Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Zerocost — for startups, advertisers, and the curious.
Getting Started
Zerocost is a monetization platform for apps, startups, and developer products. We let startups embed ads, sell anonymized usage data, and earn passive revenue — without charging their users or spending anything upfront.
Register here, install our SDK with
npx @zerocost/sdk, and paste your API key. You can be earning within the same day.Anyone can join. Any startup, any SaaS, any website, any webapp, any software, any product. Just integrate the SDK to your app and get started.
Zero. No setup fees, no monthly fees, no credit card required. We make money only when you make money — by taking a small percentage of the revenue we generate for you.
About 5 minutes. Install the SDK, add your API key, and choose where you want the ad widget to appear. That's it. Our SDK handles everything else automatically.
Ads & Monetization
We use a simple transparent revenue share. Startups do not pay us anything, they only earn. Startups keep the majority of ad revenue; Zerocost takes a flat cut to cover infrastructure, ad serving, and network operations. Exact percentages are shown on our Pricing page and in your dashboard.
Yes, you have granular control. You can choose your industry in your app profile to ensure ads provided to your users contextually match your domain/industry. Also, you decide exactly where and how ads load within your app's UI — we never place anything without your explicit configuration.
- Video — non-intrusive video placement with autoplay, mute controls, and close button.
- Text — compact text placement for contextual surfaces.
- Image — compact image + headline card with CTA.
- Inline Text — text ad blocks injected natively into your application UI.
Our formats are designed to be non-intrusive by default. Users can close any format. Our goal is ads that feel native, not disruptive.
Yes. Zerocost is not exclusive. You can run us alongside other networks and compare performance, or use us as your primary monetization layer and turn others off.
Data & Privacy
Our SDK strips all personally identifiable information (PII) on the user's device before anything is sent to our servers. Buyers never receive individual user data — only anonymized, aggregated behavioral patterns. We design our data practices with privacy in mind.
With your users' consent, you can opt in to sell anonymized usage patterns — things like session structure, feature interactions, and task flows — to companies training large language models. Think of it as passive income from your existing traffic.
- LLM Training Datasets — anonymized interaction data from your application.
- UX Session Recordings — annotated screen sessions for UX research buyers, with all inputs automatically blurred.
Yes. Our SDK ships with a built-in, explicit consent pop up. Users are clearly asked for consent before any data is collected or sold. Startups can customize the consent experience/UI, and users can opt out at any time through a privacy settings panel.
Payouts & Billing
Startups can withdraw anytime through their payouts page. Check the billing page in your dashboard for more info.
No hidden fees or upfront costs. The revenue share percentage shown in the pricing page is the only fee. What you see is what you get.
For Advertisers & Partners
Register as a partner, upload your creative, set your budget, and launch. Your ad will appear natively across apps related to your industry/niche in our network.
Contextual targeting only — no cookies, no behavioral tracking. You can target by app category and industry/niche.
We manually review all ad creatives before they go live. We don't reject advertisers — we only reject NSFW creatives, misleading claims, or content that violates our brand-safety policy. Approval typically takes under 24 hours.