Made S$1,900 over 5 months doing AI content on the side, honest numbers
S$18 an hour. That's what five months of AI content work on the side actually pays once you divide it out honestly.
28M, normal office job, about S$4.2k take home. A friend runs a chicken rice stall in a coffee shop near Toa Payoh and his Instagram was basically dead. I'd been experimenting with AI image generation in my free time, so I offered to create social content for him using a consistent AI character as a sort of brand mascot since he didn't want to be on camera himself.
The total across five months is S$1,900, and here is the actual split. My friend's stall: first month I did free because I was still figuring things out and felt weird charging for half baked work. After that we agreed on S$300 a month, so four months at S$300 is S$1,200. Then separately, one of his suppliers runs a small agency and needed a batch of lifestyle images for a bubble tea brand's Instagram stories. One time project, S$700. So that's S$1,200 plus S$700, S$1,900.
I logged hours loosely and the total comes to roughly 105 hours across the five months. S$1,900 divided by 105 is about S$18 an hour. Private tuition pays S$30 to S$50 easily. Even GrabFood can clear about S$18 with way less mental overhead. So the hourly rate is nothing to shout about.
The biggest reason the rate is so mediocre is the reject pile. Roughly one out of every three images I generated had to be thrown away. Lighting would be off, fingers would look wrong, or the character's face would drift slightly from the reference even with consistency settings on. My workflow was Notion to track deliverables, APOB AI for the character because once you nail down a face it stays put from image to image (they offer free credits each day, which covered all my early experimenting), and Canva for the text overlays and final sizing. The face consistency was the whole selling point since every post features the same “person,” but getting there meant generating three images to keep two. That rework is where all the hours went.
To be straight about it, the character across all these posts was created with AI, not a photograph of a real human. My friend knew from day one and was completely fine with it. The bubble tea agency knew too. If you ever do this kind of work, it's important to be honest about that.
I also tried making short video clips twice and gave up. The character's face drifts across frames, expressions floating in a way that looks off if you watch closely. Still images are where the consistency actually holds up. Video right now, at least in my experience, means a lot of unusable takes and I wouldn't promise it to a client.
On the practical side, S$1,900 across five months is way under the personal income tax threshold so no IRAS issues. No CPF obligation since this is casual freelance, not formal self employment. I kept simple records anyway just in case.
This is beer money, not career money. It covers maybe a few nice meals or a month of transport. It's definitely not replacing a salary and I wouldn't tell anyone to quit their job for this. The workflow is faster now that I have the character set up and know what prompts work, so the ongoing hours per month are lower. But the dollars per hour are still mediocre compared to almost any other side hustle in Singapore.
The main value honestly was learning the tools and understanding what content gets traction. Whether S$1,900 was worth 105 hours versus just doing tuition, probably not on pure dollars. But I picked up a useful skill, helped a friend whose weekend crowd has picked up a bit, and I have a reusable setup if another gig comes along. Not life changing money, but I learned something and I'm not mad about it.