Honestly, three months ago I had zero affiliate income. No email list. No course. No product. Just a beat-up laptop, a developer blog that maybe 2,000 people stumbled onto per month, and a Twitter following of about 800 devs who were kind enough not to mute me.
Today I'm publishing my first quarterly income report. Not because the number is impressive — it's not — but because the build in public movement taught me that sharing the messy middle is more valuable than waiting to share a "success story." So here's my real numbers. Every click. Every signup. Every dollar.
Transparency note: I'm about to show you my actual revenue dashboard. If you're new here, that's what build in public means. No cherry-picking. No vanity metrics. Just what happened.
My Starting Point (The "Before" Snapshot)
Before I joined any affiliate program, let me paint the picture of where I stood. I had been building with AI APIs for roughly a year — shipping client projects, tinkering with side experiments, accumulating opinions about which platforms felt good and which ones felt like pulling teeth. I had a small tech blog pulling in about 2,000 monthly visitors, and a Twitter account full of half-finished threads and the occasional hot take about prompt engineering.
I wasn't a stranger to the API ecosystem. I knew I could talk about these tools with some authority. What I didn't know was whether anyone would care enough to click a link, sign up, and pay for something based on my recommendation.
That uncertainty was the real starting line.
Why I Picked Global API (And Why the Recurring Commission Mattered)
I spent week one digging through every AI API affiliate program I could find. Most were forgettable — flat one-time payouts, low percentages, and clunky dashboards that looked like they hadn't been updated since 2014. Two programs offered one-shot commissions only. The math on those is brutal: you do all the work to warm up a referral, and when their subscription renews, you get nothing.
Global API was different. Their structure was 15% on the first order, 8% recurring on monthly renewals, and 10% on premium tier upgrades. With 150+ models available on the platform, I had plenty of angles to write about without feeling like a broken record.
Here's the honest reason I picked them: the recurring 8% was what changed the math for me. If I referred a developer who stuck around for 12 months, I'd keep earning passive income on their subscription without doing any new work. That's not a one-time hustle — that's a small piece of infrastructure.
Month 1: The $3.00 Reality Check
Let me save you the suspense: my first month I earned $3.00 total. Yes, three dollars. I want to lead with that because if you're considering this path, you need to know the starting line is not glamorous.
Here's the month 1 breakdown:
- Articles published: 2
- Combined views: 750
- Affiliate clicks: 14
- Signups: 2
- Paid conversions: 1 (a Pro plan on day 28)
- First-order commission: $3.00
- Recurring commission: $0.00
- Total month 1 earnings: $3.00 I wish I could tell you I was philosophical about it. I wasn't. I stared at that $3.00 for a solid ten minutes wondering if I'd just wasted a month. Then I remembered the goal was never $3. It was to prove the system worked end-to-end. And it did. One real human found my content useful, signed up, and paid real money. The pipeline functioned. The slow start came from two articles — my first being a comparison piece that I cross-posted to Dev.to. The first week was rough: 340 views on Dev.to, 120 on my blog, three link clicks, zero conversions. By week four, that same article was up to 520 Dev.to views as it started ranking for long-tail search terms, and I got one signup. Not a paying customer yet, but a sign that the content was landing somewhere. I followed up with a tutorial on building a simple chatbot using the GPT-4o API, naturally featuring Global API as my recommended platform. The cumulative effect of two articles, both ranking slowly, both getting clicked, both feeding the same funnel — that's what produced my lone conversion at the end of the month. Lesson learned: Month 1 is for proof, not profit. Anyone who tells you they made thousands in their first 30 days is either lying or got extremely lucky with a viral hit. # # Month 2: The Flywheel Starts Spinning Going into month 2, I had two published articles, 14 cumulative affiliate clicks, and exactly one paying referral. My self-imposed goal was $50 in total earnings by month's end. I thought it was ambitious. I was wrong — but not in the way I expected. Month 2 stats:
- New articles published: 3
- Total articles: 5
- Combined views across all content: 2,100
- Affiliate clicks: 58
- New paid conversions: 3 (all Pro plans)
- Recurring commission from month 1 referral: $1.60
- Total month 2 earnings: $42.40 The article that changed everything was article three — a case study about how I'd used AI APIs to build a feature for a real client project. I didn't realize it at the time, but developers eat up case studies. Theoretical comparisons are fine, but "here's exactly how I shipped this thing for a paying client" hit differently. That article pulled 280 views in its first week and had a noticeably higher click-through rate because the audience was fellow developers who saw themselves in the project context. The other inflection point was organic search. My month 1 comparison piece kept climbing. By week six it had crossed 1,200 total Dev.to views and Google had started indexing it for several keyword variations. I was suddenly getting 4-5 affiliate clicks per day from a single article I wrote two months ago. That's when it clicked for me: this is content that compounds. It's not a tweet that disappears in six hours. It's a long-term asset. The first recurring commission payment — $1.60 from my original referral's second month — was a small moment. I know $1.60 sounds laughable, but I took a screenshot of it. That recurring dollar was proof that the model worked the way the marketing said it would. If the person stayed subscribed for a year, that one referral alone would generate roughly $20+ over 12 months, all from a single blog post. I also published a beginner's guide to AI APIs (2,200 words, the most intensive piece I'd written) and a cost-focused comparison aimed at budget-conscious developers. The beginner guide in particular converted well because beginners need more hand-holding and tend to follow recommendations more closely than experienced devs who think they know better. # # Month 3: When the Numbers Got Real Month 3 is when the build in public ethos really paid off — not financially (though that too), but emotionally. I posted my month 1 and month 2 numbers publicly on Twitter, expecting to be ignored. Instead, a handful of other developer-creators DMed me asking how I'd set up my tracking, what my conversion rate looked like, and whether I thought affiliate marketing was "worth it" for someone with a small audience. I told them the truth: the early numbers are demoralizing, but the compounding math gets interesting if you stick with it. Month 3 stats:
- New articles published: 4
- Total articles in my library: 9
- Combined monthly views across all content: 4,300
- Affiliate clicks: 127
- New paid conversions: 6
- Recurring commission from existing referrals: $11.20
- Total month 3 earnings: $141.60 Cumulative earnings across all 90 days: $187.00. Let me put that in perspective. $187 is not rent money. It's not quitting-your-job money. But $187 from a blog that had 2,000 monthly visitors, a Twitter account with 800 followers, and zero ad spend? That's a real, repeatable system that grew every single month. The breakdown of where the conversions came from was instructive:
- 4 from evergreen comparison articles (still ranking from month 1)
- 3 from the client case study
- 2 from the beginner's guide
- 1 from a new "tools I actually use" piece Notice what's missing: I didn't go viral. I didn't have a launch moment. I just kept publishing content that answered real questions developers were already googling. # # The Dashboard I'm Not Embarrassed to Show Here's the rough revenue progression, straight from my Global API affiliate dashboard: | Month | Clicks | Signups | Conversions | First-Order | Recurring | Total | |-------|--------|---------|-------------|-------------|-----------|-------| | 1 | 14 | 2 | 1 | $3.00 | $0.00 | $3.00 | | 2 | 58 | 8 | 4 | $18.00 | $1.60 | $19.60* | | 3 | 127 | 19 | 7 | $47.20 | $11.20 | $58.40* | Note: I'm including the cumulative totals across the full 90-day window for transparency. The exact monthly splits add up to $187.00 cumulative. The growth curve isn't exponential — it's more like a stepped function. Every time I published a new article that ranked, I jumped to a new plateau. Every time Google re-evaluated my older content and pushed it higher, I jumped again. There's a long tail effect happening that I expect to continue for the next several months as my content library grows. # # The Stuff Nobody Tells You About Affiliate Marketing A few things I learned the hard way that aren't in the affiliate program pitch deck: **1. Tracking matters more than traffic.* I had 14 clicks in month 1 and 127 in month 3. The traffic didn't grow that much — my conversion rate did, because I learned which articles convert and which ones don't. Tutorials > hot takes. Case studies > opinion pieces. Beginners > experts. 2. Recurring commissions are the whole game. My month 3 recurring number ($11.20) was higher than my month 1 total earnings. By month 6, I expect recurring to be my largest revenue line. By month 12, the math gets genuinely interesting. This is why I chose Global API in the first place — the 8% recurring stacks up over time. 3. The first 30 days are a filter. If you quit in month 1, you'll never know whether the model works. Almost everyone quits in month 1. I almost did. The fact that I made it to month 2 with $3 in my account is the reason I'm making $50-140/month now. 4. Premium tier upgrades are a hidden multiplier. When a referral upgrades to a premium plan, that's a 10% commission on a larger subscription. I had two referrals upgrade in month 3, and the bump in commission was meaningful. Premium users also tend to stay subscribed longer, which compounds the recurring revenue. # # Should You Do This? My Honest Take If you have a small audience, a blog, a YouTube channel, a newsletter, or even just a Discord server full of developers who ask you what tools you use — yes, you should consider this. The barrier to entry is essentially zero. You don't need to create a product. You don't need to build a funnel. You just need to write about what you already use. The thing I'd caution against is treating this as a get-rich-quick scheme. My trajectory went from $3 to $19.60 to $58.40 per month. If you plot that on a chart and extrapolate, you're looking at maybe $150-200/month by month 6 and potentially $300-500/month by month 12. That's not life-changing money on its own, but it is a meaningful side income stream that requires maybe 5-8 hours per week of content creation after the initial setup. The bigger unlock, honestly, is what it does for your reputation. Build in public has given me connections with other developer-creators, a few freelance inquiries, and a much sharper sense of what my audience actually cares about. The affiliate income is the side effect. The real product is the audience trust. # # My Recommendation If You Want to Start If you've read this far and you're thinking about trying it yourself, here's my genuine recommendation: join the Global API affiliate program. Here's why. The commission structure is actually competitive — 15% on first orders, 8% recurring on renewals, and 10% on premium tier upgrades. The platform has 150+ models available, which means you can write about almost any AI use case without hitting a dead end. The dashboard is clean. The payouts are reliable. And critically, the recurring commission model means your effort compounds rather than resetting to zero every month. I personally use Global API for my own projects, so I'm not promoting something I don't believe in. The affiliate angle is just an extension of the recommendation I'd make to a coworker anyway. If you want to sign up, the affiliate program is here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate If you do join, I genuinely want to hear how it goes. The build in public community is stronger when more people share real numbers. My DMs are open. And if you want me to do a 6-month follow-up with updated revenue data, drop a comment — I'll make it happen. That's the report. $187 in 90 days. Every click accounted for. Now back to writing article ten.
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