What your GPU actually earns
How ElephantPool pays hosts: 80% of token revenue, per token served, with a signed receipt for every job — and why we quote euros per serving hour rather than per month.
You are paid per token your machine produces — not per hour of being switched on. Hosts keep 80% of the revenue from every job they serve. There is no bidding, no reserve price, and no minimum uptime.
The arithmetic, in the open
Take a 24 GB card serving Qwen3.8 27B. Say it decodes 186 tokens per second — a real measurement from an RX 7900 XTX, not a brochure number. That is 669,600 tokens an hour. At €0.75 per million output tokens, the job is worth about €0.50, of which you keep about €0.40.
So your dashboard says €0.40/h, and it says it only for models your machine has actually benchmarked. It deliberately does not extrapolate to a monthly figure: that would require promising demand, and we would rather show you a number that stays true.
Continuous batching changes this substantially — a card serving several requests at once produces far more tokens per hour than one serving them in single file — which is why mahout enables it by default.
Why receipts
Every completed job produces a receipt signed with a key generated on your machine, which never
leaves it. The receipt records the model, the exact build, the token counts and the timing. Run
mahout receipts verify and check them yourself — your earnings are verifiable, not
declared by us.
Getting paid
Earnings accumulate per job and are paid out by SEPA transfer from €50. Your dashboard shows the running total, the jobs behind it, and every receipt.
What it costs you
Electricity, and wear. A card drawing 300 W for an hour costs roughly €0.10 at Belgian rates. That is the number to compare any hosting income against — and the reason we pay per token produced rather than per hour idle: an idle hour costs you power and earns nobody anything.