If you are vibe coding all day with tools like Claude Code or Cursor, you are probably already using Kickbacks.ai to monetize those inevitable "thinking..." wait states. But having to open a browser tab just to check your active status or accumulated revenue is an annoying break in your workflow. Kickbacks CLI solves this beautifully by bringing your metrics exactly where engineers actually live: the terminal and the macOS menu bar.
It is fantastic because the design is incredibly low-friction and lightweight. The compact, two-line terminal view gives you an instant snapshot of your live earnings, current connection status, and recent ad history without hogging screen space. The menu bar extension runs completely in the background, updating seamlessly. It transforms a clever monetization experiment into an ambient, native part of your local developer setup.
I got tired of having to open/look at Visual Code to see how much I was earning on @Kickbacks.ai so I built a CLI and Mac Menu bar tool to easily see how much I was making, the ads I saw, and which days, weeks, and months I earned the most.
Feel free to leave feedback and hope folks enjoy :)
Love that the menu bar app stays in sync with the CLI without a clunky refresh button, and the fact that I can pipe live earnings into other tools without copy-pasting from a dashboard. The little touches like a compact earnings view that fits in two lines of terminal real estate is a nice nod to people who actually live in their shell.
The compact two-line earnings view that lives in the terminal is a genuinely nice touch — one less dashboard tab to babysit. On the plumbing: does the CLI keep your Kickbacks token in the macOS Keychain or a plaintext dotfile, and does the menu bar app poll the API on an interval or hold a live connection for the real-time earnings?
Does the menu bar version update in real time when new earnings come in, or do I have to manually refresh? Curious how chatty it would be running all day in the background.
Does this pull data directly from the Kickbacks API or do I need to authenticate each time I open it, and is the menu bar version a separate download?
how does the menu bar piece stay updated without me needing to refresh anything, and does it use a lot of battery on macOS?
How does the live earnings actually update, is it pulling from an API on a timer or streaming something real time? Also wondering what happens if you're offline for a while.