I'll be honest with you — I'm the type of dev who has a Notion database for everything. Sprint velocity. Side project MRR. Coffee consumption (joke… mostly). So when I started promoting AI API services through affiliate links, of course I built a tracker from day one.
Here's what I want to share in this post: real commission math, three income scenarios at different audience sizes, and exactly how the compounding works month over month. No hype, no rounded-up screenshots — just the kind of breakdown I'd put in front of another engineer.
Why I Even Bothered With Another Side Hustle
My day job pays well. Solid salary, decent equity, remote. But I got tired of having one income source. Single point of failure, you know? One layoff round and suddenly I'm scrambling.
I'd tried the usual stuff — SaaS micro-products, freelancing on nights and weekends, even a print-on-demand experiment that I'd rather not talk about. What stuck was affiliate marketing for AI infrastructure because it's passive after the initial push. You write the content once, the link keeps working.
I started tracking results the way I track any system: a spreadsheet with columns for clicks, signups, plan tier, first-order commission, recurring commission, and "effective hourly rate" once I logged the time spent creating the content. Spoiler: that last column is what made me double down.
The Commission Structure (Here's the Math)
Before I get into scenarios, let me lay out how Global API's affiliate program actually pays. Because the numbers matter, and a lot of affiliate pages bury them.
You get 15% on the first order and 8% recurring every month after that. Premium offerings bump that to 10% recurring on certain plans. Let me translate that into dollars across the three main tiers:
- Pro plan ($19.99/month) → $3.00 first order + $1.60/month every month after
- Business plan ($49.99/month) → $7.50 first order + $4.00/month every month after
- Scale plan ($149.99/month) → $22.50 first order + $12.00/month every month after The platform itself hosts 150+ models — text, image, embeddings, the works — which is honestly what makes it sellable. People landing on your link aren't buying vaporware; they're getting access to a real catalog with real usage dashboards. That matters for conversion rates more than people admit. Now, your monthly take depends on three things:
- How much traffic lands on whatever content carries your link
- What percentage of that traffic clicks through
- What percentage of clickers actually convert to paying users That's it. Three variables. Everything else is downstream. # # Three Income Scenarios I Modeled in My Spreadsheet I'm going to walk through three audience sizes because I've personally been at all three stages of audience growth across different platforms, and the math changes a lot. # # # Scenario 1: Small Creator (5,000 Monthly Blog Visitors) This is where most people start. You have a small dev blog. Maybe a few hundred visitors a day. You write three comparison articles — total time investment around six hours. Each piece grabs maybe 500 views a month. At a 1% click-through on your affiliate link, you're looking at roughly 15 clicks per month across the whole site. With a 2% conversion rate — which is reasonable for tech comparison content — that's somewhere around 0.3 new paying users per month. Yes, less than one. That's the reality at the bottom of the funnel. Per month, you're earning around $15–20 in blended first-order and recurring commissions. Not life-changing on its own. But here's the part people miss: those articles keep earning for years. They rank in search, they get bookmarked, they get cited. Over a three-year horizon, those six hours of writing turn into $500–700 cumulative. That's north of $100/hour amortized — just not in a single paycheck. # # # Scenario 2: Intermediate Creator (YouTube Channel, 10K Subs) YouTube is a different beast. The conversion math is better because viewers are actively watching you do something with the API. They didn't click a blog post by accident — they chose your tutorial from a list of options. Let's say you ship one tutorial a month. That video pulls 8,000 views in its first month and another 20,000 over the following year as the algorithm keeps surfacing it. With a 3% click-through to your description link, that's 240 clicks per video. At a 2% conversion rate (conservative for tutorial content), you're netting about 5 new users per video. Run that monthly for twelve months and you've got 60 referrals in your base. If the average referral sits on a Pro plan — which is realistic for solo devs and small teams — you're collecting roughly $1.60/month per user in recurring, plus one-time first-order payouts. Total first-year haul: somewhere between $2,000 and $2,500. That includes both the upfront commissions for new signups and the growing monthly recurring from the user base you've accumulated. Month thirteen onward, you're looking at $180/month in mostly passive recurring if you've stopped creating new content. Most of us don't stop, obviously. # # # Scenario 3: Established Creator (Newsletter + Blog, 75K Monthly Visitors) This is where the model starts looking legitimately attractive. Imagine you have a 30,000-subscriber newsletter and a blog doing 75K visitors per month, and you're publishing two AI-related pieces a week. Your click-through rate sits at 2–3% because you've built authority and people trust your recommendations. Conversion lands at 2–3% as well because your audience is already pre-qualified — they're the kind of people who build with this stuff. That math runs to 15–25 new referrals every single month consistently. After a full year, you're sitting on a base of 180–300 users. Average commission per user, blended across Pro and Business tiers, lands around $3–4 per month in recurring. Do that arithmetic on the recurring alone and you're earning $540–1,200/month passive. Plus first-order payouts landing every month from new signups. Total annual earnings range from roughly $8,000 to $15,000 depending on how many of your referrals upgrade to higher tiers. At that audience level, this genuinely rivals a part-time contracting gig — except the work is already done. New content just adds to the base. # # The Compounding Effect Nobody Talks About Most affiliate marketing posts skip this part because it's less sexy than screenshots of big payouts. But it's the most important thing I can tell you. Recurring commissions stack. Every referral you bring in isn't a one-time transaction — it's a small annuity. Let's do a concrete example using my real spreadsheet numbers: Month 1: You refer 5 users. Income: ~$15 first-order + $0 recurring. Month 6: You've referred 30 users total. Your monthly recurring from users still active is around $50. First-order from this month's new users adds another $40. Total that month: ~$90. Month 12: 60 users in your base. Monthly recurring now $100+. Plus new user first-orders. Monthly income around $200–300 depending on churn. Month 24: If you've maintained pace, you might have 120+ users. Monthly recurring clears $200. Total monthly income $400+ even if you publish nothing new. This is the magic. You're not chasing the next dollar — you're building a base that pays you monthly. In dev terms, it's like writing a clean microservice once and letting it handle traffic for years. The cost of running it is near zero. The 8% recurring + 10% premium structure is what makes this model work. If it were a flat one-time payout, I'd have moved on. Recurring is everything. # # Why I Picked AI API Affiliates Over Other Programs I've run a few different affiliate programs in parallel. Hosting affiliates, dev tool affiliates, and a couple of course platforms. The reason AI API programs won out for me:
- Recurring is built into the product model. SaaS subscriptions pay forever. Hosting pays a small one-time. Courses are single purchases. APIs-as-a-service have the same stickiness as hosting or email tools — once you're integrated, you don't churn.
- High relevance to my audience. I write about dev tooling. My readers actually need these APIs. Compare that to promoting, say, a VPN where my audience overlap is zero.
- The dollar value per conversion is meaningful. Even Pro plan signups move the needle. Scale plan signups move it a lot.
- Sticky because of the model catalog. When the platform has 150+ models under one roof, users consolidate spend there instead of juggling five vendor logins. Lower churn means longer recurring tails for me. The per-hour math crushes most of my other side projects. I probably average $80–150/hour blended across all the AI affiliate content I've written, once I factor in cumulative income over the content's lifetime. # # What I Track (And You Should Too) For anyone starting out, here's what I put in my tracker from day one. Treat it like a basic metrics dashboard:
- Clicks per piece of content per month
- Signups attributed to each referral
- Plan tier of each signup (because $3 vs $22.50 first-order matters)
- Monthly recurring cumulative
- Time spent creating the content That last column is the unlock. Without it, you can't calculate effective hourly rate, and that's the only number that tells you whether a content strategy is worth scaling. I refresh the dashboard on the first of every month. Takes maybe 20 minutes. The compound growth in the recurring column is what keeps me motivated. # # A Few Honest Caveats I want to keep this useful, so let me flag a few things:
- Churn is real. Not everyone stays subscribed forever. Build your projections assuming 5–10% monthly churn on your referral base. The numbers I gave are conservative on that front.
- Conversion is rarely higher than 3%. Anyone promising 5%+ across the board is selling you something.
- First content doesn't always hit. My first three articles flopped. The fourth one (a detailed walkthrough) now pays for itself monthly.
- You need volume to matter at the small tier. If you're starting with no audience, expect $0–50/month for the first 6+ months. Treat it as a long game. None of this is discouraging if you set expectations correctly. Compounding rewards patience, and the developer mindset handles that fine. # # Should You Join? Here's My Genuine Take If you've got a dev blog, a tutorial channel, a newsletter, even a decent Twitter following — and your audience overlaps with people who build with AI APIs — then yes, signing up costs you nothing and adds a revenue line. The Global API affiliate program gives you 15% on first orders plus 8% recurring on every plan tier after that, with 10% on premium offerings. With 150+ models in the catalog, your referrals have real reasons to stay subscribed, which means your recurring commissions don't evaporate after month two. I've been running this for a while now. The numbers in my Notion tracker don't lie — it's one of the highest effective hourly rates I've ever built on the side, and it required zero customer support, zero fulfillment, and zero product maintenance. If you want to take a look at how the program works and what the dashboard looks like for affiliates, you can check it out here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate?ref=devto-how-much-earn-ai-affiliate Set up your tracker before you write your first piece. Future you will appreciate the data.
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