Earning less than expected

The short answer: Your rate depends on the priority of the job you're running, which the customer chooses - not on the demand number you see on the Network Monitor. A machine on a high-demand GPU earning at the bottom of its range is usually running a lower-priority job, and nothing is wrong with the PC.

Demand and priority are different things

• Demand on the Network Monitor is how much of a GPU model is in use across the network. It's about the model, not your job.
• Priority is set by each customer per workload, and it decides the rate paid while that job runs. Priority tends to rise with demand, because low-priority jobs get replaced when cards are scarce, but there's no guarantee: a GPU can be in high demand while most of its jobs are low or medium priority.
• The Network Monitor shows the lowest and highest rate a running container can pay for your card. Anywhere in that range means the machine is working as intended.

More on how this works.

Common reasons the rate dropped

1. The high-priority job you had finished and the next one assigned was lower priority. Rates change job to job.
2. Jobs are shorter today. Customers scale down; between jobs you earn nothing for a few minutes.
3. A crypto mining job is running instead of a container job. These pay less; see Job running but no earnings.
4. The estimated rate is a projection, not what you were paid. It assumes the current job runs for 24 hours. How estimated earnings work.
5. Something is holding the machine back so it only qualifies for lower-priority work: a Degraded notification, a power limit, another program using the GPU, or a weak speed-test result. Check the bell icon and Degraded State.
6. Bandwidth Sharing affects your estimate. These workloads are much more prone to demand fluctuations, and earnings can vary largely from minute to minute - estimations can rise sharply for a period of time because of a sudden spike.

What you can do

Assignment is automatic. What you control is availability and stability: keep the machine online and idle, on a wired connection, with nothing else on the GPU, and leave it running rather than restarting for new jobs. Reliable machines are prone to receive high-priority jobs.

Still think something's wrong?

If your rate is below the Network Monitor's minimum for your card, or the earnings history shows gaps while the app says a job is running, contact Salad Support with your machine ID and the dates. We can compare your machine's record with the network's.