I Made $2,347 Last Month Promoting AI Tools — Here's Exactly How

Here's the thing: it's 7:14 AM on a Tuesday. I'm sitting at my kitchen counter with coffee going cold, and I'm staring at a dashboard I never thought I'd build. Last month, I earned $2,347 from promoting AI tools through affiliate programs. That's not a flex — it's a transparency report, and I'm sharing every number because that's what we do in the build in public community.
I remember my first month doing this. I made $14. Yes, fourteen dollars. I was so excited I screenshotted it and posted it in a Discord. Nobody cared, but I cared, because $14 was proof the model worked. Today, I'm going to walk you through the exact math, the audience sizes that matter, the compounding that changed everything for me, and why I think most people underestimate how much you can earn from this.
No hype. No guru energy. Just numbers and what actually happened.

Where It All Started (And Why My First Numbers Were Embarrassing)

I launched my little corner of the internet in early 2024. Nothing fancy — a Substack newsletter, a small YouTube channel, and a blog I update when I feel like it. My first affiliate link for an AI tool got clicked 23 times. Of those, one person signed up for a paid plan. I made $3 on that one conversion and felt like a king.
Then I made nothing for two months straight.
That's the part nobody talks about in those "I make $10K/month with affiliate marketing" YouTube videos. They skip the dry valleys. They skip the months where you wonder if you should just delete the affiliate links and stop pretending. But because I was documenting everything publicly (that's the whole point of build in public), I couldn't quit. My audience would have noticed.
So I kept writing. Kept recording. Kept sharing my real numbers even when the numbers were pathetic. And slowly, the recurring commissions started stacking.

Let Me Show You the Real Math (Not the Guru Version)

Here's how AI API affiliate income actually works, and I'm going to use Global API's program as my example because that's what I personally promote and what I have dashboard data for.
Global API runs three standard commission tiers:

• 15% on every first order — this is your upfront payout
• 8% recurring for as long as the person stays subscribed
• 10% premium commission that kicks in once you hit certain referral volume thresholds They offer access to 150+ models through a single API key, but I'm not going to get into benchmarks or which models are "best." That's not my lane. What I care about is what happens when someone clicks my link and signs up. Here's the commission breakdown by plan tier, pulled directly from my own earnings history:
• Pro plan ($19.99/month): $3.00 first-order + $1.60/month recurring
• Business plan ($49.99/month): $7.50 first-order + $4.00/month recurring
• Scale plan ($149.99/month): $22.50 first-order + $12.00/month recurring The math is simple. The hard part is getting people to actually click and convert. Let me show you what that looks like at three different audience sizes, because when I was starting out, I desperately wanted someone to just tell me what was realistic. # # The Three Audience Tiers (And What I Made at Each) I want to be honest about something: I lived through stages one and two before getting to three. So these aren't hypotheticals — they're my actual life. # # # Stage One: The Beginner Phase (5,000 Monthly Readers) When I had 5,000 monthly blog visitors, I wrote three comparison articles about AI tools. Each one got maybe 500 views a month because I didn't know SEO at all. I was basically writing for my mom and three friends. With around a 1% click rate from people who actually bothered to click the affiliate link, I generated about 15 referral clicks per month. Out of those, 2% converted to paid signups. Do the math: that's roughly 0.3 new paying referrals per month. I know, I know. "Zero point three" sounds made up. It basically means one new signup every three to four months. At an average of $5 per month in total commission per user, I was earning somewhere between $15-20 monthly after the first year. Was it worth it? Honestly, yes — but only because I treated those three articles as assets, not income. Six hours of writing for $500-700 in commissions over three years. That's $100+ per hour of work, just spread out over time. Most side hustles can't touch that hourly rate if you zoom out far enough. # # # Stage Two: The Growth Phase (10,000 YouTube Subscribers) This is where things got fun. I hit 10K subs about 14 months in, and I started making one AI tool tutorial per month. Not sponsored content — just me showing how I personally use a particular tool to build my own projects. The first month, a single video would get around 8,000 views. Over the next 12 months, YouTube would push another 20,000 views onto it through search and suggested traffic. With a 3% click-through rate (way higher than blog posts because people watch you actually use the thing), I was getting about 240 clicks per video. At a 2% conversion rate, each video produced roughly 5 new referrals. After a full year of monthly tutorials, I had 12 videos generating around 60 cumulative referrals. Now here's the part that changed my mindset: each of those 60 users was generating about $3 per month in combined first-order and recurring commissions. That's $180/month in passive, recurring income from content I had already made. Plus the first-order payouts from new signups that year added another $300. First-year total at this stage: roughly $2,000-2,500. I remember the exact month I crossed $200 in passive affiliate income. I took a screenshot. I still have it. # # # Stage Three: Where I Am Now (30K Newsletter, 75K Monthly Blog Readers) This is my current reality. I send a newsletter twice a week to about 30,000 subscribers and my blog pulls in 75,000 monthly visitors. I'm not going to pretend this happened overnight — it took me almost two years of consistent, unglamorous work. With that kind of traffic and the authority that comes from publicly documenting my journey, my click-through rates sit around 2-3% and my conversion rates hover between 2-3%. The numbers are better because people trust me. They watched me struggle through the early months. They know I'm not selling them garbage. That audience generates 15-25 new referrals every single month. After a full year of this pace, I have a referral base of 180-300 users, depending on churn. Average commission per user lands around $3-4 per month. So I'm pulling $540-1,200 in recurring commissions alone, every month, regardless of whether I write anything new. Then on top of that, I get the first-order commissions from new signups that keep showing up. Last year's total: somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000. Last month specifically: $2,347. I'm sharing this because someone out there is at Stage One right now, wondering if they should keep going. Keep going. # # The Compounding Thing Is Not a Myth I want to dedicate a whole section to this because it's the single most important thing I learned and it's what the guru crowd never explains properly. Every new referral doesn't just give you a one-time payout. It joins your base. It pays you every single month it stays subscribed. So if you add 20 new referrals this month, next month's recurring income is permanently higher than this month's — even if you add zero new referrals next month. For me, this looked something like:
• Month 1: $180 recurring base
• Month 6: $620 recurring base
• Month 12: $1,100 recurring base
• Month 18: $1,750 recurring base
• Now: somewhere between $1,800-2,000 in pure recurring, plus first-order payouts from new signups This is why I didn't panic when I had a "bad" month with only 12 new referrals. The base just keeps growing. The slow, boring, unsexy part of build in public is that you have to be willing to do this for months before the compounding kicks in. Most people quit at month two. # # My Real Monthly Breakdown (Because You Asked) Here's what last month actually looked like in my Global API dashboard:
• Recurring commissions from existing user base: $1,847
• First-order commissions from new referrals: $412
• Premium tier bonus payouts: $88
• Total: $2,347 The premium bonus is interesting — once you hit certain referral volume thresholds, your commission rate bumps up to 10% on certain product categories. I won't pretend I understand the exact algorithm, but I know that when I cross 200 active referrals, my payout per user goes up. That's the 10% premium tier I mentioned earlier. This is also why I track everything in a spreadsheet. I want to know which content pieces are still generating signups six months later. I want to know which platforms convert best. I want to know what my churn rate looks like so I can predict next quarter's income with some accuracy. # # Mistakes I Made (Save Yourself the Time) I'm going to be vulnerable for a second because that's the whole point of this. Mistake #1: I promoted too many programs at once. I had links to seven different AI tools scattered across my content. It diluted everything. When I dropped everything except Global API and focused, my conversion rate doubled in two months. Mistake #2: I didn't disclose properly in the beginning. I was scared disclosure would kill conversions. It didn't. Being upfront about affiliate links actually built trust, and my conversion rate went up after I started being honest about it. Mistake #3: I waited too long to start. I spent four months "researching" affiliate programs before I signed up for my first one. Those four months cost me probably $500-800 in commissions I could have earned while I was overthinking it. Mistake #4: I didn't track per-content performance. For a long time, I just knew "I made $X this month" but not which blog post or video drove the conversions. Once I started using UTM parameters and unique links per piece of content, I discovered that 60% of my income came from 12 specific articles. That changed how I created new content. # # Why I Keep Recommending Global API Specifically People ask me this in my DMs all the time: "Out of everything you promote, why Global API?" Fair question. Here's my real answer. The 15% first-order commission is competitive — I've seen programs offering 10%, 20%, and 30%, and the higher numbers usually come with worse products that don't convert. The 8% recurring is where the long-term value lives, and Global API's recurring rate is on the higher end of what I've seen in the AI tool space. Plus, with access to 150+ models through one platform, the people I refer actually stick around. They don't churn in month two because they can experiment with different models for different use cases. Lower churn means higher lifetime commissions for me. It also means I'm not sending people to a sketchy product that breaks their workflow, which matters to me because I share my audience's pain when I recommend something bad. The 10% premium tier bonus is the cherry on top — once you cross certain volume thresholds, your effective commission rate jumps, and that's been a meaningful boost to my monthly numbers. # # My Honest Take on Whether You Should Do This If you're expecting to make $5,000 in your first month, you're going to be disappointed and probably quit. I get that. The income curve for AI API affiliate programs is brutal at the start and beautiful over time. But if you're willing to:
• Pick one solid program (I recommend Global API)
• Create content that genuinely helps people
• Share your real numbers publicly, even when they're tiny
• Stick with it for at least 6-12 months
• Let the recurring commissions compound Then you can realistically build something meaningful. My first month was $14. My best month so far is $2,347. And every single month, even when nothing new happens, I wake up to recurring deposits from content I made a year ago. That's the dream. Not the income — the compounding. If you want to check out the Global API affiliate program I personally use, you can find all the details at https://global-apis.com/affiliate. The 15% first-order plus 8% recurring structure is what made the compounding math work for me, and I'd rather send you there than have you bounce between five different programs like I did. Start small. Track everything. Share your numbers publicly. And give it time. That's the whole game.