How Clixad is funded: the arithmetic, and where it strains

The exchange rate and the two levers

Two numbers decide whether Clixad makes money, and they live in one file, packages/pricing/src/config.ts. Everything else is derived from them, so usage can never be sold below cost.

The first is a markup of 1.5, which applies when someone buys credits with a card: $1 buys 100,000 credits, and those credits are charged against real API cost at 1.5× that cost, so a bought dollar carries a 33% gross margin. Buying is optional and never required.

The second is the one that matters here: a platform margin of one third. For a completed offer that pays the platform some amount, a third of that amount is kept and the other two thirds fund model usage at cost. Because the markup and the margin cancel exactly ((1 - 1/3) × 1.5 = 1), the arithmetic collapses to one identity: one dollar of offer payout becomes 100,000 credits, and those credits buy the two thirds of a dollar of raw model calls that the platform did not keep. That identity is also the currency factor configured on the offerwall's side, so the two are cross-checked on every postback.

So the model is profit-positive per completed offer by construction: the platform keeps a third of whatever an offer paid, whether that is four cents or three dollars. It does not promise that offers get completed, or that a third of a small payout is worth much.

What a turn actually costs

A turn is one model call: your prompt and the context go up, a reply comes back. The table below prices a turn of 20,000 input tokens and 1,500 output tokens, a normal coding exchange with a few files in context, on every model Clixad offers, straight from the pricing engine, cheapest first as in the /model picker.

The most expensive turn, on Claude Fable 5.1, costs 172 times the cheapest, on GPT-5 Nano. That spread comes from the providers' own price lists; ad funding only decides who pays it.

What one completed offer buys

One completed CPX offer at the median, 51,000 credits, is 212 turns on the cheapest model, three on Claude Opus 5.5 and one on Claude Fable 5.1.

The signup bonus is 25,000 credits, under half of one median completion. It pays for budget models only: 104 turns on GPT-5 Nano, the cheapest of them, or 10 on Kimi K2.5, the most expensive. The daily cap is 500,000 credits, the credits from $5 of payout: around 30 turns on Claude Opus 5.5 or a couple of thousand on GPT-5 Nano.

What offers actually pay

The rate is fixed, but the payouts vary a lot. From our own ledger: completed offers on our CPX wall have credited from 9,000 to 114,000 credits on completion, with a median of 51,000: 26 completions recorded in our ledger between 27 July 2026 and 12 September 2026, as of 14 September 2026.

The largest paid more than twelve times the smallest. The ledger does not record how long an offer took, and our other offerwalls are not quoted because it holds too few completions from them.

The screenout, said plainly

The most common outcome of starting a survey is not a payout. It is a screenout: a few questions in, the survey decides you are not the respondent it is paying for, and it ends with nothing credited, or at most a small bonus. You spent the minutes and earned little or nothing.

This is normal on every survey offerwall: the advertiser only pays for completes that match the panel it commissioned, and matching is decided partway through. It happens on the offerwall's side before anything reaches us, so we cannot engineer it away.

So the credits in the tables above are per completion, and a completion can take several attempts. If you want a steady top-up, buying credits will suit you better than grinding surveys. If you can treat the wall as intermittent, you will do well on the cheap models, where one completion is a hundred turns. The signup bonus is there partly so you meet the tool before the wall.

The Lootably experiment we didn't ship

Correction, 27 September 2026: Lootably has shut its service down, so it is no longer offered. CPX and TheoremReach are the walls Clixad sends you to.

Correction, 14 September 2026: Lootably has since gone live, alongside TheoremReach, so this section describes an earlier state. The payout figure it quoted is gone, because this site now quotes only what completed CPX offers credited in our ledger.

Clixad's code carries a second offerwall, Lootably, built and verified end to end behind the same postback contract as CPX. It is not live, for this reason.

When we looked at the Lootably catalogue for German desktop web, the audience most likely to run a terminal coding agent, it was almost entirely purchases, subscriptions and app installs. Those are fine offers for a rewards app; they are a bad fit for "earn a few credits to keep coding", because they ask the user to spend money or install a phone game. The one category that read as low-friction, a "one click" section, led out through TimeWall into a third wall, whose single available campaign was yet another signup.

So we finished the integration, confirmed a real completion credited correctly, and left the wall unlinked. A second wall with worse choices than the first would not have helped anyone. CPX is the only live wall.

Where this model can fail

Crediting is unreliable across the industry. The whole earn path depends on a third party firing a server-to-server postback correctly and on time. Postbacks get delayed, dropped and disputed; a conversion can be charged back long after the credits were spent, which is why the code has to let a claw-back push a balance negative. When a network simply does not credit a completion, the user did the work for nothing and the fix is not on our side. We can make our handling correct and idempotent, but we cannot make the other end reliable.

Ad-funded developer tooling is contested. Many developers think ads have no place near a coding tool, and the best-resourced entrant in this category dropped advertising inside six months. We are not going to argue that ads in a dev tool are fine. The trade is concrete: you pay with attention and completed offers instead of money, the ad is a page in your browser rather than anything in your editor, and no code or prompt leaves for the advertiser. Judge it by the numbers, not by our reassurance.

The margin is thin where the payouts are small. A third of a completed offer is real profit, but a third of forty cents is thirteen cents, and when most attempts screen out the platform sees many wall opens per credited completion and earns nothing on the rest. That is survivable at the cheap end of the model table and tight at the expensive end, where one completion is a single turn or none. The daily cap bounds the platform's exposure as much as the user's earning.