Darkbloom one month in: real earnings by Mac, how the team handles problems, and an app that makes it easy
A week ago I posted some Darkbloom numbers here. I said $2–4 a day. That's still about right for a lot of Macs, but the bigger Macs have been doing better far than that, so here's an update from the providers Slack and the public network stats.
What Macs actually earned this week (paid work only, Macs with a model loaded; not a forecast, it moves with demand):
- 64 GB, recent chip (M4/M5 Max): about $2–4 a day
- 96–128 GB with a recent Max or Ultra chip: about $3–5 a day, $5–6 on good days
- M5 Ultra: several providers reported $6–8 a day, with one $10+ day
- My own M5 Pro 48 GB does about $2.50 a day
Note: Please don't buy a Mac solely for this. While yes, if you do enough math, it can make sense to offset some of the upfront cost of buying a Mac, but only over the course of at least 1.5 years, so keep that in mind.
Demand keeps showing up. Darkbloom has served about 450 billion tokens in the six weeks since paid requests started, and added six models in the last month. This week Qwen3.8 demand roughly doubled for a few days, gpt-oss requests grew about 30%, and a new large model (MiMo) launched. Whole-network traffic is about 4.4–4.9 million requests a day.
Why I trust the team. I'm not affiliated with Darkbloom or Eigen Labs, but I've been in their Slack daily for a month (and have been building a companion app called Bloomgauge):
- They post a monthly update with real numbers and say what's not working.
- When Autopilot (their new auto model-picker) launched with bugs, fixes shipped the same night, twice.
- When withdrawals failed for some people, they refunded them, moved payouts to Stripe (providers report money arriving in minutes), and audited the ledger.
- When providers said a new model paid almost nothing, they changed its price two days later.
- The coordinator (the part that routes requests) is public on GitHub.
It's not perfect. Payouts in some countries are still rough, and earnings swing as they tune routing. But they answer in public and fix things fast.
The app. Setting Darkbloom up and keeping it earning takes a lot of effort, even if you are technical, so I built BloomGauge, a free Mac app, alongside other devs in the Darkbloom community:
- Setup in a few clicks, no Terminal: it checks your Mac, installs Darkbloom, and you make an account in your browser.
- Keeps it earning: holds the model that pays best on your Mac, reloads it after Darkbloom unloads it, and recovers stalls by itself.
- Shows what you actually earn: confirmed earnings per model and per hour, network demand, and why a Mac isn't earning when it isn't.
- Phone control: check in and switch models from your phone.
Needs an Apple Silicon Mac with 36 GB+ memory (macOS 27 recommended). Free, no account. Source is on GitHub (source-available).
Website: https://bloomgauge.io/?ref=reddit-macstudio
Source: https://github.com/cookder/bloomgauge
Big-Mac owners: what does yours earn? Especially Ultras and 128 GB+.
Screenshots from the app:
