Developer terms

Plain terms for answering paid questions. Last updated 26 September 2026.

What this is

You answer single-choice questions in the idle window of your AI coding tool, and you are paid per answer. You take part as an independent contractor. You are not an employee, not a worker, and not an agent of Tickover, and nothing here creates a partnership or a joint venture.

There is no obligation on either side: no minimum number of answers, no schedule, no shift, and no consequence for skipping every question you are ever shown. Skips cost nothing and are not held against you.

What you are paid

  • $0.50 per valid answer to a paid study, or $0.75 if the buyer targeted their audience — always 50% of the study's list price.
  • A buyer running their first study at cost pays less than the list price. Your share does not change: the reduction comes out of ours, which on those studies is nothing.
  • At most 10 paid answers a day. Panel-profile questions are unpaid and capped at 1 a day.
  • Paid per answer, never per second. A longer Claude run earns nothing extra.
  • Payment is by PayPal, in one monthly run, once your available balance reaches $10.00. Below that it stays available and rolls into the next run.
  • Payment fees never come out of your share.
  • If PayPal cannot deliver a payout, the amount returns to your available balance and waits until you save your PayPal email again.

The sponsor and the amount are shown with every paid question, before you answer it.

Taxes

You are responsible for your own taxes on what you earn here. Nothing is withheld or reported on your behalf, and no tax forms are issued.

When earnings can be taken back

An answer is credited as pending, and becomes available when the study settles. Three things can happen in between, and all of them are real:

  • Answering faster than a person could read the question marks that one answer invalid on its own, and its pending amount is reversed at settlement.
  • Some paid questions are attention checks — a decoy with one correct option, never labelled as such. They appear occasionally rather than in every study: roughly one answer in 10 while you are new, one in 30 once you have answered 20, at most once per study, and never in a study a buyer is running at cost. Getting a single one wrong costs you nothing — that answer still counts and is still paid.
  • Getting 2 of them wrong in total, counted across every study you have ever answered rather than within one, is what bites. It invalidates every answer you gave in the study where the last one fell, not only the check itself, and it flags your account. A flagged account keeps answering and keeps earning, but is left out of every payout run until someone reviews it — so what waits is not one answer, it is your whole balance.
  • Closing your account: anything not yet paid out is forfeited, because a closed account is left out of every payout run. Wait for the next run if you are owed money.

An amount already paid out is never clawed back.

Who can take part

You sign in with GitHub. One account per person. Automating answers and running several accounts end the account. Answering without reading is what the attention checks catch, and that flags the account rather than ending it — see above.

A GitHub account younger than 6 months can answer and earn like any other. What it cannot do yet is withdraw: earnings accrue and the first payout waits until the account reaches 6 months.

Ending it

You can uninstall the plugin at any moment; nothing is sent once it is gone. You can close your account from the settings page, which anonymises what we hold — the privacy page says exactly what is removed and what is kept, and closing is permanent: the same GitHub account cannot be used with Tickover again.

We can end an account for the reasons above. If we do it in error, write to hello@tickover.dev and a person will read it.

The boring part

Tickover is a trading name of an independent sole proprietor based in Vietnam. Vietnamese law governs these terms. The service is provided as it is, with no promise that a question will ever be available to you, and liability is limited to money you have earned and not yet been paid. If one clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stand.