The referral program: earning 10% on invited users' top-ups

The referral program at zukko.pro is straightforward: 10% of every top-up made by an invited user goes to the balance of whoever invited them. Not a one-time signup bonus, but a percentage that keeps coming in with every subsequent top-up, for as long as the invited person keeps using the service.

How it works in practice

You get an invite link or code in the dashboard, https://zukko.pro/app↗. From there the mechanics are linear: someone signs up through your link, and at some point tops up their balance — by card via PayPear, via SBP, with crypto, or with a foreign Mastercard EU card via Fride — and 10% of that top-up amount lands on your balance, not theirs.

One detail matters here: it is a percentage of top-ups, not of spend. If someone tops up $100 and spends it over six months, you get your 10% right when the top-up happens, not gradually as they burn through the balance.

Who actually makes money on this

People who already recommend API gateways. If you are a tech lead, write about AI-assisted development, or just answer "where do I get Claude access without the $200 subscription" questions in chats — you are already giving that recommendation. The only question is whether you keep a cut of it or not.

Agencies and freelancers setting up AI tools for clients. If you configure Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex for clients and tell them which gateway to connect through, a referral link turns a one-off consulting job into something that keeps paying while the client stays active.

Communities and dev channels. A single post with a referral link does not earn much, but a pinned message in a channel people read for months keeps generating top-ups from new subscribers continuously.

Developers building their own product on top of the gateway. If you run a service or a bot built on these models and are upfront about what powers it, a referral link in your docs or landing page is a way to collect a cut of the infrastructure cost your own users end up paying if they set up their own keys on your recommendation.

A rough number to anchor expectations

If 20 developers sign up through your link, and each tops up around $30 a month on average, that is a recurring line, not a one-off: $30 × 20 × 10% = $60 a month from that group, for as long as they keep using the service and topping up. The number is illustrative — actual income depends on how many of them stay active users rather than just registering.

Why gaming it does not work

Since the payout comes from the amount of a real top-up, mass-registering empty accounts through your link gets you nothing — if the invited account never tops up, there is nothing to pay out on. That is what separates the referral program from the one-time channel-subscription bonus (covered in a separate article), where the payout does not depend on the invited person's later activity.

Using the link without turning into spam

A referral link works better as a swap-in for a recommendation you would make anyway, rather than as a separate aggressive campaign. If you already write setup guides for connecting Claude Code or Cursor to an alternative API, the natural place for the link is exactly where the reader is already about to go sign up. Adding it somewhere that never mentioned the service before usually performs worse than simply swapping the existing https://zukko.pro for your referral version inside content that already gets read.

If the invited person stops topping up

The program does not guarantee steady income from one person: once an invited user stops topping up, payouts from them simply stop, with no penalty and nothing to cancel on your end. That is normal — active users keep generating a percentage, people who left do not, and total program income is roughly proportional to how many invited users actually stayed paying, not how many merely signed up through the link at some point.

Folding it into an existing workflow

If you already write setup guides for Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex against an alternative API, the most natural way to use the program is to replace the bare gateway URL with your referral link wherever you would have written plain https://zukko.pro. For a team where several people onboard new hires onto the same tooling, it makes sense to give the referral link to whoever actually owns onboarding — then the payouts land with the person doing the connection work.

Common questions

What if the invited person already had an account before? Referral programs work the same way everywhere: attribution follows the actual click-through-and-signup, not a retroactive claim on an existing account. If you are unsure about a specific case, check with support at https://t.me/zukkopro?direct↗.

Can this be combined with the channel-subscription bonus? These are two separate mechanics: the @zukkopro subscription bonus is a one-time $0.50 for the invited user themselves for subscribing to the channel (with Telegram linked in the dashboard, once per Telegram account; there is no signup bonus), while the referral program is a percentage for the inviter on someone else's top-ups. They are not mutually exclusive — the person you invited can still claim their own subscription bonus, while you collect your percentage on their top-ups.

Where do you see how much has accrued? Referral payouts are just top-ups to your own balance, so the running total shows up in the same place as your regular balance — in the dashboard, or via GET /v1/balance with your key.