moula · FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Straight answers on how moula pays you, what it measures, and the controls you always keep. These are our principles — the parts of an editor-integrated ad product that other tools got wrong, written down so you can hold us to them.

What is moula?

moula is an ad marketplace for developer-tool status bars. Advertisers pay to show a short, text-only sponsored line while your agent works; developers running the client — the VS Code extension or the Claude Code status line — earn a share of the revenue every time a line is actually displayed to them. That is the whole product: one line of text, and a link you choose to open or not.

How do earnings work?

You earn 50 % of the gross on every attested impression and every validated click — the gross, not some “net after deductions”. Other editor-integrated ad tools paid developers almost nothing by taking a share of an undefined “net” and rounding every tiny impression down to zero cents. We do the opposite: we count in whole micro-euros (one millionth of a euro) so nothing disappears in the rounding.

The exact arithmetic, at the market rate — a €10.00 CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions):

• One impression bills the advertiser €10.00 ÷ 1,000 = 10,000 micro-euros (€0.01).
• Your 50 % share = 5,000 micro-euros (€0.0050) per attested impression.
• A validated click is worth 20× an impression: it bills €0.20, and your 50 % share = €0.10 per click.

Every impression and every click is recorded as its own row with the CPM at serve time, the gross amount and your share — all in exact whole numbers. You can open that per-impression ledger in your dashboard and export it as CSV, so your earnings are something you can reconcile line by line rather than a single figure we ask you to take on trust.

An impression only counts after 10 seconds of real display, window in the foreground, cross-checked against the server clock. A line served but never shown earns you nothing — and costs the advertiser nothing either.

What data does the client send?

The bare minimum. To fetch an ad, the client sends your account key (which identifies the account, nothing more) and a random event identifier used to de-duplicate retries. When you open a sponsored link, the click carries that identifier so it can be credited to you. That is the complete picture.

It never sends your source code, your prompts, your keystrokes, your file paths, your open files, your workspace or project names, or the list of your other extensions. moula has no way to read any of that, because it never asks the editor for it.

The field-by-field detail is published in our privacy policy. If we ever add a field, it appears there before it ships.

Does moula modify my editor or my other extensions?

No. moula renders its line entirely through public, documented APIs. It modifies no file on disk, does not touch your editor’s Content-Security-Policy, neither reads nor modifies your other extensions, and never updates itself. An ad tool that patched its host’s files to keep showing ads is exactly the failure mode moula is built to make impossible.

The concrete guarantee: uninstall moula and your editor is exactly as it was before you installed it. Nothing to clean up, nothing left changed.

How do I pause or stop?

Whenever you like, however you like. You can switch delivery off with one command (npx moula-cli pause), regenerate or delete your key, or simply uninstall. Each of those is a supported, first-class control — pausing moula only pauses your earnings; it is never a breach of our terms.

This is deliberate. We will never add an anti-circumvention clause treating blocking, pausing or removing ads as a breach. Your editor is yours.

What is the payout threshold, and how do I get paid?

Through Stripe Connect, from €5.00 of balance. You create your payout account with them: identity, bank details and tax information never pass through our servers. No fee and no holding period — you request the transfer and it goes.

If you uninstall, your balance stays withdrawable. Impression records are your earnings ledger: they are kept as long as they justify a payment, then detached from your identity when the account is closed.

What kind of ads will I see?

Text only. A sponsored line is at most 60 characters of plain text plus a single https:// click URL — no images, no scripts, no tracking pixels, nothing that runs by itself. Every ad goes through an automatic filter then a human review before it first runs.

You can exclude entire categories from your preferences, and report any ad you dislike. Three reports trigger a re-review, eight suspend delivery.