Kickbacks

See your Kickbacks.ai earnings without opening VS Code.

A tiny, read-only macOS menu-bar app (plus a CLI) that keeps today's total a glance away, remembers the history the API forgets, and gives you a heads-up if the ads quietly stop paying.

Not affiliated with Kickbacks.ai or ShiftKeys, Inc. Kickbacks reads only your own account (GET /v1/portfolio, GET /v1/earnings) and never sends a billing or impression event. Read-only, full stop.

Why this exists

Kickbacks.ai pays you for ads shown while you code — but the dashboard lives inside VS Code, and the API keeps no history. So the simple questions are oddly hard to answer: how much did I make this week? Is earning still working, or did it quietly break an hour ago?

Kickbacks answers those from your menu bar, in any app, even with VS Code closed.

What you get

• Today, always in your menu bar. Your running total sits up top as K$ 12.34. Click it for the full picture: today vs. lifetime, your hourly/daily caps, the ads you've been served, and a clean history.
• A proper CLI. kickbacks for a quick read, kickbacks watch for a live dashboard right in the terminal.
• The history the API throws away. It quietly samples into a local SQLite database, so you get this week, this month, your best day, a daily average, and where you're trending.
• A nudge when something's off. A background check pings you when you hit a cap or cross a lifetime milestone — no need to keep the editor open.
• Shareable cards. Turn today, the week, or your all-time total into a polished image worth posting.
• Auto-updates. The menu-bar app checks for new releases in the background and offers to update with one click — runs brew upgrade and relaunches itself.

Built for screenshots and screen-shares

Recording a demo or pairing with someone? Flip on Demo mode for believable-but-fake numbers, or Privacy mode to blur every dollar amount.

Demo mode — believable, fake

Privacy mode — amounts blurred

And when you want to show off a good day, the share card turns any view — today, the week, or your all-time total — into an image:

Today

Lifetime

Install

No code-signing or notarization — nothing to trust but the code you can read right here.

Homebrew (recommended)

Add the tap once (required for third-party taps):

brew tap amitray007/kickbacks https://github.com/amitray007/kickbacks
brew trust amitray007/kickbacks

Menu-bar app — prebuilt, drag-to-Applications, no compiler needed:

brew install --cask kickbacks

CLI + in-app auto-update — prebuilt arm64 binaries:

brew install kickbacks

kickbacks login                      # sign in with Google
kickbacks                            # the dashboard  ·  kickbacks watch  for the live view
kickbacks bar install                # keep the menu-bar app running at login
kickbacks poller install             # background checks + cap / milestone alerts

Updating: brew update && brew upgrade kickbacks (or brew upgrade --cask kickbacks). The menu-bar app also checks for updates in the background and offers a one-click upgrade.

First launch — Gatekeeper prompt? The app is unsigned, so macOS will block it on the first open. Run this once to clear the quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Kickbacks.app

Or right-click the app in Finder → Open → Open.

Direct download

Download Kickbacks.dmg from the latest release, open it, and drag Kickbacks.app to /Applications. Same Gatekeeper note applies — run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Kickbacks.app on first launch, or right-click → Open.

Build from source

Clone the repo and run scripts/install-app.sh — builds a self-contained Kickbacks.app and drops it in /Applications.

The commands

Command	What it does
kickbacks	One-shot earnings dashboard
kickbacks watch	Live dashboard in the terminal (q to quit)
kickbacks earnings	Earnings + cap detail
kickbacks status	Where you're signed in, where data lives
kickbacks login / logout	Google sign-in / sign-out
kickbacks poller install	Background sampler + alerts (launchd)
kickbacks bar install	Menu-bar app at login
kickbacks --version	Print the version

How it works

Two tools, two languages, one shared local store:

• cli/ — TypeScript on Bun. It does all the real work: the API client, its own Google sign-in, the SQLite history, and the background poller.
• app/ — a Swift MenuBarExtra app. It deliberately knows nothing about earnings; it just runs kickbacks model / kickbacks history and draws the result. One source of truth, in TypeScript.

They talk through the local database, never through shared code. The deeper design notes live in docs/.

Configuration

All optional, set via the environment:

Variable	Default	What it's for
KICKBACKS_CONFIG_DIR	~/.config/kickbacks	where your tokens + history live
KICKBACKS_POLL_SECONDS	180	how often the background poller samples
KICKBACKS_ACTIVITY_DIRS	~/.claude/projects	what counts as "actively coding"
KICKBACKS_LIVE_AD_FILE	~/.vibe-ads/cli-ad.json	the extension's local ad cache — read (never written) to show the ad serving right now; falls back to the API ad if absent/stale
KICKBACKS_BASE	the Kickbacks backend	⚠️ your bearer token is sent here — point it only at hosts you trust

Privacy & security

Read-only by design — it never writes anything back. Your tokens stay in ~/.config/kickbacks/auth.json on your own machine, and nothing is sent to any third party. More in SECURITY.md.

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome — CONTRIBUTING.md has the build/test setup and the one rule that matters: it stays read-only.

License

Apache-2.0. A community project — not affiliated with Kickbacks.ai / ShiftKeys, Inc.