Darkbloom Admits Renting Your Mac to AI Pays Far Less Than Promised

Darkbloom, the network that pays Mac owners to lend their GPU to AI models, is telling participants that earnings have been weak and are not expected to improve soon. The warning comes from Kydo, a researcher at Eigen Labs, in a message sent to users this week.

Launched in April, Darkbloom lets owners of Apple Silicon Macs run AI inference. Requests arrive through OpenRouter, a gateway that routes developers' queries to various model providers, and the Mac owner keeps all the revenue the computing generates. In August, Eigen Labs put average income at $120 to $200 a month, a figure French testers had already questioned.

Tiny payouts for most

The network has about 800 participants, who earn anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars a day. The median of the top 50 reaches $5.26 a day, close to $160 a month. Eigen Labs puts the ceiling at $192 a month for a Mac mini M5 Pro with 64 GB, and only if it runs around the clock on a highly requested model.

Kydo says token prices have dropped 54% since May and points to cheaper data-centre operation: output per Nvidia cluster has risen roughly 20-fold this year, leaving margins wide enough to cut prices by 90% and still stay profitable. Darkbloom had promised AI at half the price of major providers, but « the market has caught up with our price », he writes. Cutting prices further is possible, he concedes, yet most participants would then earn even less.

OpenRouter also reportedly gives more weight to response speed and model compression than to price when distributing requests. For Macs without a Max or Ultra chip, Kydo warns that inference « won't be worth running ».

What comes next

Electricity is not the main issue. Darkbloom itself estimates the cost at 1 to 3 cents an hour for an Apple Silicon Mac, while a Mac mini M5 Pro at full load could earn at best 27 cents an hour. Most machines on the network are far from that regime, either because owners do not leave them running or because requests are scarce.

Eigen Labs is looking for other outlets: steering participants toward the most requested models, or running developers' tests and builds. It is also betting on clusters of Mac Studio units linked over Thunderbolt, each with up to 512 GB of memory. « The next step will be a fight, and I expect a lot of machines to leave and the Slack to get quieter », Kydo writes.

For anyone considering buying a Mac to earn from AI, the message is clear: current returns do not support it.