The screenshots on X say $30k a month. For most people starting out, the real number is closer to a coffee budget.
Both numbers exist. The $30k belongs to a few people at the top, and the coffee budget belongs to almost everyone in their first months.
I ran AI personas myself before I started teaching this, so I’ll walk you through how the money adds up at each stage.
People do pay for AI personas
Start with the market. Fanvue announced in July 2026 that it hit a $200 million annual run rate in May, double what it had at the end of 2025.
In that same announcement, AI creators made up around 15% of the platform’s revenue. So there is real money being spent on AI personas.
It isn’t spread evenly, though. In my experience, most of it ends up with a small group of creators at the top.
Stage 1: learning, and earning little
Most people are here, and you rarely see screenshots from this stage.
You have a persona and a handful of subscribers. Your posting is irregular, you’re still guessing what your audience wants, and the only thing you sell is the subscription.
Here is an example: say you have 30 subscribers at $10 a month. That is $300 before the platform fee.
For the first months, that’s a normal result. Almost everyone starts around there.
Stage 2: a real side income
The jump usually comes when you post on a steady schedule and start selling pay-per-view sets on top of the subscription.
Let’s do the math with made-up but realistic numbers.
300 subscribers at $10 is $3,000 a month. If one in five of them buys a $15 PPV set each month, that adds about $900.
So you are near $4,000 a month, before fees, and you haven’t even offered customs yet.
Nothing fancy got you there. You posted on schedule and gave fans a second thing to buy.
Stage 3: the top
The creators at the top have many more paying fans, and they stack customs, sexting and tips on top of subs and PPV.
That’s where five figures a month comes from. Getting there usually means a posting schedule, a sales routine in the DMs, and often someone helping.
What moves people up
I wish I could point to a secret, but I can’t. A single viral post rarely changes much either.
What I noticed back when I operated personas, and still notice in my students, is that the higher earners sell several things. Subscription, PPV, customs, sexting and tips each add a piece.
Someone with only a subscription is capped by their sub count. Someone selling four or five things earns more from the same fans.
Setting your expectations
Plan on little money while you learn. With steady posting and PPV added, a few thousand a month is a fair target.
Five figures takes a lot of paying fans plus every income stream doing its part.
Earn Money with NSFW AI is my course, and it goes through the setup for each stage in order.
If you’d rather start with the free material, I wrote about how the top NSFW AI influencers make money and about whether you can sell NSFW AI images.