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I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their busine

I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?

znpy 7mo ago
Being the middleman is often way more profitable
foota 7mo ago
Capital and availability?
- kennywinker 7mo ago
  I guess if it only works at scale capital is maybe the answer. Like enough cash to buy 5 or 10 or even 100 minis seem doable - but if the idea only works well when you have 10,000 running - that makes some sense.
gleenn 7mo ago
Power and racking are difficult and expensive?
- kennywinker 7mo ago
  How difficult? Is running 1000 minis worth $1,000,000/month of effort? I feel like it is.
  - runako 7mo ago
    There are many people who do not have ready access to a million dollars to purchase said Mac minis, much less the operating capital to rack & operate them. Very smart play to build a platform, get scale, and prove out the software. Then either add a small network fee (this could be on money movement on/off platform), add a higher tier of service for money, and/or just use the proof points to go get access to capital and become an operator in your own pool.
    - nxpnsv 7mo ago
      If those numbers are true, they could tart with one Mac and can double every few months. But, I guess there are also many people who do not have ready access to whatever a Mac mini costs either...
      - runako 7mo ago
        You can run the simulation out, but if the idea works, you can get to scaled revenue much faster than organic growth keeping 100% of the margin. This is essentially the same reason even the best money managers take outside money to start, even if they eventually kick out the investors.
  - ffsm8 7mo ago
    And at that scale (1k) it ain't even that hard, a single room could be enough to hazardly drop them on shelves with a big fan to draw out the heat
chaoz_ 7mo ago
Solid q. I think the part of it is that it’s really easy to attract some “mass” (capital) of users, as there are definitely quite a few of idle Macs in the world. Non-VC play (not required until you can raise on your own terms!) and clear differentiation. If you want to go full-business-evaluation, I would be more worried about someone else implementing same thing with more commission (imo 95% and first to market is good enough).
- jonplackett 7mo ago
  I think the point they’re making though is that the numbers seem too good to be true. ie. Does anyone know the payback time for a B100 used just for inference? I assume it’s more than a couple of months? Or is it just training that costs so much?
- Saline9515 7mo ago
  Eigenlayer (which this is spun off from) is a massively VC-funded crypto company.
thih9 7mo ago
> These are estimates only. We do not guarantee any specific utilization or earnings. Actual earnings depend on network demand, model popularity, your provider reputation score, and how many other providers are serving the same model. Others are reporting low demand, eg.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789171
znnajdla 7mo ago
The numbers are obviously high, because if this takes off then the price for inference will also drop. But I still think it’s a solid economic model that benefits low income countries the most. In Ukraine, for example, I know people who live on $200/month. A couple Mac Minis could feed a family in many places. As a business owner, I can think of multiple reasons why a decentralized network is better for me as a business than relying on a hyperscaler inference provider. 1. No dependency on a BigTech provider who can cut me off or change prices at any time. I’m willing to pay a premium for that. 2. I get a residential IP proxy network built-in. AI scrapers pay big money for that. 3. No censorship. 4. Lower latency if inference nodes are located close to me.
- kennywinker 7mo ago
  How many of those people who could live off $200USD/month can afford or already have a mac mini in the house?
  - znnajdla 7mo ago
    They already have an iPhone. They could save up or borrow for a Mac Mini if they had to. Some of those people I know who live on $200/month have $30k in the bank.
    - lxglv 7mo ago
      then you are talking about low spend, not low income
      - znnajdla 7mo ago
        Not really. There are lots of people who have low income and low spending, but not low savings. Retired pensioners with savings. Young families who inherited from deceased parents/grandparents. Highly paid professionals on sabbatical. I've met people from all of those categories in Ukraine who live on $200/month.
- NiloCK 7mo ago
dnnddidiej 7mo ago
It is too good to be true. When you see it is making more than a claude code subscription for fuck all work per day. Prolly gonna make $50 a year tops.
- CTDOCodebases 7mo ago
  Or like anything else it will be too good to be true at the very beginning but then once people hear about it and it gets popular supply overtakes demand and the mac minis go back to being idle most of the day. When YouTubers start making videos about it you know it's too late.
  - dnnddidiej 7mo ago
    The question is what is the hassle of running it plus wear and tear. Max price will tend to that. It is not like crypto where there is capital investment in a rig that can do nothing else. People are using their existing laptop. So I reckon 20-50 a year max per laptop.
agnosticmantis 7mo ago
"You could see a single robotaxi being worth, or providing, about $30,000 of gross profit per year. ... A Tesla is an appreciating asset..." - Elon Musk during Tesla's Autonomy Day in April 2019.
psychoslave 7mo ago
Because they don’t have that much initial money in their pocket, while the idle computer is already there, and the biggest friction point is convincing people to install some software. Both producing rhetoric and software are several order of magnitude cheaper than to directly own and maintain a large fleet of hardware with high guarantee of getting the electrical stable input in a safe place to store them. Assuming that getting large chunk of initial investment is just a formality is out of touch with 99% of people reality out there, when it’s actually the biggest friction point in any socio-economical endeavour.
eigengajesh 7mo ago
The numbers are optimistically legit -- it's calculated based purely considering we have demand for all machines at all times. We don't have that right now, but fairly optimistic that people will do it. That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this. Electricity is one cost, but it will get paid off from every request it receives. Electricity is only deducted when you run an inference. If you have any questions, DM me @gajesh on Twitter.
- stavros 7mo ago
  You're not taking into account the thermal strain on the machine, though. A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine.
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    > A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine. How much though? Say I have three Mac Minis next to each other, one that is completely idle but on, one that bursts 100% CPU every 10 minutes and one that uses 100% CPU all the time, what's the difference on how long the machines survives? Months, years or decades?
  - washadjeffmad 7mo ago
    Not appreciably, and not before a 5-yr AppleCare+ warranty expires. Out of our >3000 currently active Apple Silicon Macs, failures due to non-physical damage are in the single digits per year. Of those, none have been from production systems with 24/7 uptime and continuous high load, which reflects your parenthetical. Perhaps we haven't met the other end of the bathtub curve yet, but we also won't be retaining any of these very far beyond their warranty period, much less the end of their support life.
    - stavros 7mo ago
      I think the point of this is more "use the machine you have at home" than "do a TCO analysis and see if it's profitable", though. People like to keep their machines working for longer, generally.
avidphantasm 7mo ago
If you start buying minis, then you need to house, power, and cool them. So you are building a mini data center. If you are building a small data center, economies of scale will drive you to want to build larger and larger. However, this gets expensive and neighbors tend to not like data centers (for good reason). To me this seems like asymmetric warfare against hyper-scalers.
- xhkkffbf 7mo ago
  Yup. This way, the people pay for the air conditioning themselves and they probably don't even notice the extra cost.
  - edbaskerville 7mo ago
    & if they live in a cool place, they're getting a small space heater as a bonus.
Filligree 7mo ago
Because their numbers don’t work out. When you do the math on token cost versus inference speed, you get something that barely breaks even even with cheap power. Also they’ve already launched a crypto token, which is a terrible sign.
dgacmu 7mo ago
No provider maintains 100% utilization of GPUs at full rate. Demand is bursty - even if this project is successful, you might expect, e.g., things to be busy during the stock market times when Claude is throwing API errors and then severely underutilized during the same times that Anthropic was offering two-for-one off peak use. And then there's a hit for overprovisioning in general. If the network is not overprovisioned somewhat, customers won't be able to get requests handled when they want, and they'll flee. But the more overprovisioned it is, the worse it is for compute seller earnings. I suspect an optimistic view of earnings from a platform like this would be something like 1/8 utilization on a model like Gemma 4. Their calculator estimates my m4 pro mini could earn about $24/month at 3 hours/day on that model. That seems plausible.
- liuliu 7mo ago
  Hold my beer: https://imgur.com/a/sNAoghL https://imgur.com/a/sNAoghL
  - pgporada 7mo ago
    What's your Y axis?
liuliu 7mo ago
Of course these numbers are ridiculous. Mac Mini (let's assume Apple releases M5 Pro) tops Int8 (let's assume it is the same as FP8, which it is not) at ~50 TFLOPs, with Draw Things, we recently developed hybrid NAX + ANE inference, which can get you ~70 TFLOPs. A H200 gives you ~4 PFLOPs, which is ~60x at only ~40x price (assuming you can get a Mac Mini at $1000). (Not to mention, BTW, RTX PRO 6000 is ~7x price for ~40x more FLOPs). Your M4 Mac Mini only has ~20 TFLOPs.
- bentobean 7mo ago
  > Your computer only has ~20 TFLOPs. What a time to be alive.
p1necone 7mo ago
Because the "ship software to people, rent their hardware" model has zero up front investment required, presumably. And they don't have to deal with power, cooling, real estate.

I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?

znpy 7mo ago

Being the middleman is often way more profitable

foota 7mo ago

Capital and availability?

kennywinker 7mo ago
I guess if it only works at scale capital is maybe the answer. Like enough cash to buy 5 or 10 or even 100 minis seem doable - but if the idea only works well when you have 10,000 running - that makes some sense.

gleenn 7mo ago

Power and racking are difficult and expensive?

kennywinker 7mo ago
How difficult? Is running 1000 minis worth $1,000,000/month of effort? I feel like it is.
- runako 7mo ago
  There are many people who do not have ready access to a million dollars to purchase said Mac minis, much less the operating capital to rack & operate them. Very smart play to build a platform, get scale, and prove out the software. Then either add a small network fee (this could be on money movement on/off platform), add a higher tier of service for money, and/or just use the proof points to go get access to capital and become an operator in your own pool.
  - nxpnsv 7mo ago
    If those numbers are true, they could tart with one Mac and can double every few months. But, I guess there are also many people who do not have ready access to whatever a Mac mini costs either...
    - runako 7mo ago
      You can run the simulation out, but if the idea works, you can get to scaled revenue much faster than organic growth keeping 100% of the margin. This is essentially the same reason even the best money managers take outside money to start, even if they eventually kick out the investors.
- ffsm8 7mo ago
  And at that scale (1k) it ain't even that hard, a single room could be enough to hazardly drop them on shelves with a big fan to draw out the heat

chaoz_ 7mo ago

Solid q. I think the part of it is that it’s really easy to attract some “mass” (capital) of users, as there are definitely quite a few of idle Macs in the world. Non-VC play (not required until you can raise on your own terms!) and clear differentiation. If you want to go full-business-evaluation, I would be more worried about someone else implementing same thing with more commission (imo 95% and first to market is good enough).

jonplackett 7mo ago
I think the point they’re making though is that the numbers seem too good to be true. ie. Does anyone know the payback time for a B100 used just for inference? I assume it’s more than a couple of months? Or is it just training that costs so much?
Saline9515 7mo ago
Eigenlayer (which this is spun off from) is a massively VC-funded crypto company.

thih9 7mo ago

> These are estimates only. We do not guarantee any specific utilization or earnings. Actual earnings depend on network demand, model popularity, your provider reputation score, and how many other providers are serving the same model. Others are reporting low demand, eg.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789171

znnajdla 7mo ago

The numbers are obviously high, because if this takes off then the price for inference will also drop. But I still think it’s a solid economic model that benefits low income countries the most. In Ukraine, for example, I know people who live on $200/month. A couple Mac Minis could feed a family in many places. As a business owner, I can think of multiple reasons why a decentralized network is better for me as a business than relying on a hyperscaler inference provider. 1. No dependency on a BigTech provider who can cut me off or change prices at any time. I’m willing to pay a premium for that. 2. I get a residential IP proxy network built-in. AI scrapers pay big money for that. 3. No censorship. 4. Lower latency if inference nodes are located close to me.

kennywinker 7mo ago
How many of those people who could live off $200USD/month can afford or already have a mac mini in the house?
- znnajdla 7mo ago
  They already have an iPhone. They could save up or borrow for a Mac Mini if they had to. Some of those people I know who live on $200/month have $30k in the bank.
  - lxglv 7mo ago
    then you are talking about low spend, not low income
    - znnajdla 7mo ago
      Not really. There are lots of people who have low income and low spending, but not low savings. Retired pensioners with savings. Young families who inherited from deceased parents/grandparents. Highly paid professionals on sabbatical. I've met people from all of those categories in Ukraine who live on $200/month.
NiloCK 7mo ago

dnnddidiej 7mo ago

It is too good to be true. When you see it is making more than a claude code subscription for fuck all work per day. Prolly gonna make $50 a year tops.

CTDOCodebases 7mo ago
Or like anything else it will be too good to be true at the very beginning but then once people hear about it and it gets popular supply overtakes demand and the mac minis go back to being idle most of the day. When YouTubers start making videos about it you know it's too late.
- dnnddidiej 7mo ago
  The question is what is the hassle of running it plus wear and tear. Max price will tend to that. It is not like crypto where there is capital investment in a rig that can do nothing else. People are using their existing laptop. So I reckon 20-50 a year max per laptop.

agnosticmantis 7mo ago

"You could see a single robotaxi being worth, or providing, about $30,000 of gross profit per year. ... A Tesla is an appreciating asset..." - Elon Musk during Tesla's Autonomy Day in April 2019.

psychoslave 7mo ago

Because they don’t have that much initial money in their pocket, while the idle computer is already there, and the biggest friction point is convincing people to install some software. Both producing rhetoric and software are several order of magnitude cheaper than to directly own and maintain a large fleet of hardware with high guarantee of getting the electrical stable input in a safe place to store them. Assuming that getting large chunk of initial investment is just a formality is out of touch with 99% of people reality out there, when it’s actually the biggest friction point in any socio-economical endeavour.

eigengajesh 7mo ago

The numbers are optimistically legit -- it's calculated based purely considering we have demand for all machines at all times. We don't have that right now, but fairly optimistic that people will do it. That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this. Electricity is one cost, but it will get paid off from every request it receives. Electricity is only deducted when you run an inference. If you have any questions, DM me @gajesh on Twitter.

stavros 7mo ago
You're not taking into account the thermal strain on the machine, though. A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine. How much though? Say I have three Mac Minis next to each other, one that is completely idle but on, one that bursts 100% CPU every 10 minutes and one that uses 100% CPU all the time, what's the difference on how long the machines survives? Months, years or decades?
- washadjeffmad 7mo ago
  Not appreciably, and not before a 5-yr AppleCare+ warranty expires. Out of our >3000 currently active Apple Silicon Macs, failures due to non-physical damage are in the single digits per year. Of those, none have been from production systems with 24/7 uptime and continuous high load, which reflects your parenthetical. Perhaps we haven't met the other end of the bathtub curve yet, but we also won't be retaining any of these very far beyond their warranty period, much less the end of their support life.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    I think the point of this is more "use the machine you have at home" than "do a TCO analysis and see if it's profitable", though. People like to keep their machines working for longer, generally.

avidphantasm 7mo ago

If you start buying minis, then you need to house, power, and cool them. So you are building a mini data center. If you are building a small data center, economies of scale will drive you to want to build larger and larger. However, this gets expensive and neighbors tend to not like data centers (for good reason). To me this seems like asymmetric warfare against hyper-scalers.

xhkkffbf 7mo ago
Yup. This way, the people pay for the air conditioning themselves and they probably don't even notice the extra cost.
- edbaskerville 7mo ago
  & if they live in a cool place, they're getting a small space heater as a bonus.

Filligree 7mo ago

Because their numbers don’t work out. When you do the math on token cost versus inference speed, you get something that barely breaks even even with cheap power. Also they’ve already launched a crypto token, which is a terrible sign.

dgacmu 7mo ago

No provider maintains 100% utilization of GPUs at full rate. Demand is bursty - even if this project is successful, you might expect, e.g., things to be busy during the stock market times when Claude is throwing API errors and then severely underutilized during the same times that Anthropic was offering two-for-one off peak use. And then there's a hit for overprovisioning in general. If the network is not overprovisioned somewhat, customers won't be able to get requests handled when they want, and they'll flee. But the more overprovisioned it is, the worse it is for compute seller earnings. I suspect an optimistic view of earnings from a platform like this would be something like 1/8 utilization on a model like Gemma 4. Their calculator estimates my m4 pro mini could earn about $24/month at 3 hours/day on that model. That seems plausible.

liuliu 7mo ago
Hold my beer: https://imgur.com/a/sNAoghL https://imgur.com/a/sNAoghL
- pgporada 7mo ago
  What's your Y axis?

liuliu 7mo ago

Of course these numbers are ridiculous. Mac Mini (let's assume Apple releases M5 Pro) tops Int8 (let's assume it is the same as FP8, which it is not) at ~50 TFLOPs, with Draw Things, we recently developed hybrid NAX + ANE inference, which can get you ~70 TFLOPs. A H200 gives you ~4 PFLOPs, which is ~60x at only ~40x price (assuming you can get a Mac Mini at $1000). (Not to mention, BTW, RTX PRO 6000 is ~7x price for ~40x more FLOPs). Your M4 Mac Mini only has ~20 TFLOPs.

bentobean 7mo ago
> Your computer only has ~20 TFLOPs. What a time to be alive.

p1necone 7mo ago

Because the "ship software to people, rent their hardware" model has zero up front investment required, presumably. And they don't have to deal with power, cooling, real estate.