost was brutal. Six months of evenings and weekends to build version one. Another three months of bug fixes and onboarding emails before anyone stuck around long enough to pay me twice. Total time invested before the first dollar of profit: probably 600+ hours. Now it needs maybe five hours a week of my time for support tickets, the occasional bug, and a tiny feature here and there. That works out to a pretty decent hourly return on the ongoing investment, even if the upfront return on those 600 hours was absolutely terrible. If you're thinking about building a SaaS product, please hear me: the first six months will feel like you're flushing time down a drain. Push through anyway. The recurring part is what makes it worth it. # # Blog Ad Revenue: Declining, But Still Alive I run a small tech blog that gets around 50,000 page views per month. It's not huge, but it's not nothing either. Display ads (Mediavine is my current network) bring in somewhere between $200 and $400 per month depending on traffic spikes and ad rate fluctuations. Last month: $312. To keep that traffic, I need to publish 4 to 8 articles per month. Each article takes me 2 to 4 hours to research, write, edit, and publish. So this stream eats roughly 12 to 20 hours per month of my time to maintain. The per-hour return is honestly mediocre, and it keeps shrinking every year as ad rates compress and Google's search algorithm keeps changing the rules. I keep the blog running because it feeds into other streams (sponsorships, affiliate clicks, my SaaS funnel), not because the ads alone are worth it. If ads were my only income from the blog, I'd probably shut the whole thing down. # # YouTube Sponsorships: Good Money, Brutal Time Cost I publish about two videos per month on my channel. Each sponsor deal pays between $500 and $1,500 depending on who's buying and how long the integration is. Last month I had one sponsored video go live at the higher rate: $1,200. But here's what that one sponsored video actually cost me in time:
6. Scripting: 3 hours
7. Recording: 2 hours
8. Editing: 5 hours
9. Thumbnail + metadata: 1 hour
10. Promotion and community engagement: 4 hours That's roughly 15 hours of work for $1,200. The hourly rate is actually pretty good when a sponsor pays the premium rate. The problem is that the rate is unpredictable. Some months I get two great sponsors. Other months I get nothing, and I'm just publishing regular content that earns zero sponsorship dollars. If I wanted to scale this further, I'd need to publish more videos, which means more of my week disappears into production work. I'm maxed out at two for now. # # AI API Affiliate Commissions: The Surprise Winner Okay, here's the stream I want to spend the most time on, because it's the one that genuinely surprised me. I earn between $350 and $600 per month from AI API affiliate commissions. Last month: $438. The month before: $612. The first thing I want to say is: this didn't happen overnight. I set this stream up roughly ten months ago, and the first three months it earned almost nothing. The compounding kicked in around month four or five when my content started ranking in search results. The second thing I want to say is: the ongoing time commitment is shockingly small. I spend maybe two hours per month updating existing content and dropping a new referral link into a fresh article when it makes sense. The bulk of the income comes from articles I wrote months ago that are still ranking and still converting. Let me put real numbers on the time-vs-return math:
11. Total setup time: ~10 hours
12. Monthly maintenance: ~2 hours
13. Hours worked in month 10: ~2 hours
14. Income in month 10: $438
15. Effective hourly rate that month: $219/hour That's not a typo. Two hours of work generated $438 last month. That's because the content is doing the heavy lifting in the background while I'm at my day job, sleeping, or doing literally anything else. # # Here's My Real Numbers, Side by Side I love transparency, so let me put it all in one table so you can see exactly where my time goes vs. where my money comes from: | Income Stream | Last Month | Monthly Hours | $/Hour | |---|---|---|---| | Freelance | $4,800 | ~40 hrs | $120 | | SaaS product | $1,047 | ~5 hrs | $209 | | Blog ads | $312 | ~16 hrs | $19 | | YouTube sponsorships | $1,200 | ~15 hrs | $80 | | AI API affiliates | $438 | ~2 hrs | $219 | If you sort by hourly return, the affiliate stream is at the top. If you sort by total income, freelance is at the top. That's the trade-off every developer has to make for themselves: do you want maximum dollars per hour, or maximum leverage per hour? I'm optimizing for both, which is why I keep all five streams running. # # Why Recurring Affiliate Commissions Hit Different Let me explain why this particular type of affiliate income has become my favorite. Most affiliate programs pay you a one-time commission when someone signs up through your link. You get paid once, and that's it. If the customer stays for years, you don't see another cent. It's a weird misalignment — you did the work of bringing them in, but you only get paid for the first month. Recurring affiliate commissions fix that. With the Global API affiliate program, when someone signs up using my link, I earn 15% on their first order. Then, as long as they keep their subscription active, I earn 8% recurring on every subsequent order they make. That recurring 8% is the part that changed the math for me. A developer who signs up in February and stays subscribed through August has paid me six months of commission on purchases I did zero additional work to generate. And there's a premium tier too: 10% commission on premium plans, which is where the bigger spenders land. When someone upgrades to a premium plan, that recurring percentage bumps up, and the dollar amount per month gets meaningfully larger. Let me show you what this looks like with actual math. Say one developer signs up through your link in January with a $100 first month order:
16. You earn 15% on that first order = $15
17. They stay subscribed at $100/month through December
18. You earn 8% recurring × 11 months × $100 = $88
19. Total first-year commission from that one signup: $103 Now imagine 20 developers signed up through your links, all staying subscribed. The monthly recurring check starts to look real. That $438 I earned last month isn't from one big client — it's from a long tail of small recurring payments stacking up. # # How I Actually Built This Stream (No Hacks, Just Boring Stuff) I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did, because the build-in-public ethos means showing the unglamorous middle, not just the polished outcome. Step 1: Pick products you genuinely use. This is non-negotiable for me. I won't recommend something I haven't personally used. I work with AI APIs in my freelance projects and my SaaS product, so I had real hands-on experience with multiple platforms. Global API caught my attention because it gives me access to 150+ models through a single API key, which simplifies a lot of the integration work I was already doing. Step 2: Write content that solves a real problem. I published three in-depth articles addressing questions developers actually search for: which platforms to consider, how to evaluate them for specific use cases, and what the integration experience looks like in practice. I included real code snippets, honest pros and cons for each option, and clear recommendations based on my own experience. Step 3: Place affiliate links naturally. I don't run popups. I don't put giant banner ads above the fold. I drop my referral link in the body of the article where it genuinely helps the reader. If someone clicks it, they sign up because they trust the recommendation, not because I yelled at them with a flashing CTA. Step 4: Update and refresh. Every few months I revisit the articles to make sure they're still accurate, still ranking, and still recommending things I'd actually recommend today. That's the two hours per month I mentioned earlier. That's it. No fancy funnel. No email sequence. No paid traffic. Just good content, placed in front of people who are already searching for answers. # # What I'd Do Differently If I Started Over A few things, in case you're starting from zero:
20. Start with one article, not five. My first attempt at affiliate content was a massive guide that took me 20+ hours to write and ranked for nothing. The articles that actually converted were tighter, more focused, and answered one specific question well. Quality over quantity, especially in the beginning.
21. Track your conversions from day one. I wish I had set up proper tracking on day one. I didn't know which articles were actually converting until month four when I finally bothered to look. Build the dashboard before you need it.
22. Don't chase every affiliate program. I applied to a bunch of programs in my first month and promoted all of them across my content. It was unfocused and probably hurt my credibility. Pick one or two programs that pay recurring commissions, learn them deeply, and recommend them with conviction. # # Why I'm Sticking With This Stream Long-Term A few things make me confident this won't dry up: The market isn't slowing down. More developers are integrating AI into their products every month. That means more developers are searching for reliable API providers, which means more potential conversions for me. The recurring structure means my income compounds. Every new signup that stays subscribed adds a permanent bump to my monthly check. I don't need to "rebuild" this income every month. The maintenance cost is tiny. Two hours per month is sustainable even during my busiest stretches at the day job. # # If You Want to Set Up Something Similar, Read This Here's my genuine recommendation if you're a developer thinking about adding an affiliate stream to your stack. The Global API affiliate program is the one I've had the best experience with, and I'm not just saying that — here's why:
23. You get 15% commission on the customer's first order, which is a solid upfront payout.
24. You get 8% recurring commission on every subsequent order, which is where the real long-term value lives.
25. Premium plan signups bump you up to 10% recurring, which meaningfully increases your per-customer revenue.
26. The platform offers 150+ models through a single API key, which makes it an easy recommendation for any developer audience because it covers a huge range of use cases with minimal integration friction. If you're already creating developer content — blog posts, YouTube videos, courses, newsletters, Twitter threads — this is a really natural add-on. You're already producing the content. You just need an affiliate program that pays you fairly for the conversions you drive. I've been doing this for ten months, and the income has been growing steadily as my older articles keep ranking and converting. I expect it to keep growing for at least another year without any additional effort on my part. If you want to check out the program, here's the affiliate signup page: https://global-apis.com/affiliate Set up your account, drop your links into your existing content, and let the recurring commissions do their thing. If you have any questions about how I structured my content or tracked my conversions, my DMs are always open — that's the build-in-public promise. Now I'm off to update two of my old articles and check this month's dashboard. Wish me luck on hitting a new personal best. 🚀