Three months ago I made a small, slightly nervous decision: I was going to start putting affiliate links in my AI-related tutorials. Not in some spammy, "smash that buy button" kind of way. Just honest recommendations from a developer who actually uses these tools every day.
I've always been a build-in-public kind of person. I share revenue screenshots. I post monthly income reports. I think transparency is basically the only competitive advantage solo creators have left. So obviously, I had to document this whole experiment in public too.
Here's exactly what happened. Real numbers. Real awkward early days. Real lessons.
The Starting Line: Not Much, Honestly
Let me set expectations right away because I want this to be useful, not aspirational nonsense.
When I started, I was a developer who had been building with AI APIs in my own side projects for about a year. I knew the ecosystem reasonably well. I'd built chatbots, content tools, internal dashboards — the usual developer-flavored stuff. I had real opinions about which platforms felt good and which felt like pulling teeth.
My audience at the start:
- A small tech blog pulling in roughly 2,000 monthly visitors
- A Twitter account with about 800 developer followers
- A Dev.to profile with a few articles that occasionally got picked up That's it. No newsletter list. No course. No product. No existing monetization at all. Just a developer with a habit of writing about the things he builds. If you're reading this thinking "okay, but I have less than that" — keep going. The numbers I'm about to share are embarrassing at first. That's kind of the point. # # Why I Picked a Program With Recurring Commissions Before I wrote a single word, I spent a week researching AI API affiliate programs. I joined three of them. Two had the standard setup: you refer someone, you get a one-time commission, that's it. Nothing ongoing. The third one was Global API, and the structure was different. They pay 15% on first orders and 8% recurring on monthly renewals. That second number is the one that made me pay attention. Here's my logic, and it's the same logic I'd give anyone: one-time commissions feel like trading hours for a fixed payout. Recurring commissions feel like planting a seed that keeps producing. If someone signs up through my link and stays subscribed for six months, I'm earning on all six of those months, not just the first one. That completely changes the math on whether a single conversion is worth the effort. I want to be clear — I'm not saying recurring programs are automatically better in every case. I'm saying for my situation, where I write educational content that lives on the internet for years, the compounding nature of recurring commissions made way more sense. # # Month One: The $3 Reality Check Here's my real numbers for the first month. No rounding up to make myself feel better. Week 1: Joined the programs, set up my tracking links, stared at my dashboard for longer than I'd like to admit. Week 2: Published my first affiliate piece. It was an 1,800-word article walking through different AI API providers based on my actual hands-on experience with them. Real code samples. Real "this is what tripped me up" moments. I recommended Global API as the right choice for most developers and dropped in my affiliate link naturally within the recommendation. I cross-posted to Dev.to because, honestly, Dev.to is still one of the best free distribution channels for developer content if you write the kind of tutorials people actually search for. Week 3: The first week of traffic came in. The article pulled 340 views on Dev.to and 120 views on my blog. Three people clicked my affiliate link. Zero of them converted to a paid plan. Was I discouraged? A little, yeah. But I had read enough income reports to know that content affiliate marketing is a long game. Three clicks from 460 views is actually a reasonable click-through rate. The bottleneck wasn't interest — it was trust. People don't subscribe to a new platform from a single article they've never seen before. Week 4: The Dev.to version started ranking for some long-tail search terms. Views climbed to 520. Affiliate clicks for the week jumped to eight. One signup. Still no paid conversion, but a signup is a warm signal — it meant someone thought "yeah, I'll come back to this." I also shipped my second article in week four: a tutorial on building a simple chatbot using one of the popular models available through Global API. The tutorial format worked better as a soft recommendation because the link fit naturally into the walkthrough instead of feeling tacked on. Month 1 grand total:
- Articles published: 2
- Combined views: 750
- Affiliate clicks: 14
- Signups: 2
- Paid conversions: 1 (someone upgraded to Pro on day 28)
- First-order commission earned: $3.00
- Recurring commission earned: $0.00 (recurring kicks in month 2)
- Total month 1: $3.00 Three dollars. I'm going to say that out loud one more time. Three. Dollars. Here's the thing though, and I think this is the mindset shift that separates people who stick with this from people who quit after week two: three dollars is proof the entire system works. One stranger found my article, decided I seemed credible, signed up, paid real money, and a small slice of that payment landed in my account. The pipeline functions. The question is just volume. # # Month Two: Things Started to Breathe Going into month two I had two articles, 14 total clicks, one paying referral, and exactly three dollars to my name from this experiment. My target — written down in a notes app on my phone — was to publish three more articles and hit $50 in total cumulative earnings by the end of the month. Week 5: I published article three. This one was different from the previous two. Instead of comparing providers or walking through a tutorial, I wrote a case study about how I had used an AI API to build a specific feature for a client project earlier in the year. Real client. Real deliverable. Real problem solved. This piece did something the others hadn't: it gave readers a reason to care. Developers reading it thought "oh, I've had that exact problem." The case study pulled 280 views in its first week, and the click-through rate on the affiliate link was noticeably higher. People who relate to your project context are way more likely to click through to the tool you used. Week 6: The original comparison article from month one crossed 1,200 total views on Dev.to. Google started indexing it properly, and a few keyword variations began ranking. This is where I had my first "wait, is this actually working?" moment. Affiliate clicks jumped to 4–5 per day. Two more conversions that week, both to Pro plans. I want to pause on this because it's important: content compounds. That month-one article I almost gave up on after week three was doing the heavy lifting in week six. It had been quietly collecting traffic while I was off writing new pieces. Week 7: Article four was a beginner-oriented guide — "how to actually get started with AI APIs if you've never called one before." This one took the longest to write at 2,200 words, but it was aimed at a totally different audience than my earlier developer-to-developer pieces. Beginners convert differently. They need more hand-holding, more "click this, then this, then this," and they are significantly more likely to follow a clear recommendation because they don't yet have strong opinions about the alternatives. Week 8: This was the milestone week. I got my first recurring commission payment: $1.60, from the original referral's second month on the platform. I know $1.60 sounds like nothing. I made more than that in the time it took to write this sentence. But here's why I literally screenshotted it: it was the moment the model stopped being theoretical. The recurring commission worked. It wasn't a one-time payout. That referral was now a small, persistent revenue stream tied to a piece of content I'd already published and largely forgotten about. Article five went live the same week — a guide aimed at cost-conscious developers who want to be smart about how they spend on AI tools. Different angle, different keyword territory. Month 2 totals (so far as I'm tracking):
- New articles published: 3
- Total articles in rotation: 5
- Combined views across all articles: ~2,100
- Affiliate clicks: trending at roughly 4–5 per day by week's end
- Multiple new paid conversions during the month
- Recurring commissions now active and ticking upward The numbers were finally starting to look like something. # # What the Numbers Actually Taught Me Three months in, here are the things I wish I'd known on day one: 1. The first month is supposed to be ugly. Anyone quitting after $3 in earnings is operating on a broken mental model. Content affiliate income is front-loaded with effort and back-loaded with payoff. You write in month one, you earn in months two through twelve. If you can't tolerate a near-empty dashboard while you're building, this isn't the game for you. 2. Recurring commissions change the entire psychology of the work. Once I knew that every conversion was going to keep paying me month after month, I stopped optimizing for short-term clicks and started optimizing for fit. I'd rather recommend the platform to 50 ideal users than blast it out to 5,000 random ones. Better fit = longer retention = more recurring revenue for me. 3. Case studies convert better than comparisons. By a wide margin. The piece that pulled the highest click-through rate wasn't the one with the cleanest writing — it was the one about a real project I'd shipped. Developers trust real usage evidence more than they trust any amount of polished prose. 4. Distribution matters more than writing quality. My honestly "okay" articles on Dev.to outperformed my better-written blog posts because Dev.to has built-in distribution. The writing is only half the job. The other half is putting it where the right people will see it. 5. Transparency compounds. Every time I posted a small update about this experiment on Twitter, I got replies from people who were trying similar things. Some of those people are now readers, some are now customers of the platforms I recommend, and a few have even shared their own affiliate income publicly with me. The build-in-public ethos isn't just a vibe — it's a genuine growth mechanism. # # Why I'd Recommend the Global API Affiliate Program (Honestly) I'm going to end this the way I started it: with transparency. I keep recommending the Global API affiliate program to other developer-creators who ask me about this stuff, and I want to explain why — not because I was paid to, but because the math genuinely makes sense for someone in my position. The two numbers that matter: 15% on first orders and 8% recurring on monthly renewals. The first number rewards you for the work of acquisition. The second number rewards you for the work of writing content that brings in
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