How to get your project's AI costs covered in about two minutes

You maintain something people use, and it costs you money to run — an AI coding agent, an inference bill, a demo that isn't free to keep online. Here's how to let the people who benefit help cover it, in about the time it takes to read this.

1. Get your link

Sign in with GitHub. That's the whole account step — your identity is your GitHub login, so there's no new password, and only the account that controls your repos can claim your page. You get a tip page at tokentip.to/@yourhandle, a badge, and a QR code, all pointing to the same place.

2. Put it everywhere your work already lives

This is the part people underuse. Your work reaches further than your README, so the link should too:

• README — the classic; paste the badge near the top.
• Blog & docs — a line at the end of anything you publish.
• A QR code — on a conference slide, a sticker, a talk's last frame.
• Social — X, LinkedIn, Reddit, wherever you announce releases.
• Slack & Discord — pinned in the community that already relies on you.

One link, every audience. Every place your work shows up becomes a place it can be funded.

3. Know exactly what a tip becomes

When someone tips, the math is shown on the page before they pay — no hidden cut. Card processing and a small platform fee come off the top, and the rest is loaded as credit. At typical amounts, roughly 87% of a tip reaches you. A $25 tip, for example, arrives as about $21.48 of inference credit. Every line is on the receipt.

4. Spend it on any model

What you receive isn't cash — it's a spend-limited, revocable API key, usable on any model through OpenRouter. Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, whatever your project runs on. It's metered compute, delivered: not withdrawable, not a deposit, just the exact resource the work needed. Point your coding agent or your app's AI feature at it and keep building.

That's the whole loop. Your readers can't always fix the bug — but they can cover the compute that will, and now they can do it from anywhere they find you.