Yes — you can earn money from your terminal, and it's passive. TermWorks is a free CLI that shows occasional, contextual sponsorships — jobs, startup roles, and dev-tool recommendations — between your commands. You earn 50% of the revenue from every opportunity shown in your terminal. This post explains how earnings are counted and how you get paid.
How much can you earn?
How much you earn depends on how active you are in the terminal and on what advertisers are paying for the opportunities you're shown — there's no fixed per-opportunity rate. Heavy terminal users — DevOps and infrastructure engineers running kubectl, terraform, and build pipelines all day — see more opportunities, so they earn more.
It's not a salary replacement. It's found money for work you're already doing: relevant opportunities surface while you code, and you earn a share of the revenue from each one shown.
How earnings are counted
You earn on opportunities shown in your terminal — but TermWorks validates impressions first to keep things honest. Bot and CI traffic and anything that fails fraud checks doesn't count, and there's a daily cap per install. For each validated impression, you earn 50% of what the advertiser paid.
How payouts work
- Revenue split: 50% of the revenue from every validated impression goes to you; 50% is TermWorks' platform revenue.
- Payments: paid out monthly via Stripe Connect.
- No minimum: there's no threshold you have to cross before cashing out.
You link your bank once through Stripe, and earnings accrue automatically.
What you'll actually see
Opportunities appear at most once per session, between commands — never mid-command, and the frequency is configurable. A few examples of what shows up:
- Hiring: AI infra engineer at a Series A startup ($220k+, remote)
- Sponsored: Deploy your app globally in 60 seconds — Fly.io
- Remote role: Rust engineer at a well-funded protocol team
Targeting is based on the kind of work you do — your stack and tools — so what you see is relevant to what you're actually building.
Is there a catch? Is it private?
No catch — it's free, and developers get paid, not charged. On privacy: only a coarse command category (e.g. "rust", "docker"), exit status, and session timing ever leave your machine. Your actual commands, arguments, file paths, environment variables, secrets, and output stay local — classification happens on your own machine. (More detail in the security FAQ.)
You stay in control: pause anytime with termworks disable, or remove it completely with termworks uninstall.
How to start earning
On macOS or Linux:
curl -fsSL https://term.works/install.sh | bash
termworks login
termworks login links your account so you can set up payouts. That's it — relevant opportunities will start appearing between your commands, and you'll earn your 50% share of each one shown.