Earn while you wait.
We turned “Discombobulating…” into an ad marketplace.
Your idle “thinking…” line earns you 50% of the net ad revenue.
Ramp · save time and money
Grep · 0.4s
curl -L https://kickbacks.ai/v2-vsix -o kickbacks-v2.vsix && code --install-extension kickbacks-v2.vsix --force
Andrew here. Kickbacks.ai started as a solo developer project and grew into something much bigger than I ever expected. Honestly, it was never really about showing people ads. The idea is simple: attention creates value, and the people contributing it should be rewarded for that activity.
For most of the internet’s history, users provided the attention while giant platforms captured nearly all of the economic benefit. We built a simple way for developers to earn from qualifying ads that appear in the quiet moments already built into coding. Real earnings, with clear rules and no fuzzy math or “up to” language. Advertisers set the CPM, and each qualifying ad contributes to a developer’s earnings.
It turns out running a rewards program around the world comes with a truly impressive amount of bureaucracy. We now owe taxes in something like 27 countries, and some weeks we spend more time reviewing contracts than writing code. We are still a very small team, so please cut us a little slack when things are not perfect. I am doing the absolute best I can to keep up.
Even so, building Kickbacks.ai has been an incredible experience, and I am genuinely grateful that you are here for it. This is still a grand experiment, but maybe together we can rewrite the social contract for attention and change how a half-trillion-dollar industry works.
— Andrew
Your campaign now picks its surface.
Surface targetingTwo placements, two independent auctions. One toggle at checkout.
- Inside the editor, right where devs read
- Clickable everywhere — every placement is a link
- High-volume reach at a lower clearing price
- Clickable where the terminal supports links
Supported brands and surfaces
A dash means that brand does not have the matching surface type.
| Surface | Claude Code | Codex | OpenCode | Cursor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VS Code extension | ||||
| Terminal CLI | Soon | |||
| Desktop app | Maybe |
* Limited hyperlink support: some terminals show the sponsored line but do not make advertiser links clickable.
Bid live for the most-watched spinner on Earth.
Each block buys 1,000 impressions on the surface you select; every impression requires at least 10 continuous seconds on screen. The highest bid on that surface serves first; bid from $0.50 to lead or queue behind it. The developer whose machine showed the ad earns from every settled block.
Each campaign runs on one surface and competes in that surface's own auction. A dash means the campaign doesn't run on that surface. How surface pricing works
| # | Brand | Campaign | Dollars per 1,000 impressions | Terminal CPM |
|---|