Darkbloom Paid Mac Owners to Run AI Inference. Now Most Earn a Few Cents to a Few Dollars a Day
Eigen Labs' Darkbloom lets Mac owners sell their idle GPU time for AI inference through OpenRouter. As token prices fell, payouts did too, and an Eigen researcher told providers he doesn't expect them to recover soon.
Darkbloom serves prompts that come in through OpenRouter, where it’s listed as a provider for a dozen open models. Your Mac runs the model; Darkbloom pays you per token.
Two months ago the pitch sounded good. In The Register’s August piece, Eigen engineer Gajesh Naik cited “$120-200 per month per machine” on average, with top earners making about $15 to $26 a day. Darkbloom had started in April and had more than 900 registered providers.
Darkbloom’s own best case still says an M5 Pro Mac mini with 64 GB “could earn as much as $192 per month.” That assumes the machine runs around the clock on Qwen3.6 35B A3B at $0.065 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens. The network doesn’t send that much work to most machines.
Kydo’s forecast for the network: “The next stretch will be a fight, and I expect many machines will leave and Slack will get quieter.” If he’s right, the providers who stay will be the ones with Max and Ultra chips and cheap power, and the idea of every idle Mac earning its keep turns into a small pool of big machines.
