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Don't let your card sit idle: 85% is yours

The rig left over from mining, the render farm spinning empty at night, the university cluster asleep between terms, the gaming PC switched off in the evenings. Install one binary, open no inbound port, join the pool. Commission is 15%, payouts land every Friday, your scorecard is public.

Host registration opens in Phase 1. There is no application form today; this section describes the system and the rules being built.

Host section

Who can be a host

If you have a working NVIDIA card, you are a host candidate.

You don't need to run a data center. The electricity and depreciation of idle capacity are already charged to you; once you join the pool that line starts moving over to the income side.

The rig left over from mining

Cards sitting on shelves, power and cooling already in place. The only thing you have to do is line up the operating system and the driver; the agent handles the rest. This is the easiest first-class host type.

Render studio

When a project ships, the farm stops. You open that gap to the pool at night and on weekends, then put the machine into maintenance mode and pull it back the day the next job arrives. A scheduled maintenance window does not lower your scorecard.

University cluster

Nodes bought with a budget, waiting idle for months between terms. If unused hours turn into income, the lab gains a line item that pays for itself. Internal use always comes first; the pool takes the leftover capacity.

Gaming PC

One card, a consumer connection, an owner who uses it in the evenings. These machines are placed on short, interruptible jobs; on Windows they run through WSL2. If you are after serious earnings, booting Linux from a second disk moves the same hardware into first class.

The three promises — from the host side

The three promises we make to customers are also the rules of your income.

You don't pay for seconds that don't work

If your machine fails the health check, the customer's billing stops that second and the job moves from its checkpoint to another host. The same rule applies to you: idle seconds earn nothing. What raises your utilization is your price and your scorecard.

Hard budget cap

When the customer hits the cap, the job pauses safely and your machine frees up. What you accrued until that moment is settled: the risk of an uncollectible invoice sits with the marketplace, not with the host.

Per-second billing

Your earnings accrue by the second; nothing is rounded up to an hour, or even to a minute. A 40-second inference job is recorded as 40 seconds and shows up line by line in the period statement.

These three items are the product's commitment, not measured past performance. The host agent, the registration flow and weekly payouts belong to Phase 1; they are not running in production today.

Map of the section

Six pages: every rule from setup to payout.

Becoming a host is an operating decision, not a marketing one. The pages below cover everything you need in order to make that decision — limits and negative answers included.

Setup & operating system

Which operating system is fully supported, which is limited, which is not supported at all — with the reasoning. One-line install on Linux, WSL2 preparation on Windows, why macOS is out.

Requirements

Supported cards and the VRAM floor, the CPU/RAM/disk ratio per card, network and upload speed, power stability, and what happens while you are using the machine yourself.

Earnings

You set the price, commission is 15%, the remaining 85% is yours. Worked examples for three configurations, electricity cost as an input, the payout day, and what we do not promise on the tax side.

Scorecard

Four metrics, published weights, one score. How the score drives placement, how to raise it, and what happens to the computed value when we intervene by hand.

Verified tier

On-site audit, SLA commitment, access to enterprise workloads, higher utilization and a wider price band. Application steps. Opens in Phase 3.

FAQ

Can I see the customer's data, when do I get my machine back, who pays for electricity, how many machines can I add, what happens if I want to leave — thirteen questions, short answers.

A quick sense of the numbers

A rough figure in five minutes: price × utilization × 85%.

The arithmetic is not complicated. Monthly gross = your list price × hours worked in the month. Commission is 15%, the rest is yours. Electricity comes out of your pocket, so don't decide before putting your own kWh price into the equation.

You set the price: the panel shows the regional median, you don't have to follow it. No hidden margin — we add nothing on top of the price the customer sees.
No utilization guarantee: how much work you get depends on your price, your region, your card and your scorecard. Nobody can promise you a set number of hours per month; be careful with anyone who does.
Electricity excluded: the calculation beside this deducts commission from gross, not electricity. The full calculation, with three configurations and an electricity input, is on the Earnings page.
Example earnings — 4× RTX 4090
Your list price4 × $0.42/hr
Utilization assumption60%
Monthly gross$725.76
Kaldera commission (15%)$108.86
Monthly net, electricity excluded$616.90

Illustrative calculation: 30 days, uninterrupted operation and a 60% utilization assumption. Real earnings vary with your price, your region, your scorecard and demand; this is not measured revenue.

Where we stand

What exists today, and what doesn't.

Kaldera is at the company-formation stage and the product is in Phase 0. Every rule written on the host side is designed; none of it is running yet. The list is here so the distinction stays clear.

Scorecard model, commission rate, operating-system support decisionPhase 0 — defined and published
Host agent, machine registration, weekly payoutsPhase 1 — in progress
Windows/WSL2 profile and short-job placementPhase 1 — planned
Verified tier and on-site auditPhase 3 — planned
SOC 2 Type INot in process — no certificate

Component-by-component status: Status. Architecture and isolation commitments: Security.

Get started

A card sitting idle earns nobody anything.

Read the setup page first: find out which class your machine's operating system falls into. Then run the earnings calculation once against your own kWh price. If the numbers hold, get in line.

Host registration opens in Phase 1; there is no application form yet. and the earnings examples are illustrative.