Welcome to Sidequest

Last month, Anthropic opened Claude Code to mods. A mod is a small plugin that changes how Claude Code looks and behaves, from the spinner to a new pane next to the conversation. While most early mods were built for productivity, like context trackers, safety checks and replay tools, we saw a different opportunity: a new surface, inside an app many developers keep open all day, that could help fund what they're building.

Sidequest started with a question: what if a tool developers spend hours in could pay that time back with ads? We built a quick prototype, put up a website, and posted about it on X. We figured a few dozen signups would mean people cared. By the next morning more than 1,000 developers had applied for our waitlist, and it keeps growing.

So we built it. Today, we're welcoming the first group into the Sidequest Alpha.

Claude With a Side Hustle

Sidequest is a mod for Claude Code on your Desktop and CLI that pays you to see ads while you work. You install it once and keep working the way you already do. When Claude answers, a short line marked "Sponsored" appears below. Every ad you see earns you money, and doesn't affect Claude's answers or slow down your session.

Funding AI Developers

We started Koah for developers facing an unavoidable reality of building with AI: inference costs. A free user of a traditional app costs almost nothing to serve. A free user of an AI app generates inference costs on every prompt. Koah ads help developers cover that cost from day one.

Now, with Sidequest, we're helping fund developers a step earlier, while they build. Most developers build with AI tools that charge them by the token or cap their usage on a subscription. Sidequest pays them for every ad they see, so they can offset token spend and fund the extra usage they need.

Sidequest runs on the same infrastructure that publishers use to put Koah ads in their apps. For the past few weeks the whole Koah team has run it in our own Claude setups. This let us dogfood the product and identify improvements before we shipped the Alpha.

How Sidequest Ads Are Served

Each ad is one short line of text under Claude's response, with a "Sponsored" label and a link. It never interrupts a response, changes Claude's output, or asks you to do anything.

We only serve ads from brands whose products are relevant to developers who build with Claude Code. Each ad is matched to the context of your session, and we don't use cookies or third-party profiles. Relevance is the standard we hold every ad to.

Reaching Developers Where They Build

Developers are a valuable audience, and a fast-growing one. A recent survey found that 90% of professional developers use AI coding agents at work every week, and nearly half of US developers use Claude Code at work. Worldwide, Claude Code use at work has more than doubled since January.

They're also hard to reach. With Sidequest, brands can reach developers inside a tool they use all day, with relevant offers matched to what they're working on. Software brands already pay to reach this audience. In fact, eight of the top 10 advertisers on ChatGPT sell business software, productivity or developer tools, and for many of them, developers are the customer.

We built the controls below, including daily caps, identity-verified payouts and manual review, to protect advertiser value and ensure brands only pay to reach real developers. Sidequest is launching with branding and sponsorship campaigns, with more optimized ad formats to come.

Why We're Starting With a Cohort

The entire AI market, including developer tools, is moving quickly. We want to get it right for the developers using Sidequest and the advertisers paying for it. So the first rollout has guardrails:

• Invite-only. We're letting in the first group from our waitlist today and will open more spots as we learn.
• A daily cap. You can earn from up to 50 ads a day. That keeps the experience light and limits how much any one account can rack up.
• Verified payouts. Payouts go through Stripe, with identity verification, to US bank accounts.
• A human in the loop. For the first month, we'll review activity by hand before anyone gets paid. Then we'll turn what we learn into automatic checks.

If you joined the waitlist, check your inbox for an invite. If you haven't, request access and we'll bring you in with a future wave.

If you're building an AI product and wondering how it pays for itself, talk to Koah.