A freelance writer's hunt for income that doesn't require another cold pitch

The Cold Pitch That Finally Broke Me

It was a Tuesday, sometime around 11 p.m., and I was on my fourth cold email of the night. My rate was $150 per article for a B2B SaaS client, and I was grinding out two to three of those a week just to keep the lights on. After platform fees, taxes, and the occasional client who ghosted on an invoice, I was netting maybe $2,400 a month.
That's not a complaint. I know plenty of writers do worse. But the math was ugly. I was trading hours for dollars, and every single dollar required me to find another gig, send another pitch, or beg another client to extend the retainer. The moment I stopped writing, the money stopped flowing. There was no compounding. There was no asset. There was just me, a Google Doc, and the next deadline.
I had been freelancing full-time for about three years at that point. My income was technically growing, but the ceiling felt glass. To earn more, I needed to write more. To write more, I needed more hours. More hours meant more pitches, more revisions, more clients who wanted "just one more round of edits." It was a hamster wheel with a Google Doc at the center.
So I started asking around. What do writers do when they want income that shows up without a fresh pitch every month? A friend in the SEO world mentioned affiliate revenue. I had always assumed affiliate marketing was for coupon sites and influencers hawking protein powder. I was wrong.

When I Started Looking for Recurring Revenue

The first affiliate program I joined was for a project management tool. I think they paid 20% on the first month, nothing recurring. I made $89 in three months and then the referrals dried up. The next one was a hosting company — 40% first month, again nothing after that. Same story. Sign up, get paid once, watch the dashboard collect dust.
The pattern was obvious. Most programs are designed to reward a single transaction. They pay you to bring a customer in the door, and after that, you're just a referrer in their system with no ongoing stake. For someone like me, who was trying to replace hourly income with something steadier, this was useless. I didn't need a one-time bonus. I needed a revenue stream.
That's when I started paying closer attention to recurring commission structures. Not "30% on the first order" recurring. Actual, month-after-month, "as long as they stay subscribed" recurring. The difference is enormous if you do the math, and I'll show you exactly what I mean later in this article.

Why AI API Affiliate Programs Caught My Eye

I write a lot of content for dev-focused startups. I'm not a developer myself — I'm the person who turns "we built a thing" into a blog post, a landing page, a white paper. Over the past year, almost every single one of these clients has been building something that uses AI under the hood. Not just chatbots, either. Document processing, semantic search, content moderation, the works.
Every one of those clients is paying for API access to large language models. And every one of them is paying every month. The cost shows up on the invoice like clockwork. If a writer like me could position a few of these tools in my content — naturally, not as shills — and earn a piece of that monthly spend, that would be the closest thing to a retainer I'd ever built without a contract.
So I started digging. I wanted to know which AI API providers actually had affiliate programs, which ones paid decently, and which ones had the kind of recurring structure that could actually move the needle for a solo freelancer like me.
I looked at the major names first. Then the smaller ones. Then the platforms that aggregate access to multiple models. What I found surprised me, and a lot of it was disappointing. But one program in particular stood out, and I want to walk you through my full evaluation.

My Framework for Evaluating These Programs

Before I signed up for anything, I made myself a simple scoring system. I'm a writer, not an analyst, but even I can run a basic cost-benefit calculation. I evaluated each program on five things:

1. First-order commission rate. How much do I get when someone signs up through my link?
2. Recurring commission availability. Do I get paid again on month two, month six, month twelve?
3. Recurring commission percentage. When it is recurring, is it enough to matter?
4. Payout mechanics. How do I get the money, and what's the minimum?
5. Product quality. Will the people I send actually stay subscribed, or will they churn after a week? That last one is the one most affiliate marketers skip. They chase the highest percentage and end up promoting a product that doesn't deliver, which means low conversions and angry readers. I've been on the receiving end of bad affiliate recommendations as a consumer — it burns trust fast. So I only recommend things I'd actually use myself or that my developer clients have had good experiences with. With that framework in hand, let me walk you through what I found. # # Global API: The First One That Made Me Do the Math Twice I came across Global API while researching unified API providers for a client article. The pitch is simple: one API key, access to 150+ AI models, no need to juggle a dozen different accounts and billing systems. For a developer building AI features, that's genuinely useful. The platform handles the integrations. But here's what got my attention as a freelancer — their affiliate program. Global API pays 15% commission on first orders and 8% recurring commission on every monthly renewal after that. On top of that, they pay 10% when one of your referrals upgrades to a premium plan. Let me say that again, because the recurring part is the part that matters: they pay you every single month your referral stays subscribed. Not once. Not for the first three months. Every month. Let me do the math on the Pro plan, which is $19.99 per month. In the first month, I earn 15% of $19.99, which is about $3.00. Then for every month after that, I earn 8% of $19.99, which is $1.60. Over a full year, a single Pro subscriber who stays the whole year generates roughly $22 in total commissions. That's not life-changing on its own, but scale it. Get 50 Pro subscribers, and you're looking at $1,100 a year from a handful of articles or videos. Get them to stick around for two years, and you're at $2,200 from the same 50 referrals. Now the Scale plan, which is $149.99 per month. First-order commission is 15% of $149.99, around $22.50. Recurring is 8%, which is $12 per month. A single Scale plan referral who stays subscribed for a year brings in over $165. Five of those referrals is over $800 a year, and you did the work to land them once. Compare that to writing five articles at $150 each — that's $750, but I had to do the work every time. With the affiliate referral, I do the work once and the income continues. There is something quietly powerful about that math. As a freelancer who has spent three years trading hours for dollars, the idea that I could write one good tutorial, embed a few links, and earn from it for the next 24 months is genuinely transformative. It's not retirement money, but it is the difference between being a freelancer and being a freelancer with assets. Payouts are handled through PayPal with a $50 minimum threshold. The dashboard shows clicks, signups, conversions, and earnings in real time, which I appreciate because I hate waiting around to see if a click even registered. They also provide promotional materials — banners, comparison charts, code snippets — which is helpful if you don't want to create every visual asset yourself. The biggest selling point for me, though, is the lack of a minimum audience requirement. I have a Medium following of around 3,000 and a Substack of about 800. Some affiliate programs want you to prove you can drive traffic before they let you in. Global API doesn't care. You can sign up with zero followers and grow from there. For someone in the early stages of building a writing business, that accessibility matters a lot. # # The Big Names That Don't Pay You At All Here's where the comparison got frustrating. After finding Global API, I assumed the bigger players would have even better programs. Spoiler: they don't, because most of them don't have programs at all. OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4o, does not offer a public affiliate program for their API. They have partnership arrangements for enterprise relationships, but those are for companies signing five-figure annual contracts, not for the freelance blogger or newsletter writer. If you want to recommend the OpenAI API in your content, you cannot earn a commission by linking to it. Period. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is in the same boat. No public affiliate program. Their focus is on direct sales and enterprise accounts. So if you're a writer whose audience keeps asking "what's the best way to access Claude?", you have no way to monetize that traffic through Anthropic directly. This is a real gap in the market, and it's exactly the kind of gap that programs like Global API fill. When someone is searching for a unified solution that gives them access to multiple models through one interface, you can be the writer who answers that question and gets paid for the referral. Some third-party resellers do offer affiliate commissions on OpenAI and Anthropic access, but the rates are noticeably lower because the reseller is taking a cut. The economics just don't compare. When you go through a direct affiliate program, you keep more of what you earn. # # Crunching the Numbers for My Own Business Let me put my own situation on the table, because I'm not writing this from some abstract "you could do this" position. I'm writing it because I'm doing it. In a typical month, I publish about six to eight articles across Medium, my Substack, and a few client blogs. Of those, maybe two are in the AI tooling space. With Global API's commission structure, even a modest conversion rate could meaningfully change my monthly income picture. Here's a conservative scenario. Say I write four articles a year that include my Global API affiliate link. Each article pulls in roughly 2,000 views over its lifetime (some do better, some do worse). If I convert at 1%, that's 20 signups. If half of those are on the Pro plan and half are on the Scale plan, that's:
6. 10 Pro referrals × $22 annual commission = $220/year
7. 10 Scale referrals × $165 annual commission = $1,650/year Total: $1,870 a year from a single quarter's worth of writing. And those referrals keep paying me for as long as they stay subscribed. By year two, if I add four more articles and the existing referrals stay active, I'm at $3,740 a year for the same effort. By year three, potentially $5,000 or more. That is the compounding effect I mentioned earlier, and it's the reason I now actively think about affiliate strategy when I plan content. I still write the same number of articles. I just make sure some of them are pointing at income streams that don't evaporate when I close my laptop. # # What I'm Doing With This Information To be clear, I'm not abandoning freelance writing. Clients still pay me $150 per article for B2B content, and that revenue funds my life. But the freelance gig model has a fundamental flaw: the work is perishable. An article I write in March doesn't earn me anything in April unless I write another one. Affiliate commissions from programs like Global API give me a second income layer that doesn't require a fresh pitch every month. The articles I write today can still be generating revenue in 18 months. That's the closest thing I've found to the kind of recurring revenue that retainer clients used to provide — except I don't have to deal with a client. I also want to be honest about the limits. Affiliate income is not passive in the "set it and forget it" sense. You have to write good content, keep it updated, and send real traffic to the program. If you slap a link on a low-effort article and walk away, nothing happens. But for a writer who is already producing content, embedding affiliate links is a 30-second change to a workflow you're already running. The marginal effort is small. The marginal upside is real. The other thing I'll say is that affiliate income replaces some of the worst parts of freelancing. The endless pitching. The awkward follow-up emails. The client who wants a discount. With affiliate income, the only "client" is the platform's affiliate manager, and they generally want you to succeed because your success is their customer acquisition. # # If You Want to Try Global API Yourself If you've read this far, you're probably the kind of person who is already writing about AI tools, developer workflows, or tech products — and you're tired of every dollar requiring a new gig. In that case, the Global API affiliate program is genuinely worth your time. Here's why I keep recommending it. The commission structure is real: 15% on first orders, 8% recurring on renewals, and 10% on premium upgrades. The product itself is solid — one API key, 150+ models, no platform