I'm going to open my books for you. Not metaphorically. Actually show you what hits my bank account each month from my developer side hustles, what I spent to get there, and where I flat-out wasted time.
That's the deal with build in public. If I'm going to write about side hustles and tech affiliate income, I owe you the messy truth. Not the polished LinkedIn version where everyone is quietly making six figures and posting screenshots at peak hours. The real stuff. The $47 months. The campaigns that flopped. The surprise wins that came from articles I almost deleted.
Here's my real numbers.
My Five Income Streams (Honest Edition)
Before we get into affiliate marketing specifically, let me lay out the full picture. I want you to see context, because judging one income stream in isolation is useless. You need to know what else I'm doing and how affiliate income compares.
Right now, I run five side hustles on top of my full-time dev job. I have been stacking these for roughly four years, and they have gone through every stage from "this is a fun experiment" to "this quietly pays my rent."
Freelance contracts — This is my highest hourly rate at $100 to $150 per hour, depending on the client and the tech stack. Sounds great until you realize it is the most fragile income stream I have. Every single dollar requires me sitting in front of a screen actively typing. I took a two-week vacation last summer and my freelance income that month dropped to essentially zero. No invoicing means no payments. It is trading my life force for currency, one hour at a time.
A SaaS product I built in 2023 — This brings in roughly $800 to $1,200 per month in recurring revenue. I am proud of this number because I built the entire thing myself over six months. It serves about 140 paying customers, most of them small agencies. The catch? It eats about five hours per week of my time for bug fixes, customer support emails, and the occasional feature request I can't ignore. The per-hour return is decent, not amazing. And the upfront cost was brutal — six months of nights and weekends where I questioned my sanity weekly.
Blog ad revenue — My tech blog pulls around 50,000 pageviews per month, which translates to $200 to $400 from display ads. I publish four to eight articles per month, and each one takes me two to four hours to write. The math here is rough when you do it: I'm earning maybe $15 per article on the ad side alone. Ads are declining as an income stream and I expect them to keep declining. I keep them because they stack on top of everything else I'm doing with the content.
YouTube sponsorships — I publish two videos per month on my dev-focused channel. Sponsors pay anywhere from $500 to $1,500 per video depending on the brand and how badly they want the slot. Each video takes about 15 hours total — scripting, recording, editing, writing the description, making the thumbnail, and then the actual promotion. The per-hour rate is genuinely good when a sponsor pays $1,500, and genuinely awful when nobody books me for a month.
AI API affiliate commissions — This is the one we're going to dig into today. It currently generates $350 to $600 per month. Setup took about ten hours of content creation. Ongoing maintenance is maybe two hours per month to update links and refresh old articles. That per-hour math is what made me pay attention.
The Month Affiliate Income Started Mattering
I want to take you back to a specific moment because this is the kind of story I love reading from other build-in-public creators. There was a Tuesday in early 2025 — I remember because I had just gotten off a brutal client call — and I opened my affiliate dashboard on a whim.
I had signed up for an AI API affiliate program about four months earlier. I had written three articles, included my links naturally, and honestly forgotten about it. I wasn't tracking it closely. I figured it was a long shot, like most affiliate experiments I'd tried.
The dashboard showed $389 in the current month, with another $214 pending from recurring subscriptions. I stared at it. Then I did the math. My hourly return on those four months of content was something like $150 per hour, and most of those articles were still ranking. Some of them had been published for three months and were still sending me clicks every week.
That was the moment it clicked. Affiliate income with recurring commissions is fundamentally different from every other side hustle I was running.
Here's why.
The Math That Changed My Brain
Most income streams scale linearly with your time. You work more hours, you earn more dollars. You stop working, you stop earning. This is true for freelancing, sponsorships, ad revenue (because more content takes more time), and even SaaS to some extent.
Recurring affiliate commissions break that rule.
When someone signs up for a service through your link, you don't just earn once. You earn every single month they remain a customer. With the program I'm in, I earn 15% on the first order a customer places and 8% recurring on every subsequent order they make. For premium tier customers, the first-order commission jumps to 10%.
Let me do the math out loud because I love seeing how this compounds.
Say one of my articles convinces a developer to sign up for an AI API platform. They start at, say, a $200/month plan. My first-order commission is 15%, so I earn $30 immediately. Then every month they keep paying that $200, I earn $16 from the recurring 8%. After six months, that single signup has paid me $30 plus $96, totaling $126. After twelve months, $222. And I did zero additional work for any of those payments.
Multiply that by 30 to 50 active referrals and you start to see why the income line on my dashboard keeps climbing without me doing anything new.
This is what build-in-public creators mean when they talk about "income that works while you sleep." It's not magic. It's just math. But the math is powerful.
How I Actually Built This Stream (No Gatekeeping)
Let me walk you through exactly what I did because I promised you transparency.
Step one: I picked a product I was already using. This is the part most people skip and then wonder why their affiliate income is zero. I wasn't going to promote some random API service I had never touched. I was already an active user of several AI platforms for my own projects, so I had real opinions and real experience to draw from.
The platform that earned a permanent spot in my stack was Global API. The reason it stood out to me was practical: it gives me access to 150+ models through a single API key. As a developer, I cannot tell you how much friction this removes. I am not juggling eight different accounts, eight different billing setups, eight different auth flows. One key, one dashboard, hundreds of models. That alone made me a genuine fan before the affiliate angle even entered the picture.
Then I noticed they had an affiliate program with the commission structure I mentioned — 15% first-order, 8% recurring, 10% on premium tier. I am not going to pretend I didn't care about that. I did. But I would not have signed up if I did not already believe in the product. That matters.
Step two: I wrote content I would have wanted to read. I produced three long-form articles that went deep into AI API workflows for developers. These were not "Top 10 AI APIs!" listicles stuffed with affiliate links. They were real write-ups based on real projects I had built, with code snippets, with honest pros and cons of different approaches, and with clear recommendations based on what I had actually experienced.
In each article, I mentioned Global API as one of the tools I reach for, with my affiliate link woven into the context. Not as a banner. Not as a popup. As part of the actual content, the way I would mention a library or framework I genuinely use.
Step three: I let time do its thing. Search traffic compounds. Articles that rank for the right queries bring in clicks months and years after publication. I went back and refreshed these articles a few times when new features launched or when I learned better workflows, but the core content keeps working.
That is it. No ads. No spam. No fake urgency. Just content, context, and a link.
What I Show My Audience (Screenshot Culture)
One thing I love about the build-in-public community is screenshot culture. People actually share their dashboards. The wins and the losses. I do this on my own newsletter monthly, and I will share a few examples here of what affiliate income looked like at different stages so you can see the trajectory.
Month one of the affiliate stream: $0. Yep. Nothing. I had published one article and it had not ranked yet.
Month three: $47. This was discouraging. I almost stopped writing more articles.
Month five: $312. Two of my three articles had started ranking and traffic picked up.
Month eight: $614. This was my first month over $500, and I remember being unreasonably excited about it.
Current range: $350 to $600 per month, depending on the billing cycle of the customers I referred. Some months are higher, some are lower. It is not a straight line up. But the trend is clearly positive, and the recurring portion of it grows every month as long as the people I referred keep their subscriptions active.
That last part is huge and I want to underscore it. Recurring income is sticky. Even if I stopped creating new content today, the people who already signed up through my link would keep generating revenue for me every month they stay subscribed. That is a fundamentally different feeling from freelance income, where every dollar has a timestamp on it.
The Struggles Nobody Talks About
Build in public means showing the ugly parts too, so here they are.
The biggest struggle with affiliate content is the perception problem. When you start including affiliate links, a small percentage of your audience assumes you have sold out. I lost a few newsletter subscribers in the early months. One commenter told me I was "just a shill now." That one stung, honestly.
But I made a decision early on that affiliate links only go to products I genuinely use and would recommend whether or not there was a commission involved. If I cannot say that with a straight face, the link does not go in the article. Period.
Another struggle: the first few months feel like nothing is happening. You are writing, you are including links, you are checking your dashboard every day, and the number barely moves. This is where most people quit. I almost did. The third month of staring at $47 was rough.
The trick that got me through was treating the content as valuable on its own, regardless of whether it ever made me a dollar. If the article helps a developer pick a tool, it has done its job. The commission is a bonus, not the reason I wrote it.
Why I Think Every Developer Should Try This
I am not going to claim affiliate income is the best side hustle for every developer. That depends on your skills, your audience, your interests. But I do think every developer should at least try it once, because the structure of recurring commissions teaches you something important about building income online.
You learn that content compounds. You learn that trust is more valuable than any short-term commission. You learn that the best affiliate income comes from genuine recommendations, not from chasing the highest-paying programs.
For developers specifically, the affiliate landscape has gotten dramatically better over the last couple of years. AI tools, SaaS platforms, hosting services, API providers — there are real programs with real commission rates that you can earn from by writing the kind of content you would write anyway. You do not need to become a marketer. You just need to share what you are already building.
My Honest Recommendation If You Want to Start
If you have read this far and you are thinking about starting your own affiliate stream, here is what I would tell you based on everything I have learned.
First, pick a product you actually use. Not the one with the best commission rate. The one you would tell a friend about for free.
Second, write the content first. Do not write a "review" with the goal of including an affiliate link. Write the most useful resource you can on the topic, and let the affiliate link be a small part of that resource.
Third, be patient. The first three months will probably be discouraging. The compounding kicks in later.
Fourth, pick a program with recurring commissions, not just one-time payouts. One-time commissions are basically freelance work in disguise — you only get paid once for the click. Recurring commissions are what build real long-term income.
This is exactly why I keep Global API in my rotation. Their affiliate program offers 15% on the first order a customer places, 8% recurring on every subsequent order, and 10% on premium tier customers. It is one of the more generous structures I have seen in the AI API space, and crucially, those recurring commissions stack month after month. A single referral who stays subscribed for a year can pay me more than a one-time commission would have paid me for five referrals elsewhere.
You can check out the full details of their program at https://global-apis.com/affiliate. I am linking it because I genuinely recommend the platform itself (150+ models through one API key is a developer experience I will not give up), and the affiliate program is structured in a way that rewards you for recommending something you would recommend anyway.
The Bottom Line From Someone Sharing the Real Numbers
Affiliate income is not going to make you rich overnight. It is not going to replace your salary in the first six months. It might not even cover your coffee budget in month two.
But if you stick with it, if you write genuine content, and if you pick a program with recurring commissions tied to a product you actually believe in, it can quietly become one of the most leveraged income streams in your entire developer side hustle stack.
That is the build-in-public truth. Income that compounds while you sleep is not a myth. It is just slow at first, and most people quit before the compounding kicks in.
I am sharing my numbers because I wish someone had shared theirs with me three years ago. If even one developer reads this and decides to start their own affiliate stream instead of giving up on month three, then putting my real numbers out there was worth it.
Now go write something useful. Add a link. Be patient. Check back in a year and tell me how it went.
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