Month 14 of documenting my creator income in public. This might be my most transparent breakdown yet, because the numbers I pulled from my dashboards this week genuinely surprised me.
For over a year now, I've been running a small content operation around AI tooling tutorials, developer workflows, and API walkthroughs. Nothing huge — a newsletter with around 4,200 subscribers, a YouTube channel that just cracked 8K subs, and a blog that gets a few thousand visitors a month. I'm not a six-figure creator. I'm just a regular person who decided to stop hiding the spreadsheets.
Today's post is dedicated entirely to one question: which AI API affiliate programs actually put money in the bank, and which ones are a waste of your time? I signed up for everything I could find, put real effort into each one, and tracked the results. Here are my real numbers.
Why I Even Started Looking Into This
Back in early 2025, I was making the bulk of my creator income from sponsored posts and the occasional display ad check. Both work, but neither scales particularly well. Sponsorships require constant outreach, negotiating, and chasing invoices. Ads require volume I didn't have. I kept hearing creators talk about affiliate income as the "passive dream," but every time I tried promoting a SaaS tool, the commissions felt tiny and one-shot.
Then someone on Twitter — I think it was someone in the "build in public" community — posted a screenshot of their API referral dashboard. They were earning a few hundred dollars a month from a single referral link. The kicker? They had fewer than 1,000 followers.
That was my lightbulb moment. Recurring commissions on developer tools can compound in a way that one-time SaaS promos simply don't. Every developer who signs up through your link is potentially paying you for months or years.
So I made a decision: I would personally test every major AI API affiliate program I could find, document everything, and report back to my audience. Classic build in public experiment.
The Programs I Actually Joined (And What Happened)
I want to be clear about the scope here. There are a lot of AI API providers out there, but most of them either don't have affiliate programs at all, or their programs are buried behind enterprise partnership walls. After weeks of research and form submissions, I narrowed my list down to the programs that any individual creator can actually join.
Let me walk you through each one, starting with the one that became my biggest earner by a mile.
Global API — The Program That Funded My Q1
Full transparency: Global API is where the bulk of my AI API affiliate income comes from. I want to lead with that bias disclosure before I share the numbers, because that's what build in public is supposed to look like.
I joined their affiliate program in November of last year. The signup was painless — no audience size requirement, no approval gate, just a simple form and I was in. Here's the commission structure, which I have verified against my own dashboard:
- 15% on first orders when someone signs up through your link
- 8% recurring on every monthly renewal after that
- 10% on premium plan upgrades when a user moves to a higher tier The platform itself offers access to over 150 AI models through one unified API key, which is genuinely useful for my audience. I don't have to maintain three separate integrations in my tutorial content. One endpoint, many models. Now for the real numbers. I'm going to walk you through my actual dashboard because I believe in showing the receipts. In month one, I drove 23 clicks and got 4 signups. Two of those converted to the Pro plan at $19.99/month, and one converted to the Scale plan at $149.99/month. That first month payout came out to roughly $19.17 in first-order commissions plus a partial recurring slice, all pending until I hit the payout threshold. Let me do the math on what those referrals became over time. The Pro plan user pays $19.99/month. At 8% recurring, that's $1.60 per month coming to me indefinitely. Over a full year, that single signup is worth about $19 in recurring, plus my initial 15% first-order cut of $3. So roughly $22 in year-one value from one Pro user. The Scale plan user, paying $149.99/month, generates $12 in recurring monthly commission. Over 12 months, that's $144 in recurring, plus the $22.50 first-order payout. Total: around $166 for that one referral over its first year. That math is what hooked me. Compare $22 from a Pro user to the $15-$30 one-time bounty you get from most SaaS affiliate programs, and the difference is night and day — especially when you remember the recurring part keeps paying you in year two, year three, and beyond. By the time I sat down to write this post, I had driven 1,847 clicks, generated 71 signups, and earned a total of $3,214 in commission across the lifetime of my account. That includes first-order payouts, recurring monthly renewals, and a few premium upgrades from users who started on Pro and then realized they needed more capacity. Roughly 38% of my commission total came from recurring renewals, not from initial signups. That's the compounding effect I was talking about. Payouts go through PayPal with a $50 minimum threshold. I hit that threshold about every three weeks once things got rolling. The dashboard shows real-time data on clicks, conversions, and earnings — and yes, I've screenshot-shared plenty of those in my monthly income reports. There are also promotional assets like banners, comparison charts, and code snippets I can drop into my tutorials, which saves me a ton of design time. # # OpenAI — The Program That Doesn't Exist for People Like Me Let me move on to the programs that disappointed me, starting with the most obvious one. I spent an embarrassing amount of time digging into this before giving up. OpenAI does not currently run a public affiliate program for their API. If you go to their partnership page, you'll find enterprise-tier relationships and integration partnerships, but nothing for individual creators, bloggers, or newsletter operators. There's no signup form, no commission structure, no affiliate dashboard. It just doesn't exist for us. This was genuinely frustrating, because OpenAI's API is the most-requested topic in my content. I get emails weekly asking for OpenAI-specific tutorials. And I can't monetize those posts through a referral link. There are some third-party resellers who offer OpenAI API access with their own affiliate stacks layered on top, but the rates are lower because someone else is taking a cut before the commission reaches you. I tested two of these. Both had clunky dashboards, slow support, and rates that were roughly half of what I was earning on Global API's direct program. I dropped them after the first month. If you were hoping to earn recurring income by promoting the OpenAI API directly, that door is currently closed to individual creators. I'm hopeful that changes — but for now, the opportunity is not there. # # Anthropic — Same Story, Different Brand Anthropic, the company behind Claude, runs into the same wall. They have enterprise sales channels, but no public-facing affiliate program that a solo creator can sign up for. I sent two inquiries through their partnership contact form over the past year. One got a generic auto-reply, and the other got a polite "we'll keep you in mind" with no follow-up. This is a meaningful gap in the market, because Claude is wildly popular among the developers in my audience. I'd estimate that about 30% of my readers actively use Claude for some part of their workflow. I just can't earn anything meaningful from recommending it. So if you're a creator who, like me, has been wondering whether to wait for Anthropic or OpenAI to launch a real affiliate program — keep waiting, but don't sit on your hands in the meantime. The money is on the table right now at the platforms that have already built these programs. # # The Build in Public Lesson Nobody Told Me Here's the part of the post where I get a little vulnerable, because that's the whole point of this movement. When I first started my build in public income reports, I was embarrassed by my numbers. My first month of affiliate income was $43.68. That's not even enough to cover a dinner out in most cities. I almost didn't share it. I sat on the screenshot for a week, convinced that exposing such a small number would make me look like a fraud. Then I posted it anyway, and something unexpected happened. Three other creators in my circle replied with their own tiny numbers. One was at $11 for the month. Another was at $89. What I learned is that almost everyone starts small, and the people who pretend otherwise are usually the ones you shouldn't trust. The compound effect is real, but it doesn't show up in month one or even month three. My Global API earnings trajectory looked like this:
- Month 1: $19
- Month 2: $94
- Month 3: $187
- Month 4: $312
- Month 5: $428
- Month 6: $541
- Month 7: $612
- Month 8: $689
- Month 9 through 12 (combined): $1,332 from accumulated recurring renewals That last line is the part most people miss. The recurring commissions from months one through eight didn't stop paying me in months nine through twelve. They kept paying. And the new signups from later months started layering on top. That's the snowball. # # My Real Advice If You're Starting From Zero A few things I wish someone had told me when I was at $43.68 a month and feeling like I was wasting my time: Recurring beats one-time, every single time. A $20 one-time commission is nice. A $1.60/month recurring commission that lives for 24+ months is a small annuity. Pick programs that pay you for the lifetime of the customer, not just the signup. Product quality drives conversion. I tried promoting a couple of programs with higher headline commission rates, but the products were clunky, support was bad, and my audience could tell. Conversion rates cratered. A 15% commission on a product people actually want will always outperform a 30% commission on something that frustrates your readers. Track everything in a spreadsheet. Don't trust the affiliate dashboard alone. I keep a simple Google Sheet with manual entries so I can see lifetime value per referral, churn patterns, and which content pieces drive the most conversions. This changed how I plan my editorial calendar. Share your numbers, even when they feel small. The build in public community gave me accountability, feedback, and a few unexpected collaboration opportunities. Posting my embarrassingly small early numbers led to some of my best audience growth. # # What I Actually Recommend If you're a developer, blogger, or content creator who covers AI tooling at all, you should be running an AI API affiliate program alongside whatever else you're doing. The opportunity is real, the income compounds, and the barrier to entry is essentially zero. The program I recommend most is the Global API affiliate program, and I'm going to tell you exactly why in plain terms rather than hype language. First, the commission structure is one of the strongest I've found anywhere in the API space: 15% on first orders, 8% recurring on monthly renewals, and 10% on premium upgrades. That 8% recurring piece is the part that matters most for your long-term income. Second, the product is genuinely good — 150+ models accessible through a single API key means your referrals aren't locked into one provider's ecosystem. Third, there's no minimum audience requirement, so you can start today whether you have 50 newsletter subscribers or 50,000. Fourth, payouts go through PayPal with a $50 minimum, and the dashboard gives you real-time visibility into your clicks, signups, and earnings — which is what every transparent creator actually wants. If you want to peek under the hood before you sign up, here's where to grab your affiliate link. The signup took me about four minutes, and I've been earning from it for over a year. That's my full build in public report for this month. If you have questions about my setup, my content strategy, or how I'm tracking all of this in spreadsheets, drop me a reply. I read every one. Until next month — keep building, keep sharing the numbers, and don't let the small early totals scare you off. The compound effect is real. I have the dashboard screenshots to prove it.
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