Your menu bar buys the coffee.

Every minute-long placement is auctioned; the winning bid is recorded. You receive 65% of auction revenue, always on. Example from our published model: 1,000 impressions at a $6 CPM = $6.00 total → your base share is $3.90 → bounded bonuses can add at most $0.55 → the platform keeps at least ~$1.55. Every ledger row shows the winning bid and your exact cut, so you can redo this math yourself on your own data.

Full payout model →

A minute-long placement counts when three things are true: your Mac is awake and unlocked, there was recent activity this minute (a coarse yes/no signal — FreeCoffee never learns what you did), and the menu bar was actually visible — not hidden behind a full-screen app that suppresses it. Only verified impressions are billable, and only verified impressions count toward the click caps.

A click pays $0.05 when it's verified: at least 10 seconds after the impression, with at least 2 seconds of dwell. Two caps protect advertisers (and you, from bot-accusations): a maximum of 5 verified clicks per day, and verified clicks can never exceed 25% of your verified monthly impressions. Both caps are enforced before anything is credited.

You earn 10% of your referee's base earnings for 12 months — double the referral rate claim in the comparison above. It's gated on real activity: your referee needs at least 60 verified minutes in their first 30 days before the referral starts paying. No gate-passing, no payout — which keeps the program worth funding.

Any time your available balance is at least $2. The standard rail settles within 24 hours; there's an instant stablecoin option — both with no fees (rails subject to provider availability). Payout timing is the most-cited complaint in this product category, so it's a design constraint here, not a feature request.

Every balance in FreeCoffee is also shown as a coffee count: 1 cup = $5.00, floored — so $28.55 reads "≈ 5 cups". The menu bar literally buys the coffee. It's a format, not a currency: payouts still settle in dollars.

Four things, and that's the complete list: awake/unlocked status, coarse recent-activity (a yes/no signal per minute), placement visibility (is the chip actually rendered and visible — notch and safe-area aware), and verified ad clicks. Never captured: screen contents, files & browser history, keystrokes & screenshots, window titles. No Screen Recording, Accessibility, or Input Monitoring permission — ever. The Mac app is one readable Swift file with a comment block at the top stating exactly this boundary.

It doesn't count, and you're not charged (advertisers) or credited (earners) for it. When the system is unsure whether the placement was visible for the full minute, the minute is not billed — that's the rule, stated before you install, not discovered after payout. Snooze the bar before a meeting (30 min / 2 h, with a countdown) and it resumes on its own.

Honestly: the demo ledger is simulated until paying campaigns clear review — nothing here pretends otherwise. What day zero buys you is position: the payout rules ($2 minimum, 24-hour rail, 65% base + written 70% ratchet) are locked before the auction fills, referrals accrue from your first invite, and the first advertisers bid against an empty room — which is exactly why the launch offer exists.

Country targeting ships with the platform backend; today the self-serve feed is worldwide with tiered CPM floors (T1 $4.00 · T2 $2.50 · T3 $1.25) doing the geographic work. Maximum bids are the auction itself: the highest CPM wins each minute, and minutes below your floor simply don't serve your creative. See For advertisers.