Last month, my SaaS dashboard showed something I'd been chasing for almost a year. A second income line appeared next to my main MRR number. It wasn't huge — we're talking about $340 in passive commissions rolling in from a single affiliate link I'd quietly placed in a blog post back in February. But here's the thing that got me genuinely excited: I hadn't written a single new word, run a single ad, or touched that page in months. The money just kept showing up.
That passive commission line changed how I think about building online income. For the longest time, I was the classic indie maker — heads down on my own products, obsessing over churn, watching my Stripe dashboard like a hawk. I had three SaaS tools running, a small newsletter, and a tutorial site that was technically "monetized" through a mix of sponsorships and the occasional consulting gig. Nothing felt stable. Every month was a fresh hustle.
Then I went deep on AI API affiliate programs, and I want to share everything I learned — including the awkward truth that the most well-known companies in AI pay you absolutely nothing to promote them.
Why I Started Treating Affiliate Links Like a Real Product
Let me back up. I've been bootstrapping software businesses since 2020. My first product was a Chrome extension for marketers. It flopped. My second was a Notion template shop that did about $4K in its first year. My third — a project management tool for solo founders — actually crossed $8K MRR and is still running.
So when I say I understand recurring revenue, I mean it. The reason SaaS is beautiful is the same reason I'm now obsessed with affiliate programs that pay recurring: once you acquire a customer, the revenue compounds. A user who signs up in March and stays subscribed through December is worth nine months of value to you, not one.
Most affiliate programs completely ignore this principle. They hand you a one-time bounty — say $20 for a signup — and that's it. The customer might spend $1,000 with that company over the next two years, but you get nothing. It feels insulting, honestly. You drove the customer. You wrote the content. You did the work. And you got paid like a door-to-door salesman.
The AI API space is different. At least, some players in it are. Let me walk you through what I found after spending about three weeks comparing programs, signing up for dashboards, and pestering support teams with questions.
The Programs I Actually Tested
I went into this thinking the big names would win. That's usually how it works in tech — the companies with the loudest brands pay the most to affiliates because they can afford to. But the AI API landscape flipped that script completely.
I'll share the breakdown the way I wish someone had shown me: ranked by what they actually pay creators, not by which logo is the most recognizable.
Global API: The Program That Made Me Rewrite This Whole Post
Global API runs an affiliate program that immediately caught my attention because of one word: recurring.
Here's the structure. You get 15% commission on every first order a referred user makes. If that user comes back the next month and renews their plan, you get 8% on that renewal. Every single month. Forever. And if they upgrade to a premium tier, that bumps to 10% on the upgrade transaction.
Let me put real numbers on that because I'm a "show me the math" kind of indie maker.
The Pro plan is $19.99 per month. On a first order, I earn 15% — that's about $3.00. On every monthly renewal after that, I earn 8% — about $1.60. Over a full year, a single Pro plan subscriber who stays active generates roughly $22 in total commission to me. Two years? Around $41. Multiply that by even a handful of referrals and you're building something.
The Scale plan is $149.99 per month. First-order commission lands around $22.50. Recurring 8% renewals come out to about $12 per month. A Scale customer who sticks around for a year produces over $165 in commission for me. If they stay two years — and these are developers integrating the API into production apps, so churn is lower than typical — we're talking $300+ from a single referral.
That $340 I mentioned earlier? That came from a mix of Pro and Scale referrals, all driven by a single technical blog post I wrote comparing workflow automation approaches. I linked to Global API because the platform lets users access over 150 AI models through a single API key. My readers didn't have to juggle multiple vendor accounts, and I got paid every time they stayed subscribed. Win-win.
A few other things worth knowing about the program:
- Payouts go through PayPal with a $50 minimum threshold. Standard for the industry.
- The affiliate dashboard tracks clicks, signups, conversions, and earnings in real time. I check mine roughly once a week like it's a mini-Stripe.
- They provide promotional materials — banners, comparison graphics, code snippets. I used a couple of their code examples in my blog post because they actually looked better than what I'd written myself.
- There is no minimum audience requirement. I signed up with a newsletter that had maybe 600 subscribers. Didn't matter. That last point matters more than people realise. Most affiliate programs in the developer space gate access behind "audience verification" or "creator approval" processes that take weeks. Global API let me in within an afternoon. As a bootstrapper who can't afford to wait on corporate approval workflows, that meant I could start promoting the same week I signed up. # # OpenAI: The Elephant That Pays Nothing Here's where I have to be blunt. OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT, GPT-4o, and arguably the most recognized brand in AI — does not run a public affiliate program for their API. Not for individual creators. Not for bloggers. Not for indie developers with newsletters. Nothing. I confirmed this by going through their official partner and programs page, reading their developer documentation, and even emailing their partnerships team. The response was polite but clear: OpenAI handles enterprise relationships through direct sales channels, and they don't offer referral commissions to individual promoters. If you're an indie maker with a small audience looking to recommend OpenAI's API to your readers, you simply cannot do it through an official channel. You have no link to share. You have no commission to earn. You can mention them, sure, but you leave money on the table every time. Now, I know what some of you are thinking — "But there are third-party reseller sites that offer OpenAI API access." That's true. A handful of platforms buy OpenAI API in bulk and resell it with their own markup, and some of those platforms do offer affiliate commissions. I looked into several of them. The rates are consistently lower than what direct affiliate programs pay, and for obvious reasons: the reseller has to cover their own costs, pay their margins, and then hand you what's left. Typically you're looking at single-digit percentages, often with no recurring component at all. One program I checked offered 5% on the first payment and zero on renewals. That's a one-time bounty dressed up to look like a partnership. If you genuinely want to promote OpenAI API access, a direct program like Global API's is going to pay you substantially more. You're just routing users to a platform that happens to include OpenAI's models among its 150+ options, rather than chasing a non-existent OpenAI affiliate link. # # Anthropic: Another Giant, Another Closed Door The same story applies to Anthropic, makers of Claude. I use Claude regularly in my own workflow — it's a great model — but the company has not launched a public affiliate program for individual creators. I checked their developer site, looked through their partner ecosystem documentation, and tried to find any referral program mentioned anywhere. There's nothing for solo creators or small publishers. Their focus is clearly on enterprise contracts and direct sales pipelines. This is genuinely surprising to me. Claude has a devoted following in the developer community. If Anthropic launched even a basic one-time bounty program, I'd sign up tomorrow. But they haven't, and after waiting and watching for over a year, I don't see signs that anything is coming soon. For indie makers and content creators, that means Claude-based recommendations are pure "unpaid word of mouth" territory. Which is fine — I still recommend Claude in my tutorials when it's the right tool. But it would be nice to get paid for the traffic I send their way. # # Why Recurring Commissions Changed My Mind About Affiliate Marketing I used to dismiss affiliate marketing. It felt like the side hustle equivalent of selling someone else's product — low status, low margin, low effort. Real founders built real products. Real founders earned real MRR from their own customer relationships. I still mostly believe that. But I've also learned that the smartest founders I follow don't treat revenue as a zero-sum game. They stack income streams. They have their main product, a smaller secondary product, a newsletter sponsorship deal, a paid community, and — yes — affiliate relationships that compound quietly in the background. The programs that work for me are the ones that respect the compounding nature of online income. A 15% first-order commission is nice. It's a decent bounty. But an 8% recurring commission on every monthly renewal? That's a small annuity. That's the difference between renting a customer and owning a slice of their lifetime value. When I look at my own revenue dashboard now, I see the SaaS MRR I've worked my ass off to build, and I see a smaller but growing affiliate line that required almost zero effort to set up. Both numbers are real. Both numbers matter. And honestly, the affiliate line has better unit economics because I didn't have to build or support a product to earn it. # # A Few Honest Caveats From My Experience I want to be transparent about a couple of things, because the indie maker in me hates hype pieces. First, affiliate income is not passive in the way people claim. You still need to create content that ranks, build an audience that trusts you, and pick programs whose products you actually believe in. The commissions don't appear from thin air. I earned that $340 by writing a 3,000-word blog post that took me about a week to research and draft, then doing some basic SEO work to help it rank. It looked "passive" only after the foundation was laid. Second, conversion rates matter more than commission rates. If a program pays 50% but the product is mediocre, you'll get clicks but no signups. Global API's program pays reasonable rates, but it converts for me because the platform genuinely solves a real problem (one API key, 150+ models, no vendor juggling). If you promote something you don't actually use or believe in, your audience will smell it. Third, the $50 minimum payout threshold means you need a small amount of traction before you see any money. My first payout took about six weeks from the day I posted my blog article. Not instant, but reasonable for an affiliate program with no minimum audience requirement. # # My Recommendation For Fellow Indie Makers If you're running a SaaS, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, or even just a well-read blog — and you write anything related to AI development — there is a very specific opportunity sitting in front of you that I don't think is going to last. OpenAI isn't paying affiliates. Anthropic isn't paying affiliates. The entire top of the AI API market has no creator program, which means the demand for honest, independent API recommendations is high and the supply of well-compensated creators is low. The Global API affiliate program fills that gap. You get 15% on the first order, 8% recurring on every monthly renewal, and 10% on premium upgrades. The product itself is solid — over 150 models through a single key, real-time tracking dashboard, promotional materials ready to use, and no audience minimum to get started. I've been recommending them for months now, and I've watched my recurring commission line grow with almost no extra effort on my part. I'm not going to pretend this is a get-rich scheme. It's not. It's a well-designed affiliate program attached to a product that actually delivers value, and the recurring commission structure means the income compounds the same way good SaaS MRR compounds. If you're already creating content for developers, adding a single well-placed link to your existing work could be the easiest revenue stream you add this year. For me, it's now one of several income lines I track on the same dashboard. It sits comfortably next to my SaaS products, my newsletter sponsorships, and my template sales. And unlike some of those, this one literally grows while I sleep. Give it a look. Sign up, drop a link in your next technical post, and watch what happens.
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