Rent Out Your GPU: 2026 Idle-Card Scenario Math

Renting out your GPU can offset power and a slice of the card's cost. It is not a salary. On the assumptions below — 600W, ¥0.32/hr power, a 20% fee, a $0.20/hr list price, 1 USD = ¥7.1 — a 4090 nets about ¥588 in a month only at 100% uptime (720 hours). At 30% uptime the same math is about ¥176.

Monthly net, by list price and uptime

The 20% fee is an assumption, not a published SpareHive rate, and the $0.20 / $0.25 rows are hypothetical list prices, not offers.

01. What can you make if you rent out your GPU?

At 30% uptime and a $0.20 listing, the scenario is about ¥176 a month.

That is the number to remember. Thirty percent uptime means the card is rented in the evenings, at night, in the hours the PC would otherwise sit off or idle. ¥176 offsets a real electricity bill; it does not replace one.

¥588 is the same scenario at 100% uptime, 720 hours.

A home PC does not live there. One hundred percent means rented every hour of every day for a month: no gaming, no reboots, no router hiccup. Treat the 100% column as the model's ceiling, and treat any post that quotes it as a normal month as selling the ceiling.

Nothing in this table is a SpareHive payout.

List price and fee are assumptions. SpareHive has not published a host fee, has not set list prices, and is not paying hosts yet — the numbers exist to show how the arithmetic works, not what a check will look like.

02. Where does the hourly net come from?

A $0.20 listing with a 20% fee leaves $0.16 before power.

The marketplace keeps its cut first: twenty percent of $0.20 is $0.04, so the host side of the trade is $0.16/hr. This step has not touched electricity yet.

Power on this 600W rig is about ¥0.32/hr, and what remains is about ¥0.82 per powered hour.

On a ~600W rig, power costs about ¥0.32 for every hour the machine runs, rented or not. Converted and subtracted, $0.16 leaves roughly ¥0.82/hr. Scaled across 720 hours, that is the ≈¥588 row. The math shown is the result; we are not running a second exchange-rate essay inside this one.

At $0.25 the 100% row is about ¥793, and the 30% row is about ¥238.

Same assumptions, higher list price: power takes the same bite, and every row scales up with the listing.

03. Why is a home listing able to sit under the $0.49 median at all?

Renters on Vast.ai pay a 4090 median of $0.49/hr.

That median — not the $0.14 floor — is the number renters budget; see what renters pay for a 4090 hour for the full floor-and-median table. A planning band around $0.20–$0.25/hr sits roughly 50–60% under that median, and it is not a published SpareHive price.

Power is the structural gap.

The same 600W rig costs about $0.047/hr to run on the China residential figure in this model, against $0.10–$0.22/hr for a host in the US or Europe — that electricity spread is the whole reason an under-median listing can still clear money after power. The five-region table lives on the page about why a renter compares the hour with buying.

The renter is also avoiding a bought rig that costs about $0.45–$0.75 per worked hour.

At 30–50% real use, a purchased 4090's cost concentrates into the hours it actually runs — roughly the same range as renting at the median. One sentence, one link; the full amortization table is on that same page.

04. What do you actually receive on marketplaces that exist today?

Cash and gift-card balance are not the same take-home.

Salad pays suppliers largely in gift-card balance rather than cash, with 4090-class hours listed from $0.16/hr. Balance that converts into games and subscriptions still does not pay an electricity bill, which arrives in cash. Read the payout form before you assume the listed rate is income.

A token subsidy is not hourly cash.

Clore.ai runs about 20,000 GPUs with commissions from 1.8% to 10% plus token subsidies. A subsidy denominated in a token is a position in that token; we do not forecast token prices here, and neither should your rent math.

Read the payout rule before you install anything.

Minimum balances, payout thresholds, currency, and form of payment all live in the marketplace's terms, and they change the effective yield more than a few cents on the hourly rate. The order of operations is: payout rule first, then the rate.

05. Can you take the PC back, and what work is allowed?

Choose a marketplace that lets you pause when you want to play.

SpareHive's plan includes a host pause — the card comes back to your desk when you want it. Wherever you list today, confirm the pause rule before joining; a marketplace that punishes offline hours will tax exactly the evenings you bought the card for.

AI image and video jobs are the work in this math.

That is the demand side this whole calculation assumes — overseas small teams rendering images and short video. Mining is not offered and not invited. No coins, no mining software, no hardware tweaks; the arithmetic above has no mining row.

A paused card earns zero in that hour, and the table already shows low uptime.

Pausing is compatible with the ¥176 case — 30% uptime and evenings-free coexist fine. It is not compatible with the ¥588 case, which assumes the machine never comes back to your desk. Pick the column that matches the life you actually live, not the one that matches the headline.

06. What do you register, if anything?

SpareHive's host page is a registration, not a live queue of jobs.

The design: hosts run an outbound-only client, so a home connection without a public IP can work; you pause anytime; mining is not accepted; and every figure on this page stays a scenario. If that matches the card and the schedule you have, register a card on the host page.

No uptime promise to the renter, so no uptime promise to the host.

A marketplace built on home machines makes no availability promises in either direction. What fills the gap is redundancy on the platform side and honest math — like the 30% column — on the host side.

The risk list is short enough to memorize.

Ephemeral job design is a plan, not an audit. Heat and the PSU are real costs. Power must be subtracted before anything is "earnings." Home links drop. Each of those gets its own page in our host docs; none of them goes away by not being read.

FAQ

Will I earn ¥588 a month if I rent out my GPU?

No. ¥588 is the 100% row at a $0.20/hr listing under the assumptions in the table. At 30% uptime the same row is about ¥176. Real home use is closer to the low rows.

Is the 20% fee SpareHive's fee?

No. Twenty percent is an assumption in the scenario. SpareHive has not published a live fee, and it is not paying hosts yet.

Can I mine on the side while the card is listed?

No. The math on this page is for AI image and video jobs. Mining is outside the product.

Do I need a public IP?

Not for SpareHive's design, which dials out from the PC. That is a plan for the waitlist product. A marketplace you use today may still ask you to open ports; read that requirement before you join it.

Can I play games on the same PC?

Yes if the marketplace lets you pause. SpareHive's plan lets a host pause. Hours you play are hours the table counts as offline.