THE CRUNCH
Darkbloom, a distributed inference network from Seattle-based Eigen Labs that lets people rent out their Mac GPUs to handle AI prompts, has told participants to expect low earnings for the foreseeable future. Around 800 people currently earn a few cents to a few dollars a day by processing model prompts routed through the AI gateway OpenRouter. In a message to the network's Slack, Eigen Labs researcher Kydo was blunt: "Earnings have been low. For most providers, I don't expect that it is going to recover soon."
The economics are shifting fast. Darkbloom's own best-case estimate says someone running an M5 Pro Mac mini with 64 GB of RAM, fully dedicated around the clock to a sought-after model, could earn about $192 a month. The median among the top 50 on its leaderboard is roughly $5.26 a day, or $159.86 a month. But token prices, the unit of AI work, have slid sharply: Anthropic's price per million tokens fell from $2.65 in May 2026 to $0.62 in October, a 77 percent drop, and Ramp's AI Token Price Index shows similar slippage. If that decline were applied to the median leaderboard earnings, they would work out to about $1.23 a day.
Kydo attributed the squeeze to cheaper data centre compute, saying output per NVIDIA cluster is up roughly 20x this year with margins wide enough to cut prices 90 percent and still profit. "The market caught up to our price," he said, adding that going lower would leave most participants earning "even less nothing." OpenRouter is also moving away from price-based routing towards decode speed, quantization and prefill speed, which disadvantages people without top-of-the-line Max or Ultra Apple Silicon; for them, Kydo said inference "won't be worth running."
Darkbloom plans to adapt by steering participants towards in-demand models, chasing other workloads such as distributed CI/CD jobs, improving time to first token and finding buyers beyond OpenRouter. For Mac hardware, the focus is shifting to clusters of high-end Mac Studios connected over Thunderbolt using Apple's RDMA. "The next stretch will be a fight, and I expect many machines will leave and Slack will get quieter," Kydo concluded, while insisting the company is well capitalised and will not give up.