How TermWorks works

TermWorks is a two-sided network: developers install a free CLI and earn from relevant opportunities shown in their terminal, and advertisers — companies hiring or promoting dev tools — pay to reach those developers by the work they're doing. Here's the whole mechanism, start to finish.

The two sides

• Developers install the CLI for free and earn 50% of the revenue from every opportunity shown to them.
• Advertisers create campaigns — jobs, roles, or sponsorships — and pay per impression shown (CPM), targeted by developer stack and seniority.

What happens after each command

1. You run a command, and the shell hook fires when it finishes.
2. The hook passes only the first word of the command to the TermWorks binary (e.g. docker becomes the category docker). Classification is local.
3. The binary checks your preferences, timing rules (at most once per session, configurable), and the active campaign pool.
4. If there's a relevant, allowed opportunity, it prints a single tasteful line between commands. Otherwise it does nothing.

How targeting works

Advertisers target by the signals that actually predict relevance:

• Categories — language, framework, cloud, toolchain (e.g. backend, infra, ai-ml, web3)
• Seniority — junior through staff and principal
• Open to work — developers who've opted into role opportunities
• OS — macOS, Linux, Windows

Because targeting keys off coarse, locally-derived categories, advertisers reach the right developers without anyone exposing raw command data.

How the money flows

1. An advertiser funds a campaign targeting a developer audience.
2. Each time an opportunity is shown, the impression is validated — bot/fraud filtered and capped per install per day — and the advertiser pays for each validated impression at their bid CPM.
3. 50% of that revenue goes to the developer whose terminal showed it; 50% is TermWorks' platform revenue.
4. Developers cash out monthly via Stripe Connect, with no minimum.

Privacy by design

The system never needs your raw commands to work — only the category. Your commands, arguments, file paths, environment variables, secrets, and output never leave your machine. (Details in the security FAQ.)

You stay in control

Opportunity frequency is configurable, you can pause anytime with termworks disable, and remove it entirely with termworks uninstall.

Get started

curl -fsSL https://term.works/install.sh | bash
termworks login

Then keep doing what you're doing — relevant opportunities will find you.