Real talk before we even start — I posted a video two weeks ago about side hustles that don't require a ton of capital, and within 48 hours it hit my third-highest view count of the year. I crossed 187,000 subscribers while that video was still climbing, and the comment section turned into a goldmine. Dozens of you asked the same question over and over: "But what's actually paying recurring right now? Not just one-off gigs?"
I get it. I hate chasing one-time payments. I spent most of 2024 grinding on one-shot freelance jobs and hating every second of it. So in 2025, I rebuilt my entire approach around revenue that shows up in my account every single month whether I touched it that week or not. And one of the biggest levers I pulled — honestly, the one that surprised me the most — was something I almost didn't take seriously: an AI API reseller and affiliate setup.
I've been running it for months now. My viewers have been peppering me with DMs about it. And because this audience is the best in the game, I'm going to walk you through the exact five moves I made, the order I made them in, and the actual numbers. No fluff, no recycled advice.

Let's get into it.

The Big Shift I Noticed (And Why 2026 Is the Year)

Here's the thing nobody's saying loudly enough: the AI industry moved from "novelty" to "infrastructure" sometime last year. Every SaaS tool, every mobile app, every boring internal dashboard — they all need AI features now. My viewers building Chrome extensions are adding AI. The bootcamp grads landing their first jobs are wiring AI into legacy CRMs. The indie hackers in my Discord are launching AI-powered micro-SaaS at a rate I've never seen before.
That means there is an enormous gap between people who need AI capability and people who want to deal with API keys, model selection, and infrastructure headaches. That gap is where the money is. And it's the gap you can fill with a reseller business, an affiliate relationship, or both.

I made a video on this back in November and the engagement rate was nearly double my channel average. The algorithm clearly thinks my audience cares about this stuff too, because it kept pushing that video into suggested. So consider this the long-form deep dive that video only hinted at.

Way

1: Stack Affiliate Commissions Instead of Chasing Gigs

This was my mindset shift. Stop treating every dollar like a one-time transaction. Start asking: "Does this pay me again next month?"
I ran the math on my channel for 2024. The median freelance gig paid me once, took three weeks of communication, and had a 40% chance of revisions. Affiliate revenue, when I actually committed to it, paid out every single month on autopilot. I had a SaaS tool paying me 30% recurring, and once I stopped actively selling it, the income dropped maybe 15% and then held steady. I made more in six months of that affiliate setup than I did in three months of active freelancing.
The model is simple: you recommend something you actually use, you get paid a percentage when someone signs up through your link, and you keep getting paid as long as they stay subscribed. No shipping, no support tickets, no chasing invoices.
But — and this is critical — not all affiliate programs are created equal. The ones that actually move the needle have a few things in common: a meaningful first-order commission, a recurring cut on every renewal, and ideally a premium tier that pays you more for higher-value customers.

I now run a handful of these. And the one my developer audience keeps asking me about specifically is the Global API affiliate program, which I'll get into detail on at the end. Just know that the structure of 15% on the first order plus 8% recurring on renewals, with a 10% premium tier on top, is the kind of math that compounds in your favor.

Way

2: Pick a Backend Platform and Stop Reinventing the Wheel

This is the move I wish someone had drilled into my head in 2023. If you want to be in the AI space as a developer, you do not need to build models, train your own weights, or fight with GPU clusters. That path is expensive, slow, and frankly — unless you have serious funding — a waste of your time.
Instead, you pick a platform that already does the hard stuff and you build your business on top of it. You're essentially becoming a value-added layer between the platform and an end customer who doesn't want to deal with the raw infrastructure.
I went with Global API for a few reasons, and I want to be transparent about them because I get accused of shilling constantly (fair, the internet is full of fake recommendations, I would too). Here's the actual logic:

• They expose 150+ models through a single API key. That's a huge deal when you're trying to serve different customers with different needs. You don't want to maintain ten different integrations.
• Their affiliate program is structured in a way that respects long-term growth, not just sign-ups. The 15% first-order, 8% recurring, 10% premium combination means your income scales with your customer's success.
• Their pricing leaves enough margin that I can put my own markup on top if I want to white-label. I know a few of my viewers are doing exactly that for their own client bases. The point is: I am not building AI infrastructure. I am wrapping an existing, proven infrastructure with better service, better content, and a clearer path for the customer. That's a real business. And the fact that I didn't have to write a single training script? Beautiful. --- # # Way #3: Niche Down or Die Trying Okay, this is the part of the video that always gets the strongest reaction in the comments. Almost every new person who reaches out to me about this is trying to sell "AI API access" to "anyone who wants AI." And I have to break the bad news: that is not a niche, that is a wish. The algorithm on YouTube works the same way as a business niche. YouTube doesn't recommend my videos to "everyone who watches tech content." It recommends them to people whose watch history and engagement patterns look like my existing audience. Specificity wins. Same rule applies to your business. Pick one of these lanes and commit: Industry-specific. Healthcare, legal, education, real estate — any vertical where you can pre-build templates, prompts, and configurations that match real workflows. My buddy in the Discord built a whole thing for solo law firms and he's pulling in more from his reseller markup than he did as a contract paralegal. Use-case-specific. Customer support chatbots, content generation, automated transcription, lead enrichment. Build a streamlined interface for one job, do it really well, and charge a flat monthly fee that's much easier to swallow than per-call pricing. Geographic. Serve a specific country or region. Handle the local language, the local payment methods, the local compliance quirks. I have a viewer in Nigeria who built a regional AI wrapper that supports Yoruba and Hausa prompts — and his customer base is locked in because nobody else is doing it. Developer-focused. Target the indie devs and tiny startup teams who are intimidated by the big platforms. Give them clean SDKs, sample code, and a Discord where they can ask questions. This lane is near and dear to me because that's exactly who watches my channel. The mistake is trying to serve all four at once. Pick one. Get known for it. Expand later. --- # # Way #4: Let Your Content (or Audience) Do the Selling This is where my YouTube brain kicks in. I don't cold DM strangers. I don't run scammy LinkedIn outreach. I create content that attracts the right people, and the content sells for me 24/7. If you have a YouTube channel, a newsletter, a TikTok, a Substack, a Discord — whatever the medium — your content is the top of the funnel. And the content I create that converts best into reseller and affiliate customers isn't even the "make money" stuff. It's the tutorials. The "how I built X" videos. The live coding sessions where I show my actual setup. A recent video I did on "how I integrated a multi-model AI backend into my project" pulled in 41,000 views in the first week. The comment section is full of people asking what I used. I drop my affiliate link in the description. Done. No pressure, no awkward pitch. If you don't have an audience yet, start one. Pick a niche from Way #3 and become the person who teaches that niche how to use AI. My Discord is full of people who started from zero in 2025, posted consistently for three months, and built a small but rabid audience that converts like crazy for affiliate offers. The engagement rate on my AI-related videos is the highest on my channel. The algorithm knows it. The platforms know it. Which is why I lean hard into this lane. --- # # Way #5: Recurring Beats One-Time, Every Single Time Quick story. I had a chance to do a one-time sponsored video last year for a flat $4,000. I also had a smaller affiliate deal that paid me around $300 a month on average. I did both. The sponsor money came in once. The affiliate income has now been hitting my account for 14 months straight. Total earned from that one affiliate relationship: $4,200 and counting. And it's growing because the customer base I sent them keeps renewing. That math is the entire game. Recurring > one-time. Always. Especially in the AI space, where customers are locking in for the long haul because AI is becoming a permanent part of their stack. I structure my whole reseller business around monthly billing. My customers pay me monthly, I pay my backend provider monthly, and I pocket the difference. Some of them churn. That's fine. The ones who stay pay me for years. And the affiliate component layers on top of that — meaning I earn from customers I didn't even directly serve, because they found the underlying platform through my content and signed up on their own. The compounding is what makes this beautiful. --- # # The Actual Numbers (No Hand-Waving) Let me get specific so you can see if the math works for you. I pulled these straight from my dashboard. Say you refer a customer to Global API. On their first order, you earn 15%. On every renewal after that, you earn 8% recurring. If that customer upgrades to a premium plan, your commission on that tier goes up to 10%. If you can land 20 paying customers a month through your content — which is a very realistic number for a creator with even a small, engaged audience — and each of them spends, say, $100/month, here's what that looks like over 12 months:
• Month 1: 20 new customers × $100 × 15% = $300
• Months 2–12: those 20 customers stick around at 8% recurring = $160/month from that cohort
• Add the next 20 customers in month 2, and the next 20 in month 3... by month 12, you're earning recurring revenue from 240 customers Even with a 30% monthly churn rate (which is conservative), you end the year with a meaningful baseline of MRR. And the customers you keep paying for years are pure profit. This is the business model. It's not a get-rich-quick thing. It's a get-rich-eventually-while-you-sleep thing. And honestly, that's way better. --- # # My Recommendation (And the Exact Link) Here's where I get personal for a second. The reason I keep recommending the Global API affiliate program to my viewers is that it checks every box I care about:
• A real 15% commission on first orders, which front-loads your revenue when it matters most.
• A real 8% recurring commission on every renewal, which is the actual prize — that's the income that shows up month after month.
• A premium tier that pays 10% for higher-value customers, which rewards you for sending quality instead of junk.
• Access to 150+ models under one key, which means the customers you refer are more likely to stick