BackSpin - Open AI Attention Exchanges
Devs earn during AI waits. Advertisers reach them right then
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BackSpin - Open AI Attention Exchanges - Devs earn during AI waits. Advertisers reach them right then

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Most dev-tool ads are one-sided: the tool shows you ads, you get nothing. BackSpin flips that into a two-sided exchange, developers opt in and earn a share of revenue for the attention they give during AI wait states. It's private by design, never reading your code, prompts, or AI responses, and detecting AI activity from content-free signals only. It works everywhere you do: editors, CLIs, MCP hosts, and the browser. And every integration is opt-in and reversible, uninstalling cleanly.

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Maker
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Hey everyone 👋 I'm Rizaldy, founder of Backspin. Thanks for checking us!. This started from a moment we all know too well: you send a prompt, kick off a build, or hand a task to an agent, and then you just… watch the spinner. Multiply that across a whole day and it's a huge amount of focused downtime that's worth nothing. BackSpin turns that moment into something useful for both sides of a marketplace. For developers: when your AI is working, BackSpin shows one tasteful, relevant discovery during the wait, a tool, MCP server, grant, job, or bounty, and pays you a share of the revenue for the attention. No extra clicks, no context switching, no feed to scroll. The second your AI is done, it steps aside. Two things I care about most: - Privacy is a hard line, not a setting. BackSpin never reads your code, your prompts, or the AI's responses. It figures out that your AI is busy from safe, content-free signals only. - It's opt-in and reversible everywhere. Every integration is off until you turn it on, and it uninstalls cleanly. It works where you already do: VS Code and forks (Cursor, Windsurf, Kiro), CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, and more), MCP hosts, and the browser. For advertisers: this is the flip side. Developer attention is scarce and hard to reach without being annoying. BackSpin places a single, relevant card in the AI wait, a real moment of downtime, so it's discovery, not interruption. Because developers opt in and get paid, the attention is given, not stolen, which makes it better inventory and a fairer deal all around. I'd genuinely love your feedback: - Developers: which tool or editor should we support next? - Advertisers: who are you trying to reach, and what would make this a no-brainer for you? - Everyone: does the "earn during AI waits" idea click, or is anything unclear? I'll be around all day answering questions. Thank you for taking a look 🙏

The two-sided exchange idea is genuinely interesting and I like that it's opt-in and reversible. One thing I'd love to see is a small earnings dashboard, even a simple weekly email summary showing roughly how much attention time translated into revenue share. It would make the value feel tangible and probably encourage more developers to keep the integration enabled instead of forgetting it's running in the background.

Maker

Thanks! Glad you like the opt-in design.  


For the stats, we do have a detailed breakdown of your attention seconds and earnings available right now in the developer dashboard at :)


That said, a weekly email is a great idea to keep the value tangible without you needing to log in and check. We will look into setting up a weekly digest.

Do you prefer email, or would you rather see a quick stats printout directly in your CLI / VS Code / browser extensions?

How do you actually detect AI activity without looking at prompts or responses, and what's stopping a clever extension from faking those signals to grab more revenue?

Maker

 Good question. We never look at prompts or responses at all, we just watch the shape of activity around the wait: things like task start/end, keystroke and focus timing, whether the card was actually visible on screen. That feeds a public scoring formula (open on our open-algorithm GitHub repo) that weighs activity, focus, and trust, then subtracts a fraud risk score.

The scoring math is open. Our fraud detector is not, on purpose, since publishing the exact thresholds would just hand out a cheat sheet. You can find out more in our Github pages .

finally something that pays me back for the seconds I lose to loading spinners. love that it works without peeking at my code

Maker

 Really glad it landed that way, that's exactly the point we built it around. Those wait seconds were just dead time before, so we figured they might as well pay you something instead of nothing.

And yeah, the code/prompt privacy part wasn't a nice-to-have for us, it's a hard line: BackSpin only ever sees timing and focus signals, never the actual content of what you're working on. :)