Launching today
uwait
Get paid while AI thinks
76 followers
Get paid while AI thinks
76 followers
Every time you use ChatGPT or Claude, you wait. Usually 3 to 8 seconds. That's it. That's the idea. uwait is a Chrome extension that shows a curated ad during that loading screen. You get a small cut. The publishers whose content trained the AI get a cut too. The advertiser gets your attention at a moment when you're actually paying attention. The split: 50% to users, 30% to publishers, 20% to us. We're picky about advertisers. Just brands that make sense in that context.
Buska
Hey Product Hunt, Tristan here.
I built uwait because I got tired of staring at a loading screen every time I asked ChatGPT something.
That's it. That's the whole origin story.
Three seconds. Five seconds. Sometimes more. Multiplied by every query I do in a day, every day. At some point I thought, that's a lot of attention going nowhere. And attention is worth something.
So I built a Chrome extension that shows a small ad during that wait. You earn from it. Publishers whose content trained the AI you're using earn from it too. We take 20%.
No account to create. No surveys. No referral schemes. You install it, use AI like you normally would, and money accumulates in the background.
I've been running it myself for a few weeks now. It's not life-changing money. But it's real money, for time you were already spending doing nothing.
The extension is live at uwait.co. There are already a few advertisers running so you'll actually see ads from day one.
Curious what you think. Happy to answer anything below.
This is one of the more unusual ideas I’ve seen here. I like the observation that AI waiting time is basically unused attention. Everyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude a lot knows those few seconds add up, especially during a busy day. The revenue split is also interesting, especially the publisher part. I’m curious how you decide which publishers should get paid from a given interaction, since AI training data and attribution can get very messy very quickly.
My main question is about the user experience: how do you make sure the ads stay lightweight enough that they don’t make AI tools feel more distracting or noisy over time?
Buska
@andrasczeizel Great question on attribution. The approach is straightforward: every source the AI cites in its response gets a share of the revenue from that interaction. More details on how it's calculated are on the site if you want to dig in. On the ad weight question, I hear you. The constraint I've set is that ads only show during the loading phase, which is already dead time. The goal is never to add noise on top of an answer, only to fill the void before one appears.
Love the concept. It's one of the most creative AI monetization ideas I've seen recently.
My main question is around advertiser economics rather than user earnings.
If I understand correctly, advertisers are bidding primarily for access to a high-value audience (developers, researchers, knowledge workers, etc.) rather than prompt-level targeting.
In that case, what kind of CPMs do you expect to sustain long-term, and what evidence suggests advertisers will consistently pay enough to make the economics work for all three parties (users, sources, and uwait)?
The idea is compelling, but it seems like the entire model depends on advertisers seeing strong enough ROI from these "AI wait-time" impressions compared to traditional channels like Google, Reddit, LinkedIn, or developer-focused sponsorships.
Curious how you're thinking about that side of the marketplace.
Buska
@webrizen On targeting: right now the value proposition to advertisers is the audience segment itself. "AI power user" is already a fairly premium profile, and that alone justifies decent bids without needing prompt-level data. We also let users optionally share a bit about themselves to help refine targeting over time, so the signal improves as the network grows, without ever touching what they actually type.
On earnings per user: honest answer is it's day one, so I don't have stable data yet. But I can tell you we crossed 100 users in the first 4 hours and there are already a few euros sitting in pending earnings. Too early to extrapolate, but the early signal is that even at small scale, something is accumulating. The threshold question you're raising (does it change behavior?) is one I'm actively watching. If it doesn't feel meaningful to users, the model doesn't work long-term. I'll share proper numbers once I have a few weeks of data
monetizing the loading screen is one of those ideas where you hear it and think "why didn't anyone do this already." the 50/30/20 split with publishers getting a cut is a smart way to address the "AI trained on our content" argument too. curious how you keep the ad quality high at scale though because the moment it starts feeling spammy the whole value prop falls apart
Buska
@tina_chhabra Exactly the right concern to raise. Right now I manually review and approve every single ad before it goes live. No advertiser can run without my validation. They also get a dashboard with basic performance data, which keeps them invested in relevance over volume. It won't scale that way forever, but quality control before growth feels like the right order of operations here.
Buska
@kamedan_ Fair pushback. The bet is that you're already staring at a blank screen for 3 to 8 seconds doing nothing. The ad doesn't replace anything, it fills time that would otherwise be wasted. Whether that feels like a distraction or not probably depends on the person, which is why I'm watching retention and usage data closely. Youu should check annd try it ahah
@tberguer loved the idea. just a question like how is it surfaced to users? Is it a full-screen ad or something more lightweight? When the AI is thinking, I usually spend that time reviewing my prompt or previous responses, so I'm curious how you make it non-intrusive and also do you give payment like in some kind of token or you have your own money system which use can later cash-out ?
Buska
@anusuya_bhuyan Ha, appreciate that. The timing felt right, might as well put those seconds to work.