Pay it forward while your AI thinks.
A sponsored line shows in your assistant's status line while it works. Advertisers pay. You keep 50%, 20% goes to charity, and you can donate your share too — giving without spending a penny.
🔒 Zero effort. We never read your code, prompts, or output.
We start raising for charity the day we launch. Get in early, bring friends, climb the list. — developers already waiting.
No spam. We email you once when it's your turn. Privacy-first, always.
You're # of . Refer other devs to climb the list — and toward Founding Hero:
Every signup from your link bumps you up — and 20% of all revenue goes to charity, automatically.
You already wait while your agent runs. Now that wait earns you a little — and gives a little.
One command hooks a sponsored line into your AI assistant's status line. Open source. Uninstall restores your settings exactly.
While the model is working, a brief sponsored line appears. Nothing to click or refresh — you do nothing differently.
Your wait-time earns a share of real ad revenue, and 20% always goes to charity. Withdraw on demand at $10, or donate your share.
Every dollar an advertiser pays is divided the same way — and 20% always goes to charity, automatically.
Shared between users by usage. Withdraw on demand once you hit $10 — or donate it (below).
Mandatory. Every user gives automatically, to causes the community votes on. Feel good without spending a penny.
Hosting, payments, and the time to keep the tool working and paying. That's it.
It's beer money, not income — anyone promising $100s/month from a status line isn't being straight.
Every bucket is a fixed share of revenue we've actually collected — so the pools can't be smaller than what's owed, and we never need to "throttle" earnings near payout.
Your balance is an append-only, auditable ledger, and the charity total is public (below). During a period your figure is an estimate; it finalises at close.
Works with Claude Code today (CLI + VS Code / Cursor / Windsurf). Web ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini coming via the browser extension.
$ npx idlewell install
Uninstall any time with npx idlewell uninstall (restores your previous settings exactly) · check earnings with npx idlewell status.
We could have built just another tool that quietly pays you pennies. Instead we asked a better question: what if the millions of hours developers spend waiting on their AI could add up to something genuinely good?
You're going to wait while your agent thinks anyway. Idlewell turns that idle time into real money — and routes 20% of every penny to charity, automatically. No extra effort, nothing out of your own pocket. Every developer who installs it is doing good simply by doing their job.
This space has a reputation for over-promising and not paying. We're built to be the opposite: pool-share so we can never owe more than we collected, on-demand payouts, a public ledger, and a live charity counter anyone can check. Under-promise, actually pay, quietly fund real causes.
Beer money for you, a brag-worthy Heroes wall if you give your share, and — at scale — serious money for good causes. That's the whole idea: make it possible to do good from everyone's coding.
20% of all revenue, plus every share our Heroes choose to donate. Causes are chosen by community vote, disbursed transparently.
and counting · updates live
Giving without spending a penny. Real people only — opt in to appear here.
| # | Developer | Donated |
|---|
Opt in and your handle can appear here — we will never seed this with invented names.
| # | Developer | Earned |
|---|
Fair question — the category has a bad name. Here's exactly why we're built differently.
Two reasons. First, structure: it's pool-share — you get a fixed % of revenue we already collected, so we can never owe more than we hold and never need to throttle. Second, proof: our payout ledger stats and charity total are public, and we publish real receipts.
Because we'd rather build something good than something greedy. Every user gives a little, automatically — so even if you never lift a finger you're funding real causes. We publish the running total and the receipts, and the community votes on which charities get the money.
Turn it on and your entire 50% goes to charity instead of your balance — giving without spending a penny of your own money. Opt in to the Heroes wall and your handle shows how much you've paid forward over time. Switch it off any time.
Whenever you like — it's on demand. The moment your confirmed balance hits $10, withdraw and it goes to your Stripe account. (A status line earns slowly, so reaching $10 takes a while — we say so up front.) A short cooldown between withdrawals keeps transfer fees from eating your balance.
No. We store only a salted, one-way hash of your IP, a per-install ID, and (if you sign in) an account ID. Never your code, prompts, files, or the AI's responses. The client is open source — check for yourself.
No — and that's deliberate. We pay for attention, not concurrency: overlapping wait-states across your machines collapse to one, with per-user caps. Six terminals ≈ one. It keeps the pool fair for everyone.
Reach AI-forward developers inside their workflow — the people who pick the tools their teams buy. Targetable by language & tool. Sponsor the wait-line + our weekly dev newsletter, and 20% of your spend funds charity too.
Prefer email? hello@idlewell.dev
