Start Earning
How an onboarded B3IQ machine becomes earn-eligible — claim it, reach readiness, optionally offer it to external marketplaces, and read payouts in USD.
This guide assumes you already have a machine running: the host agent is installed, online, and serving locally. Earning is optional and gated — a machine serves your inference first, and idle capacity earns only through the explicit paths below.
Each step below is a separate gate. Finishing one does not imply the next. The most common confusion is expecting earnings the moment a model is installed — directed work requires every gate to pass at once.
Machines join the earning paths by invitation and manual onboarding, and the volume of directed work varies. This guide describes the gates honestly, not a guaranteed level of activity.
Before You Start
The host agent is installed and online, with a fresh heartbeat and at least one model that responds to a local chat completion.
Enrolling a machine uses an onboarding code from the B3IQ team; purchased machines arrive pre-onboarded.
The account that owns the machine receives its payouts. Sign in on the dashboard with that account before claiming.
A model the machine can serve and benchmark, so it can reach a ready route tier.
If the machine is not yet running, start with the Setup wizard and confirm a local chat works before continuing here.
The Path To Earning
Claim the machine to your account
The setup wizard shows an 8-character claim code for the machine — as a QR code and as a manual code. Sign in to the dashboard with the account you want to own it, then scan the QR or enter the code (or redeem it at the dashboard's claim page for a pre-onboarded machine).
Claiming sets ownership. Readiness and payouts attach to the owner you redeem with, so claim on the intended account the first time.
The claim binds to whichever account is signed in at redemption. If you redeem on the wrong account, sign in to the intended one and re-run the claim with a fresh code.
Reach route, model, and benchmark readiness
A claimed, online machine still has to pass the readiness gates before it can take directed work: route health, an installed and benchmarked model profile, and fresh observed benchmark evidence.
Check the public diagnosis for the machine and the specific model you want to serve: open its page in the explorer, or read Route readiness, which lists every route or model blocker with the next action — the direct answer to "why am I not earning yet?".
Use the id of a model your machine actually serves. List the live set with
GET /v1/api/models rather than guessing a name.
Serve eligible directed work — or flip to Earn mode
There are two distinct earning paths:
- Directed workloads. A claimed, online, route-ready machine accrues its revenue share automatically when B3IQ directs eligible work to it. No switch to flip — readiness is the gate.
- Earn mode. Flipping a machine to Earn on its detail page offers it to external GPU marketplaces instead. While in Earn mode the machine does not serve your inference and SSH is disabled; flip it back to Bare metal to reclaim it.
Watch earnings and payouts
The dashboard Earnings page shows USD trends over 7-day and 30-day windows, and each machine's detail page carries an Earned (24h) tile. Payout history lists batches with a status each.
Payouts are batched and settled to your payout account, and each batch records a public proof.
Accrued earnings and finalized payouts will not always match at a given moment. Work accrues continuously; settlement happens in batches, so a delay between the two is normal.
Earnings Come From Real Work
Earnings reflect actual work performed — directed requests served, or marketplace workloads run in Earn mode. Nothing pays for idle capacity that never serves a request: a ready machine that receives no work earns nothing until work lands on it.
Serve yourself first
A Bare-metal machine serves your own inference free, always — earning never competes with your own traffic on the same box unless you choose Earn mode.
Expect earnings from readiness alone
Readiness makes a machine eligible; it does not create work. Earnings track the work that actually runs.
Common Blockers
Serving your own traffic is free and earns nothing by itself. Directed-work earnings require the machine to be claimed, online, and route-ready — and for eligible work to actually land on it.
Run the route-readiness probe to find the exact blocker (stale heartbeat, unbenchmarked model, unhealthy route). If everything passes, the machine is eligible and simply waiting on directed work — volume varies.
Expected. An Earn-mode machine leaves your serving pool (and SSH is disabled) while it is offered to external marketplaces. Flip it back to Bare metal on its detail page.
Earnings accrue continuously; payouts settle in batches. A pending payout simply has not been included in a submitted batch yet.