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A few days ago I watched kickbacks.ai go viral. 

It’s a great idea: slips an ad into the little status text under your AI coding agent while it churns.  You get paid half the ad revenue. Nice.

I thought someone’s gonna do this with bitcoin, it’s obvious.

Peter2Paul payments baby.

12 hours later it hadn’t popped up on my X or nostr feed yet so I set about building it with claude code.

It's called Kicksats.

How it works:

  • You run Claude Code with a tiny status-line script. While the agent thinks, an ad sits under your prompt.
  • An advertiser funded that slot with a Lightning invoice. No card, no account, no KYC, just pay the invoice and your ad goes into rotation.
  • Every qualified thinking-window bills against their budget, and HALF of it accrues to you, the dev.
  • When your balance crosses a tiny floor it auto-pays to your Lightning address via LNURL. No withdraw button, no dashboard to babysit. Sats just turn up.

Some of the bits SN might care about:

  • Auction is weighted-random by bid, not winner-take-all, so a small advertiser still gets impressions.
  • Billing is server-authoritative and credit-gated per window, single-use signed token per impression, so a forged metrics POST can't mint sats.
  • Real LND on the backend. The first outbound payouts already landed in a Primal wallet, so the money side is not a mock.

It's genuinely live today. I posted it a few hours ago and the abuse-testing has already started (someone rotated a few dozen client ids from one IP to probe the payout path). The per-IP cap and the payout floor caught it and it extracted exactly zero, which honestly made my night more than the launch did.

I'm one person who built this for the love of it, so I'd take any of:

  • devs willing to run it and tell me if it works lol
  • anyone who wants to be one of the first advertisers (it is stupidly cheap)
  • a beating on the billing/abuse model from people here who think about this harder than I do

Site's in the link. Thanks in advance.

Onwards