FAQ & Fraud Ground Rules

How earnings work, and the rules that keep every payout honest.

Last updated: June 15, 2026

Kickbacks pays real developers a share of ad revenue for the ad shown in their coding assistant's "thinking…" line. That only works if the impressions are real. This page explains how earnings are calculated and the ground rules our fraud systems enforce — so honest users always get paid and the people gaming the system never do.

1. How do I earn?

Install the extension, sign in, and keep coding as normal. When your AI assistant (Claude Code and other supported assistants) is working, the "thinking…" verb is replaced by a short sponsored line. You accrue credit for the time that line is genuinely on screen, plus any clicks. The current revenue split is an estimated 50% of the net ad revenue attributable to your impressions and clicks. You don't have to do anything differently — there is nothing to click, refresh, or run on a schedule.

Which editors and assistants are supported?

Officially supported today:

The Claude Code extension for VS Code.
The Claude Code CLI in the terminal, where the sponsored verb appears in the status line or spinner.

The Codex extension is supported on an experimental basis. Support for OpenCode and Cursor is coming soon.

2. What counts as a real impression?

An impression earns only when all of the following are true:

The ad was actually visible on your screen for at least five seconds during a live wait-state.
The wait-state came from a real, human-initiated coding request — not a script, bot, loop, or prompt run solely to spin the spinner.
The extension is properly installed, signed in, and connected.
You're within the applicable activity caps (see below).
The activity isn't excluded by our fraud systems.

We apply per-user spacing rules and hourly/daily caps so that normal use is always covered and artificial bursts are not. We don't publish the exact cap values — they move with abuse patterns — but ordinary, genuine coding never comes close to them.

3. When do I get paid?

Earnings accrue to your balance and are paid out monthly via Stripe Connect once your balance is over the payout threshold (currently US $10) and you've completed Stripe onboarding (including any required tax forms). Balances are estimates until reconciled, and payouts can be held during a fraud review. See the Terms, §6 for the full payout mechanics.

Which countries can receive payouts?

Payouts run through Stripe Connect, which can only send money to bank accounts in the countries Stripe supports. If your account is in a country Stripe doesn't pay out to — currently including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Vietnam, among others — we can't transfer your earnings yet.

Your credit is safe. It keeps accruing in your account, and we'll pay it out as soon as your country becomes supported. Your portal shows a notice if we detect you're in an unsupported region — that's inferred from your sign-in location, so if it's wrong just email us and we'll correct it.

4. Fraud ground rules

These are the lines that, if crossed, make activity non-billable and can get an account blocked. They exist to protect the honest majority — every fake impression dilutes a real developer's share and overcharges an advertiser.

One account per person. Creating or operating multiple earning accounts — alone or in coordination with others — is prohibited.
Real usage only. No automated clicking, scripted prompts, bots, click farms, paid-to-click schemes, or any setup whose purpose is to manufacture impressions or clicks.
No collusion or account networks. Pooling devices, machines, or identities to aggregate earnings is prohibited.
No tampering. Don't modify, spoof, replay, or otherwise falsify the telemetry the extension reports.
No circumvention. Don't try to evade caps, account limits, or other controls — including by rotating networks or devices.

5. How fraud detection works

We run automated, continuously-tuned systems alongside human review. They look at the shape of activity, not the content of your work, and they catch coordinated abuse in both directions:

We enforce thresholds in both directions of the account ↔ network relationship:

Many accounts behind one network. When more than a set number of distinct accounts earn from a single network fingerprint, that's treated as a farm.
One account spread across many networks. When a single account earns from more than a set number of distinct networks — the signature of proxy or VPN rotation used to dodge the per-network rules — that's caught too.

We deliberately don't publish the exact thresholds, the windows they're measured over, or the other signals involved (timing patterns, device fan-out, account-creation bursts, and more). Honest use stays comfortably inside every limit; if you're a real developer coding normally — even from a laptop, a desktop, and the occasional coffee-shop Wi-Fi — you will never trip them. Established, long-standing accounts are given the benefit of the doubt and routed to a human rather than auto-actioned.

6. What happens if an account is flagged

Depending on confidence, our systems either flag an account for human review or block it automatically. A blocked account stops earning immediately, and credit accrued from the abusive activity is voided. Where money has already been paid out on fraudulent activity, we reserve the right to recover it. You'll see a clear "Account blocked" indicator in the extension if this happens. Full detail is in the Terms, §9.

7. What we collect (and never do)

We collect only what's needed to credit earnings, bill advertisers, and stop fraud: ad/event identifiers, on-screen visibility metrics, a per-install ID, extension/host versions, and — for signed-in users — an account ID. For abuse detection we process your IP address, but we store only a salted, one-way hash of it — never the raw IP. That hash is what lets us count "accounts per network" and "networks per account" without ever storing your actual address. Separately, when you open your earnings portal we do a quick, in-memory lookup of your IP's country (just the country, not a precise location) to check payout eligibility and show the notice described in §3 — that lookup happens on the spot and isn't stored.

We do not collect the content of your code, prompts, AI responses, files, or project contents. The telemetry has no field capable of carrying them. See the Privacy Policy and Terms, §10.

8. Advertisers & refunds

Advertisers buy blocks of 1,000 five-second impressions and bid for placement priority. Because we aggressively exclude fraudulent traffic, you're billed for delivery to real developers. If our systems determine impressions weren't delivered as intended — or were tainted by fraud we caught after the fact — we can issue a credit or refund. Questions about a campaign's delivery? Email us and we'll send you a per-campaign delivery report.

9. Appeals & contact

If you believe your account was flagged in error, contact us — a human will review it. We weigh the evidence in good faith; established accounts in particular are reviewed by a person before any action sticks.

Email: support@kickbacks.ai
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