How to make money using Claude Code (with honest numbers)

If you searched for ways to make money using Claude Code, most of the answers you found were about doing paid work faster. Client work and small SaaS tools, mostly. That's still the best way to turn Claude Code into money, by a wide margin.

This post is about a much smaller way. I built a mod called Tokenbreak that shows a small ad in your terminal while Claude is working, and gives you half of what the advertiser paid. I'm going to start with the numbers, because they're small, and you should hear that from me first.

Tokenbreak is an independent project. It's built for Claude Code, but it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.

The honest numbers

Right now Tokenbreak is in Phase 0. The mod shows house ads (ads for Tokenbreak itself and the free components on our site), and there's a waitlist. House ads pay nothing. So today, the real answer to "how much can I make" is zero.

When paid campaigns start, here's roughly what a heavy user can expect. I'm assuming 20 active days a month, a wide terminal, and launch prices. "Fill" means the share of ad slots that carry a paid ad instead of a house ad.

My expectation for the first months of paid ads is something close to the 10% row. A few dollars a month.

There's also a ceiling, and it's there on purpose. The Prompt Banner counts at most 120 impressions a day, and Theater counts at most 20. At launch prices, that caps a heavy user at about $1 a day even if every slot is sold. I could raise the caps and make the numbers look better, but then the thing would get annoying, and I think annoying is how this kind of product dies.

So the pitch is "earn toward your subscription." Covering a full $20 a month would take 80% fill or better plus heavy use on 25 or more days, and I don't expect that early. Bigger plans are out of reach. If someone tells you a terminal mod will pay for Claude Max, they're selling you something.

Those numbers assume a fairly heavy day: about 60 prompts and a few hours with Claude Code on screen. Lighter users earn less, and anyone on a narrow terminal loses the Theater slot, which cuts the figures by about a quarter.

How Tokenbreak works

Claude Code supports mods: small plugins that react to events, like a turn starting or finishing, and can draw on parts of the screen. Tokenbreak uses that to put an ad in one of three places.

The three ad formats

The Status Sponsor is up to 40 characters in the status line at the bottom of the screen. It's the quietest format, and the cheapest for advertisers at a $5 CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

The Prompt Banner is a single line just above the prompt box, rotating about every 40 seconds. It costs advertisers $12 CPM, and in practice it does most of the earning because it shows up most often.

Theater is an image pane on the right side of the screen that opens while Claude is working. It only appears in wide, fullscreen terminals, since on a narrow screen it would squeeze your code. It's $30 CPM.

Ads are labeled as sponsored, and every one is reviewed by a person before it runs. The ad policy bans malware, crypto scams and airdrops, gambling, adult content, impersonation (Anthropic included), misleading claims, and links that start downloads. Ads also can't contain shell commands, so you'll never see a sponsored curl | sh in your terminal.

Where the money goes

Developers who install the mod earn 50% of net ad revenue from the ads shown on their machine. "Net" means what the advertiser paid, minus card fees, refunds, and anything we flag as invalid traffic.

Payouts work like this:

• They're paid in USDC on Base, sent to your own wallet. Tokenbreak keeps a ledger of what you've earned and never holds your keys.
• The minimum payout is $10, and earnings sit for 30 days before they can be paid, so refunds can settle.
• There are daily earning caps.
• Your GitHub account has to be at least 90 days old.
• Stripe payouts are planned for later, for people who don't want to touch crypto.

There is no Tokenbreak token, and there won't be one. If anyone offers you a Tokenbreak airdrop, it's a scam.

One more thing about timing: at 10% fill, it takes about five months to reach the $10 minimum. Better to know that now than to wonder in month two why nothing has arrived.

Privacy

This is the part I'd want to know first if I were installing an ad mod, so here it is plainly.

Ads never enter Claude's context. They're drawn on your screen, and Claude never sees them, so they never cost you a single token. The mod doesn't read your code or your prompts. It only needs to know that a turn started or finished, not what's in it.

The only things that leave your machine are these:

- which ad was shown
- when it was shown
- an opaque turn id, so one Claude turn counts once
- a random device id

The device id is random and created on install. It isn't tied to your name, your hardware, or your GitHub account unless you link it yourself to get paid. If you click an ad, a short redirect counts the click for that ad and nothing else: no device id, no cookie.

Tokenbreak is open source, so you don't have to take my word for any of this. Read the code.

Install it

You'll need Claude Code with plugin support. From inside Claude Code, add the Tokenbreak marketplace and install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add tokenbreak/tokenbreak
/plugin install tokenbreak@tokenbreak

That's the whole install. Next time Claude is working, you should see a house ad in the status line or above the prompt. If your terminal is wide and fullscreen, Theater will open on the right during longer turns.

A few things worth knowing before you install:

• If you stream or share your screen, pause ads first. Your viewers didn't opt in.
• If it's a work machine, check your employer's rules about installing plugins.
• If the idea of ads in your terminal makes your skin crawl, don't install it. That's a completely reasonable reaction, and Tokenbreak will never show up unless you add it yourself.

Pause it or remove it

To stop ads, run:

/ads pause

To remove Tokenbreak entirely, uninstall it from the /plugin menu. Once it's uninstalled, it sends nothing.

What happens next

Phase 0 is about finding out whether people will tolerate this at all, and whether the formats work on real screens. Paid campaigns, developer accounts, and payouts come in later phases. If you want to earn when that happens, install the mod now and join the waitlist on tokenbreak.dev. I'll email when accounts open, and I'll post real numbers (fill rate, payouts, all of it) on the public stats page as soon as there are any to post.

If you try it and hate it, tell me why. That's useful too.