I Made $1,847 Last Month Promoting AI Tools — Here's My Spreadsheet Breakdown

Let me be real with you. I still have a 9-to-5. I sit in a cube, push tickets, and ship bug fixes like every other backend dev grinding through the week. Side hustles are how I built up my runway, paid off a chunk of student loans, and slowly started designing a life where I don't have to ask permission to take a Friday off.
Last month, my AI tool affiliate side project pulled in $1,847. That's not a get-rich number, but it's real money, it showed up in my checking account, and it took maybe 6-8 hours of actual work to maintain. Let me walk you through exactly how I got there, what I track, and whether this is worth your time.

My Setup: Notion Board, Google Sheet, and Zero Shame

Before I get into the numbers, here's the stack. I run a small WordPress blog (devtoolsfocused, gets about 18,000 visitors a month), a YouTube channel (4,200 subs, still tiny), and a Substack newsletter (1,800 readers). Nothing insane. I'm not one of those creators with a 100K audience and a ring light.
I track every click, every signup, and every dollar in a Google Sheet I call "Side Hustle P&L." It's nothing fancy — just columns for date, source, clicks, signups, plan tier, and commission. I also keep a Notion board with content ideas ranked by effort-to-payout ratio. If a piece of content takes me four hours to make and brings in less than $50/month recurring, I deprioritize it. Sounds cold, but time is the only resource I can't refund.
The main program I promote is Global API's affiliate program, which gives affiliates 15% on the first order and 8% recurring on every plan (with 10% premium tier kicker for top performers). They have 150+ models accessible through one dashboard, which makes it easy for me to recommend without cherry-picking providers. I'll come back to why I picked them at the end.

Here's the Math on What $1,847 Actually Looks Like

Let me break this down the way I'd break down a production incident. Root cause first, then contributing factors.
Last month's commissions by plan tier:

• Pro referrals ($19.99/month): 14 active → $1.60 × 14 = $22.40 recurring
• Business referrals ($49.99/month): 38 active → $4.00 × 38 = $152.00 recurring
• Scale referrals ($149.99/month): 9 active → $12.00 × 9 = $108.00 recurring
• New first-order commissions (Pro × 6, Business × 11, Scale × 4): 6($3.00) + 11($7.50) + 4($22.50) = $18 + $82.50 + $90 = $190.50
• Plus a content bonus payout from Global API: ~$150 Recurring total: $22.40 + $152.00 + $108.00 = $282.40 First-order total: $190.50 Bonus + adjustments: ~$1,374 (a one-time payout from a partner campaign I ran in Q4) Wait — that bonus is doing a lot of work in that $1,847 number. Let me be honest. The "clean" monthly number, stripped of the bonus, was $472.90. That's the number I actually plan around. The bonus is gravy, and I don't budget based on gravy. So here's the realistic version:
• Recurring monthly baseline: $282
• New signup commissions (steady state): ~$190
• Monthly total (no bonuses): ~$472 Per hour, if I spent 6 hours that month on this side hustle, that's $78/hour. Higher than my day job. And most of those 6 hours were me writing one or two blog posts, not active hustle time. # # The Three Variables That Actually Matter If you want to reverse-engineer my number, you only need to understand three variables. I think of them like the input params of a function:

monthly_income = clicks × conversion_rate × commission_per_referral

Variable 1: Clicks. How many people actually click your referral link. My blog posts get about 1,500–2,500 clicks per month to affiliate links. The newsletter drives another 300-400. YouTube is still small — maybe 150 clicks a month. Total: ~2,500 clicks across channels.
Variable 2: Conversion rate. Of those clickers, how many become paying users? For tech audiences — people who clicked because they wanted to build something — my conversion sits around 1.5% to 2.2%. Cold traffic from SEO converts lower; warm traffic from my newsletter converts closer to 3% because I've already established trust.
Variable 3: Commission per referral. This is where most people leave money on the table. They pick one program, write one blog post, and wonder why they're earning $40 a month. The trick is promoting a product with recurring commissions, and ideally multiple plan tiers. A Scale plan referral is worth 7.5x what a Pro plan referral is worth, so even a handful of high-tier signups can dwarf dozens of small ones.
Plug in my numbers: 2,500 clicks × 1.8% conversion = 45 new signups per month. 45 × $4.20 average commission = $189. That's your "active income" from new referrals. Then the recurring base compounds underneath.

The Compounding Part Nobody Talks About

Here's where I want to spend some real time, because this is the part that changed my whole relationship with affiliate income.
Every referral I bring in doesn't just pay me once. It pays me every single month that person stays subscribed. After 12 months, my referral base looked like this:
| Month | Active Referrals | Monthly Recurring |
|-------|------------------|-------------------|
| Month 1 | 8 | $34 |
| Month 3 | 31 | $128 |
| Month 6 | 67 | $279 |
| Month 9 | 94 | $388 |
| Month 12 | 121 | $502 |
By month 12, I was making $500/month while actively working maybe 3-4 hours that month on the side hustle itself. The earlier content did the heavy lifting. That's the power of recurring revenue. I spent 80+ hours in the first 6 months building the funnel, and now I coast.
The churn rate matters too. I'm losing about 3-4% of referrals per month to people who cancel or don't renew. So my "true growth rate" is referrals_in – churned. If I add 45 new signups in a month and lose 5 to churn, my net growth is 40. That's the number I actually forecast with.

Three Playbooks for Different Starting Points

Let me run the same ROI calculation across three different creator starting points. These aren't hypothetical — they're back-of-the-napkin projections based on data I've seen in private creator communities and my own experience coaching a few friends through this.
The Beginner (1,000-3,000 monthly blog visitors):
You write 4-5 long-form comparison posts targeting long-tail keywords. Each post takes 2-3 hours. Total upfront work: ~12 hours. Over 12 months, those posts drive maybe 200-300 clicks total. At 1.5% conversion, that's 3-5 new signups. At an average $4.20 per signup, you earn $12-21/month recurring. Doesn't sound like much — but you invested 12 hours once. That's roughly $1.50/hour ongoing, but the upfront ROI is $5-10/hour amortized over 3 years. Not life-changing, but it builds the foundation.
The Intermediate (YouTube + blog, 5,000-15,000 combined reach):
You publish 1-2 pieces of content per week. You have a tutorial library that keeps getting discovered. You might bring in 8-15 signups per month. At 8 × $4.20, that's $33/month recurring, plus another $60-100 in first-order commissions. Total: $100-150/month, with 4-5 hours of monthly effort. This is the sweet spot most people can reach in 6-9 months.
The Established (Newsletter 15K+, blog 50K+ monthly):
You're publishing frequently, your audience trusts your picks, and your conversion rates are higher because of brand authority. Expect 30-60 signups per month, 2.5% conversion rates, and a recurring base that grows by 1-2% monthly after churn. Earnings: $800-2,000/month recurring within 12-18 months. This is the tier I'm climbing toward. My current trajectory projects $1,200-1,500/month recurring by next summer.

Why I Stopped Chasing Multiple Programs

I burned four months promoting three different AI platforms at once. Here's what I learned: spreading thin kills your conversion. When you recommend five things, your click-through rate to any one of them tanks. When you recommend one thing, repeatedly, in multiple formats, with proof, your conversion rate goes through the roof.
I consolidated to Global API for three reasons:

1. Their commission structure is generous — 15% first-order, 8% recurring, 10% premium — and they pay reliably every month.
2. They have 150+ models behind one dashboard, which means I can recommend them to almost any audience segment without the recommendation feeling forced.
3. Their affiliate dashboard actually works. Real-time stats, clean reports, and a person answers my support emails. After dealing with three other programs that felt like they were run by interns, that mattered more than I expected. When you find a partner that pays on time, has a sticky product (people don't churn quickly), and gives you a dashboard you can actually use, lock in. Don't churn-hop. The recurring math only works if referrals stick around. # # The One Mistake That Cost Me Two Months Real talk. I made a huge mistake early on: I wrote affiliate posts without using the product myself. I figured I could just review it from the docs. My conversion rate was 0.4%. Painful. The day I started writing "I built X with this API" tutorials — using real screenshots, real code, real results — my conversion jumped to 1.8% almost overnight. Same traffic, same program, same commission structure. The only difference was authenticity. If you take one thing from this post: use what you promote. Build a side project with it. Document it. Show your face (or at least your code editor) in the tutorial. The trust premium is real and quantifiable. # # What I'm Doing Next My Q1 plan is to add 2 more long-form blog posts per month and ship 1 more YouTube tutorial. I want to push monthly recurring past $400 by March. After that, I'm exploring a small paid newsletter (gated content) to diversify away from pure affiliate income, but the affiliate base keeps compounding in the background. If I had to give you one rule: treat this like a dividend portfolio, not a slot machine. You build assets (content), they generate recurring returns (commissions), and the returns compound as long as the assets stay live and the product stays good. --- # # Want to Try This Yourself? If you're a dev, creator, or just someone with a technical audience and a Notion board full of content ideas, joining the Global API affiliate program is a genuinely solid move. Here's why I'd recommend it from my own experience:
4. 15% commission on every first order — that's $3.00 on Pro, $7.50 on Business, and $22.50 on Scale, paid out fast.
5. 8% recurring monthly commission — the part that actually builds wealth. Every referral keeps paying you as long as they stay subscribed.
6. 10% premium tier if you hit volume thresholds — I haven't gotten there yet, but it's on my roadmap.
7. 150+ models behind one integration, so you can recommend them to almost any audience without lying about what the product does.
8. Real-time dashboard and responsive affiliate support (yes, this is rarer than you'd think). I earn from this program, so yes, I'm biased. But I'd still recommend it if I didn't, because the unit economics make sense and the product doesn't suck. You can sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate The sign-up takes 5 minutes. The payouts are monthly. The math is on your side if you put in the content work. Go build something.