What nine idle-hardware apps actually paid, month by month
One mini PC, one US residential connection, nine apps, recorded on the first of every month from each platform's own dashboard. Gross, then net of electricity. Where a number is unreliable I say so instead of rounding it up.
Recording since JUL 2026 · last entry 01 OCT 2026 · next entry 01 NOV 2026
Host Geekom GT1 Mega, 24/7 · line 30 Mbps down · region Ohio, US
Draw ~25 W (estimated, not metered) at 16 ¢/kWh
Idle Ledger records what nine passive income apps actually pay on one always-on mini PC, on a single US residential connection in Ohio, read from each app's own dashboard on the 1st of the month. September 2026 came to $15.35 gross and $12.47 net of estimated electricity. Low tens of dollars a month, not hundreds.
Some 'Start' links are referral links. They don't change what you pay, and the table is sorted by measured payout, not commission.
App-by-app notes
Grass
Bandwidth · GRASS & USDC tokens on Solana · desktop node earns above the browser extension
Desktop node since August, no payout yet. Nothing lands until a season settles, so the dollar column stays empty rather than getting a made-up conversion of a points balance. I'm optimistic about where the seasons shake out. Optimism isn't a number though, and it's not going in the table as one.
One thing I got wrong at first and most pages still have wrong: Stage 2 settled in July and paid out in USDC rather than GRASS, and it only covered contributions through 8 June 2026. I started in August, which puts me outside that window entirely. The 170 million GRASS figure everyone quotes is a separate distribution that hasn't happened.
So don't read a Grass balance the way you'd read a Honeygain balance. One is dollars you can withdraw. The other is a claim on a distribution that hasn't happened yet. Setup and how the points model actually works, plus what Stage 2 actually paid.
Honeygain
Bandwidth · PayPal or crypto · $20 minimum payout
Still not paid out, but barely. Cumulative sits at $19.41 against a $20 minimum, so I'm 59 cents away and September was its best month at $7.39. I said November last time. It'll land in days.
Worth saying that the wait was the whole complaint about Honeygain and I spent four months making it. JumpTask mode drops the minimum to fifty cents and I'd have been paid in July. I stayed on standard specifically to measure how long the climb takes from zero, since nobody publishes it, and the answer is about four months on one US residential connection. If you just want the money out, take JumpTask. Setup and the difference between the two modes, and how it compares: EarnApp vs Honeygain, measured.
EarnApp
Bandwidth · PayPal or Wise · operated by Bright Data
Last month I wrote that EarnApp had overtaken Honeygain. September undid it. EarnApp fell to $4.62 while Honeygain climbed to $7.39, so the gap is now $2.77 the other way and the cumulative isn't close: $12.99 against $19.41. The August crossover was a fourteen-cent lead in a single month, which is exactly why I hedged it at the time, and it did not hold.
It still wins on the thing that matters most, which is time to money. Its minimum is low enough that it has paid out repeatedly while Honeygain has paid nothing. I can't tell you that minimum with confidence though: four sources published within months quote $1, $2.50, $5 and $10, and one was a competitor's page aimed at poaching EarnApp users. Setup, the router firmware option, and the hourly rate change, and the head-to-head: EarnApp vs Honeygain on this connection.
Repocket
Bandwidth · $0.20/GB advertised, the highest rate here · two devices per IP
Highest advertised per-gigabyte rate in the table and middle of the pack in actual payout, which is the gap between a rate card and demand for your IP. A high rate on traffic nobody routes to you loses to a lower rate on steady traffic every time.
Watch this one. Reporting through 2026 says the referral program was removed, cash offers were disabled, and the mobile apps were discontinued. A platform trimming features while holding a $20 minimum is worth keeping an eye on. Setup and what was removed.
PacketStream
Bandwidth · PayPal · recorded $0.00 in August, $0.44 in September
It came back. August was a clean zero and I published a page saying I didn't know why and that the most likely explanation was my own container dying unnoticed. September earned $0.44, which means the account was fine and nothing structural had changed.
I'm leaving that page up rather than quietly deleting it. A month of zero with no explanation is a real thing that happens in this category, and the useful lesson survives the resolution: if you aren't reading your dashboards monthly you will not notice when something stops. The unresolved row, and what resolved it.
Storj
Disk space · STORJ token · no deposit, 25% of earnings withheld for nine months
Not running yet, and the row stays empty rather than showing a zero. It's still the one app here selling something other than IP reputation, which makes it the only one that would add to the total instead of splitting it. That hasn't changed. What has changed is who owns it.
Storj was acquired by Inveniam, announced October 2025. The official announcement says the STORJ token's role is unchanged and that customer pricing and contracts are unchanged, and it talks about investment in network growth for node operators. It says nothing at all about node payouts, which is a conspicuous gap in a document that found room for everything else.
Operators noticed. There's a live forum thread asking whether it's time to cut operator payments again, across roughly 30,000 nodes. No cut has been proposed and that thread is community discussion rather than anything official, so I'm not going to report it as one. But Storj did cut operator payouts in December 2023, and that announcement said it didn't anticipate further adjustments for the foreseeable future, which is worth holding next to the current silence.
I'm holding off for now. Not because the economics look broken, but because the whole Storj case rests on a nine-month withholding period, and committing to that under a new owner who hasn't said a word about payouts is a different bet than the one I was planning to make. I'd rather wait a quarter and write this up with an answer than start a node to find out. When I start, this row fills in and the reason goes here.
A note on what I do not run
Mysterium turns the host into a VPN exit node, meaning other people's traffic leaves through my IP address. That is a categorically different risk from reselling bandwidth and I will not run it on a connection I care about. Separately, several apps that dominate the "best alternatives" listicles have no track record I can verify and no operator I can name, so they are not in the ledger.
Questions people actually ask
Can you run Honeygain, Grass and Repocket at the same time?
Technically yes, and none of them forbid it. But they are all reselling the same thing, which is your IP address's reputation as a residential connection, and the buyers on the far end are often the same proxy brokers. Adding a fourth or fifth bandwidth app splits existing demand rather than adding new demand. The lever that actually moves the total is a second distinct residential IP, or an app that sells a different resource such as disk space or compute.
How much do bandwidth sharing apps actually pay per month?
For a single US residential connection running continuously, realistic totals across a full stack land in the low tens of dollars per month, not hundreds. This one paid $15.35 gross and $12.47 net of estimated power in September 2026. Rates vary by country and demand for US residential IPs runs higher than most regions. Any figure quoted without a date, a location and a connection type is not a number you can plan against, including the ones in this table if you are somewhere else.
Do bandwidth sharing apps slow down your internet?
Less than people expect. These apps move a few gigabytes a month rather than saturating the line, so they do not need a fast connection to go unnoticed. I run the whole stack on a 30 Mbps line and do not notice it while browsing. The real costs sit elsewhere. Your IP may get flagged by sites that block known proxy ranges, which shows up as extra captchas, and many residential ISP agreements prohibit reselling the connection.
Is Storj better than bandwidth sharing apps?
Different trade, not strictly better. Storj pays for stored data at roughly $1.50 per terabyte per month, takes no token deposit, and withholds 25 percent of earnings during the first nine months, with half of that returned around month fifteen. It rewards uptime and patience, and earnings ramp over months as the node fills. Because it sells disk space rather than IP reputation, it does not compete with bandwidth apps on the same connection.
Is sharing your bandwidth for money safe and legal?
The apps are legal, and the established ones encrypt traffic and vet commercial buyers. Two risks are worth naming specifically. Many residential ISP agreements prohibit reselling your connection, so read yours. And VPN exit node software such as Mysterium is a different category entirely, because other people's traffic leaves through your address, which is not a risk I would take on a shared or workplace connection.