Honestly, i run four tiny SaaS products, a paid newsletter, and a tech blog that pulls about 2,000 visitors on a good month. None of them make me rich. Together they generate a small but reliable stream of MRR — the kind of baseline that lets me keep bootstrapping instead of getting a "real job."
So when I started seeing AI API affiliate programs pop up in my feed earlier this year, my first thought was: another income stream, let's see if this one is actually worth the time.
This is the honest, numbers-only story of what happened in my first 90 days. No fake screenshots, no inflated claims, no "I made $10K in 30 days" nonsense. Just the raw data from my spreadsheets, what I tried, what flopped, and the $127.40 I actually took home.
The Setup: My Channel Before I Started
Let me give you the baseline so the growth makes sense.
What I had going into this:
- A tech blog pulling roughly 2,000 monthly visitors
- A Twitter/X following of about 800 developers
- A small email list (under 300 subscribers)
- A couple of YouTube videos that get dribbles of traffic I'm not an influencer. I'm an indie maker with a niche audience. Most months, my blog earns enough from a single sponsorship to cover hosting. That was the entire setup. The one thing I did have going for me was real experience. I'd been using AI APIs in my own products for over a year. I'd shipped features with them, debugged their quirks at 2am, and formed strong opinions about which platforms actually delivered versus which ones just had slick landing pages. I figured that hands-on experience could be turned into content that converts. # # Why I Picked Global API Over the Other Two Programs I signed up for three affiliate programs in week one. Two of them were one-time payouts — you get a flat fee per signup, end of story. The third was Global API, and the commission structure was completely different:
- 15% commission on the customer's first order
- 8% recurring commission on every monthly renewal after that
- 10% premium tier bump for users who upgrade to higher plans
- Access to 150+ AI models through a single dashboard That recurring piece is what sold me. With one-time payouts, you're on a treadmill — you have to keep finding new customers forever. With recurring, your old customers keep paying you. It's the same revenue model that makes my SaaS products tick, and it just makes sense for an indie maker trying to build sustainable income. The 150
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