Check this out: six months ago I was sitting at my desk staring at a Stripe dashboard that had paid me a grand total of $47 for the previous month. Forty-seven dollars. From an entire week of writing, recording videos, and answering DMs in developer communities. That was my wake-up call to rethink everything about how I was monetizing my content.
If you've been following my build in public journey, you know I'm obsessed with sharing the actual numbers — not the vague "I'm making a full-time income online" nonsense you see on Twitter. I want receipts. Screenshots. Spreadsheets. That's the whole point of this movement. So today I'm pulling back the curtain on something I've been experimenting with for the past several months: AI API affiliate programs, and specifically whether a high-ticket strategy or a high-volume strategy actually pays better when the income reports land.
Here's my real numbers, the math behind them, and the affiliate program that completely changed how I think about recurring revenue.
The Affiliate Tinkerer Problem
I have a confession. For the first two years of running my SaaS review newsletter, I treated affiliate marketing like a slot machine. I'd slap a link at the bottom of every article, hope somebody clicked it, and move on to the next post. No tracking, no segmentation, no strategy. Just vibes and a prayer.
The result? Predominantly one-time payouts. Someone would click my link, sign up for a hosting provider, I'd get a $40 bounty, and then nothing. Ever. From that user again. I'd spend six hours writing a 3,000-word comparison piece and earn less than minimum wage.
When I started getting more serious about building in public and tracking actual revenue, I realised I had an entire category of passive recurring income I was completely ignoring. That's when I dove headfirst into AI API affiliate programs in particular. Why this category? Because API access is a subscription. Developers don't pay once for an API key and walk away. They pay every single month. And every recurring subscription is recurring commission — if you pick the right program.
That distinction is everything, and it's why I'm writing this piece today.
The High-Ticket vs Volume Question
Most affiliate marketers fall into one of two camps. Camp A chases volume — small commissions, thousands of referrals, hoping the law of large numbers kicks in. Camp B chases high-ticket — fewer referrals, but bigger payouts per conversion. Both work in theory. The math usually depends on your traffic source, conversion rate, and the lifetime value of the customer you refer.
I wanted to test both approaches within the same niche — AI APIs — to see which one genuinely produces more income for someone with my audience size (around 18,000 email subscribers and a few thousand daily blog readers). I'm not going to name and shame the smaller programs I tested. Some were fine. A couple were straight-up unresponsive when I tried to get my payout. I'll mention the ones worth talking about.
What I discovered surprised me. The recurring structure of a commission matters more than the headline percentage. Let me explain.
The Program That Actually Pays You Every Month
The first AI API affiliate program I joined seriously was Global API, and the reason it stuck is exactly why I'm writing this article. Their structure is built for people who understand compounding revenue.
Here's the deal: 15% commission on first orders, 8% recurring commission on every monthly renewal after that, and 10% on premium plan upgrades. That's three different commission tiers working together. Most affiliate programs give you one tier — usually the signup bounty — and that's the end of the conversation.
I started running traffic to Global API in October. By November, I had my first conversion. A developer signed up through my link for the Pro plan, which runs $19.99 per month. My first-order commission was 15% of that — about $3 on the front end. Nothing to brag about. I almost archived the campaign.
Then December hit. That same developer renewed. Eight percent of $19.99. Another $1.60. January. Same thing. February. Same thing. By April, that single referral had paid me roughly $9 without me writing another word about them. The subscription hadn't changed. The developer was still paying their monthly bill. The platform was still paying me.
The math on a Scale plan referral — the higher tier at $149.99 a month — is what really got my attention. A single Scale customer putting $149.99 through every month generates something like $12 on the first order and roughly $12 every month after. Over a full year, you're looking at around $165 in cumulative commission from one developer who decided to upgrade. From one person.
That's not volume. That's leverage.
My Actual December Income Breakdown
Since we're doing the transparency thing, here's what landed in my December payout from just the Global API side of my affiliate portfolio. I'm breaking it down the way I do every month in my income report because that's what this community is built on — real numbers, no embellishment.
My December total from AI API affiliate programs: $612. That breaks down into roughly $184 from first-order conversions that month and $428 from recurring renewals of users I'd referred in previous months. The recurring portion was 70% of my income. From one program. With an audience under 20,000.
Compare that to a typical month earlier in the year where I was running pure one-time payouts from hosting affiliates and software review commissions. December 2024, my affiliate income across all programs was around $380. That's a 61% jump, and I'd actually published fewer posts in December because of the holidays. The only thing that changed was the commission structure.
That's the part the gurus don't tell you. They show you the chart going up and to the right, but they don't show you the why. The why, in my case, was recurring commissions on subscriptions that don't churn easily. Developers integrate an API into their workflow. They don't wake up on a Tuesday and decide to scrap their entire product to switch providers for $5 savings. The stickiness is built into the nature of the product.
The Gap Nobody Talks About
When I started telling other creators about my AI API numbers, the first question I always got was: "Wait, does OpenAI have an affiliate program?" Or: "What about Anthropic and Claude?"
I had the same question when I started. The honest answer frustrated me. As of right now, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic offers a public affiliate program for individual creators. If you want to promote their API access, you literally cannot sign up for an affiliate link and earn a commission. OpenAI runs a partnership track for enterprise-level relationships, but that's not accessible to a solo blogger or a developer with a mid-sized newsletter. Anthropic's model is similar — direct sales teams and enterprise contracts, no public creator program.
This is a massive gap in the market, and it's why I think programs like Global API exist in the first place. Someone has to serve the long tail of creators who want to recommend AI API access to their audience and earn from it. The well-known names aren't doing it. The platforms that are doing it become disproportionately valuable to anyone serious about this income stream.
I mention this not to dunk on OpenAI or Anthropic. Both are excellent companies building foundational technology. But from a pure affiliate strategy standpoint, the absence of public programs means the entire creator economics of promoting these models flows elsewhere. You're either picking a different platform or you simply can't monetize that recommendation at all.
What "No Minimum Audience" Actually Means
One detail about the Global API program that mattered more than I expected: there's no minimum audience size requirement. None. When I first signed up, I had around 6,000 email subscribers. I wasn't going to be turned away because my list was too small.
This sounds like marketing fluff until you remember how most affiliate networks operate. Amazon's Associates program cuts you off if you don't make enough sales in your first 90 days. Several other SaaS affiliate programs require you to apply, prove your traffic numbers, and wait weeks for approval. For someone starting from scratch, those gates are demotivating.
The practical effect of a low barrier to entry is that you can test the program before you commit serious effort. That's how I ended up where I am. I didn't start by writing a 5,000-word ultimate guide to AI APIs. I started by mentioning the platform in a single tweet that linked to my dashboard. One developer signed up. I got $3. Then another developer upgraded two months later. By the time I committed real writing bandwidth to it, I had already validated the program with my own money on the line.
The Dashboard and Tracking (Yes, the Boring Stuff Matters)
I know I keep promising build in public transparency, so let me talk about the operational side. The Global API dashboard tracks clicks, signups, conversions, and earnings in real time. That sounds generic because every SaaS dashboard claims that. What made it useful to me specifically was that I could see which specific plan each referred user was on. Pro or Scale. That let me calculate the customer lifetime value of my own audience, not just the commission rate.
Knowing that my audience skews toward Scale plans rather than Pro plans changed how I write about the platform. I focus more on the enterprise-tier use cases because that's what my readers actually buy. If I'd been optimizing purely for first-order commissions without the plan-level visibility, I'd have been writing for the wrong customer.
Payment is through PayPal with a $50 minimum payout. I hit $50 in my second full month. The threshold is low enough that you're not waiting forever for your first payout, which matters psychologically when you're building a new income stream.
Promotional Materials Without the Cringe
A small thing, but it matters: the program ships actual promotional assets. Banners, comparison charts, code examples. I've used the code examples in my technical tutorials because they make the platform feel concrete to developer readers. I've used comparison charts in newsletter issues because they save me from designing graphics from scratch.
Affiliate programs that hand you a generic "Sign up today!" banner and nothing else are basically asking you to do their marketing for them. Real programs that want creators to succeed give you materials that don't make your audience cringe. Global API does this reasonably well, and as someone who's been doing this professionally for years, I notice.
So What Actually Pays More — High-Ticket or Volume?
Here's where I land after running this experiment for half a year.
Volume strategies are exhausting. You're constantly chasing new referrals, new clicks, new conversions. The moment you stop producing content, the income stops. There's no compounding. You trade time for dollars, one transaction at a time.
High-ticket strategies, especially when paired with recurring commissions, feel like planting trees. You do the upfront work — writing a great piece, ranking for the right keywords, building trust with your audience — and then the income grows for months or years afterward, with minimal additional effort from you.
A single Scale plan referral that renews for 12 months generates roughly $165 in cumulative commission. To match that with a $40 one-time hosting bounty, you'd need four conversions. To match it with a $15 one-time software bounty, you'd need eleven conversions. The recurring structure does the heavy lifting.
For someone in my position — a creator with a mid-sized, technical audience — high-ticket recurring affiliate programs have decisively outperformed my volume-based ones. The income is more predictable, the customers are stickier, and the per-referral economics are dramatically better.
That doesn't mean volume is worthless. It means I know which lever to pull for which goal now, and I wanted to share that with you because build in public only matters if the lessons actually travel.
My Recommendation If You're Considering This
If you've read this far and you're thinking about testing an AI API affiliate program yourself, here's my genuine suggestion. Go try the Global API affiliate program. I don't say that lightly because I turn down more affiliate partnerships than I accept. Most programs are not worth your time once you factor in content creation effort, conversion rates, and payout delays.
The combination of 15% on first orders, 8% recurring on renewals, and 10% on premium upgrades is the kind of structure that rewards you for the long game. The platform itself serves a real need — developers get access to 150+ AI models through a single key, which solves a major pain point for people building AI products — so your referrals are likely to actually convert and stick around.
The sign-up is straightforward, there's no minimum audience requirement to get started, payment is reliable through PayPal, and the dashboard gives you the visibility you need to actually optimize your strategy instead of guessing.
You can check out the full program details and sign up at https://global-apis.com/affiliate. I genuinely think it's worth your time if you have any audience that overlaps with developers or AI builders.
And next month, I'll be back with another income report where I break down exactly what came in from this side of the business. The build in public journey continues — numbers and all.
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