The $0.50 channel-subscription bonus: how to claim it

If you signed up recently and did not see a "try it out" dollar on your balance, that is not a bug. The starting balance on regular signup was discontinued on September 18, 2026: the practice was dropped because of disposable-email farming, where the same people stamped out accounts for free balance rather than actual use. Right now the only way to get free money on your account is to subscribe to the @zukkopro Telegram channel. It is a one-time $0.50 bonus tied to the fact of subscribing, not to signup itself.

What you need to do

The bonus is not paid for a subscription existing somewhere in Telegram in the abstract — it is paid for linking your Telegram account to your zukko.pro profile plus being subscribed to the channel. There are two ways to do that: through the dashboard, or through the bot.

Method 1: through the dashboard

1. Go to the dashboard: https://zukko.pro/app↗.
2. Find the Telegram-linking section, usually near profile or balance settings.
3. Link your account — this requires authorizing through Telegram, the standard login widget.
4. Subscribe to @zukkopro↗ if you have not already.
5. After linking and subscribing, press "Check" — $0.50 should show up on your balance; check it via GET /v1/balance with your key, or directly in the dashboard.

curl https://api.zukko.pro/v1/balance \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer fetch_your_key"

Method 2: through the bot

If your Telegram account is already in active use and you would rather skip the web login widget, the @zukkopro_bot gives the same result — it also handles linking Telegram to your profile. The logic is the same: link the account and be subscribed to the channel, just through a bot conversation instead of a web form in the dashboard.

Why the bonus does not show up right away

A couple of reasons $0.50 does not appear the instant you subscribe to the channel.

Order of operations matters. If you subscribe to the channel before linking your Telegram account to your site profile, the system may not connect the two automatically. The right order is: link first, through the dashboard or the bot, then separately confirm your @zukkopro subscription is active.

It is a one-time bonus, not a reward per action. If you already claimed $0.50 before on another account, or with the same Telegram account linked to a different profile, linking it again will not pay out a second time — the bonus is paid once per Telegram account, not for every link.

Unsubscribing and resubscribing does not create a new bonus. Leaving the channel and rejoining to run the flow again does not work — the linkage is only counted once.

Why signup no longer grants a starting balance

Before September 18, 2026, every new account got a small starting balance automatically. That was dropped because of mass farming: disposable mailboxes were registered in batches for the free dollars, with no intent to actually use the service. The result is a bonus tied to something harder to automate at scale: subscribing through a real Telegram account. If an old guide or screenshot somewhere mentions that "signup gives you a free dollar," that is outdated information and no longer describes current practice.

If you do not use Telegram at all

There is no way to get this $0.50 without a Telegram account — both routes, the dashboard and the bot, require actually linking one and actually subscribing to the channel. That is a deliberate trade-off: a one-time free balance only makes sense to hand out where it is physically harder to churn out at scale, and creating dozens of disposable Telegram accounts is noticeably harder than creating dozens of disposable mailboxes.

This is a one-time check, not a recurring source of balance

$0.50 is enough for exactly one connection test, not for regular work. If you already know real traffic is going through the gateway, it makes sense to move straight to a normal top-up through one of the payment methods — SBP, card via PayPear, crypto, or a foreign Mastercard EU card via Fride — rather than trying to stretch $0.50 into more than one or two short requests.

If you are the one bringing other people into the service, keep in mind: the channel-subscription bonus goes to the invited person themselves, not to whoever invited them. That is a separate mechanic from the referral program, where 10% of top-ups goes to the inviter, not to the invited person's own Telegram link.

What to do with the $0.50 once you have it

That amount is enough for one real check that your key and connection actually work, before committing to a proper balance top-up. A quick check:

curl https://api.zukko.pro/v1/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer fetch_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
  -d '{"model":"claude-sonnet-5","max_tokens":64,"messages":[{"role":"user","content":"test"}]}'

If you get a response and see a small charge — visible in the response's X-Zukko-Cost-Micros header or in the GET /v1/usage history — the connection is set up correctly, and you can top up for real volume: via SBP, by card through PayPear, with crypto, or with a foreign Mastercard EU card through Fride.