"Ad-supported" has earned its reputation. It usually means the product is worse on purpose, and that the thing being sold is you.

We think an ad-supported editor is defensible, but only if it commits to a few things and then actually enforces them. Here is what ADCode commits to.

1. Ads stay in the corner, and stay out of the way

A sponsored card appears in the corner of the window while you work. It never takes focus, never covers the editor, and never blocks a keystroke — you can ignore it completely and it will leave on its own.

It does not appear during a debug session, when the window is not focused, in the first minute after launch, or twice in a row without a gap.

That focus rule matters more than it sounds: an ad shown to an unfocused window is one nobody saw, so paying for it would be fraud against the advertiser and showing it would be noise for you. It is simply not served.

An earlier version of this page said cards also wait for you to stop typing. They do not, and they never did — the scheduler has no typing rule in it. We have corrected the claim rather than quietly leave it standing: a card that only ever arrived once you had stopped working would be a card shown to somebody who had already left, and that is not a promise worth keeping even if we had built it. These rules are the ones actually evaluated, in a fixed order, in the editor's scheduler.

2. Your code stays on your machine

Targeting uses a closed list of 45 generic tags — the language and framework currently open. lang:rust. fw:react. tool:docker. That is the entire vocabulary, and it cannot be extended by a server response.

File contents, file paths, and project names never leave the machine. Not hashed, not truncated, not "anonymised". They are never sent.

3. You get a real share, stated plainly

Advertisers compete in a second-price auction starting at $1.00 per 500 impressions. You get 50% of the winning ad's clearing price, credited to your ledger when the receipt is verified.

At the default cadence of six cards an hour, that is about $0.024 for an hour of active editing.

We would rather print that number than let you discover it. ADCode is a way to use a capable editor for free with some money coming back. It is not a way to earn a living, and any product in this category telling you otherwise is doing arithmetic it hopes you will not repeat.

4. You can turn it down, or off

Cadence is a setting: off, light, standard, or max. Off means no ads and no earnings, and the editor is otherwise identical — no nag screens, no reduced features, no countdown to a paywall.

The server can make the limits *stricter* than your setting. It can never make them looser. A compromised or misconfigured server cannot be used to flood you with ads, because the client refuses any configuration more permissive than the one it shipped with.