Is running Salad worth it on an RTX 4070?

On this rig a good full day nets about $2.50 after electricity - roughly $45 to $60 a month if the card runs around the clock at about $0.15/kWh. It is real but modest, and whether it is worth it depends mostly on your power rate and how genuinely idle your card is. Bad days happen too - one demotion dropped a day to $0.33. The honest answer is to measure your own card.

Does Salad raise my electric bill or wear out the GPU?

Power is the real cost: this card draws about $0.60 a day running full-time at $0.1527 per kWh, already subtracted from every net number shown. Capping the card to 140W cut its temperature about 7C with minimal earnings impact. No GPU damage observed - it is the same sustained load as a long gaming session, at lower clocks.

Is Salad better than just turning the PC off?

If your electricity is cheap and the machine is on anyway, Salad turns idle time into a few dollars a day. If power is expensive or you would otherwise shut down, the math gets thin fast and some days barely clear the power cost. Measuring tells you which side of that line your card is on.

Why do earnings drop hard on some days?

Salad pays more for AI workloads than for fallback crypto mining. Running your own GPU programs such as a local LLM or video work can demote the machine to low-paying jobs - that was the May 17 drop to $0.33 for the day. Knowing the moment it happens is the difference between a $2.50 day and a $0.33 day.

What is the Idle GPU Profit Coach?

It is a $29 Windows and NVIDIA monitoring kit that logs exactly what your GPU earns on Salad after power, flags the demotions and silent gaps that quietly cost you money, and tells you whether running it is worth it on your hardware and your electric rate.

Is Salad worth it? Here's what my GPU actually got paid.

Q: How much does an RTX 4070 actually earn on Salad?

Measured over about three weeks: roughly $1.00 to $2.50 net per day depending on demand and the machine chef rating, with margins of 75 to 90 percent after power. Earnings vary day to day with Salad workload availability.

Salad is the desktop app that rents out your idle GPU for AI compute (salad.com, not the food). I run it on one used RTX 4070, and I've logged every dollar it earns and every dollar of power it burns since May 10. This is that record, live. There's a calculator below so you can run the same math on your own card before you install anything.

TL;DR

Salad rents your idle GPU for AI compute and pays you in credit (salad.com, not the food).
On my used RTX 4070, a good day nets about $2.50 after electricity — roughly $45–60/month running full-time, logged daily since May 10.
It's real money: I cashed out my first $50 to PayPal on June 2 (about 10% comes off the top on withdrawal).
Slow days happen. Your electricity rate and how genuinely idle the card is decide whether it's worth it.

Find out now → Run your own card & rate in the calculator.

The card: a used RTX 4070 I bought refurbished on eBay for $479 from a seller called NEW-TECHIES. At what it's earned so far, Salad alone takes the better part of a year to pay that back. That's the point: it only makes sense on a card you already own and leave idle, not one you buy to run Salad.

How it started · May 10

$0.00

Day 1. No idea what the card could earn, or what gaming and LLM sessions were quietly costing me. Pure guesswork.

How it's going · day 11

$20.79

Lifetime balance, measured to the hour. Net run-rate ~$43/month. Every hour of my own use now has a dollar figure on it.

↓ the 11 days in between ↓

Live now

Checking the kitchen...

Reading the live log.

Worth it right now?

-- -- /hr after power

Reading the live numbers...

Star Chef pace — chopping this week-- / 50h

Daily net earnings

Where it's headed

Balance now $--

Projected $--

--·--

Projection extends the last 30 days' pace (only the days the card was actually running) forward. It is a trend line, not a forecast or a promise -- Salad demand swings, so read the dashed line as "if today's pace simply held."

What the numbers caught

May 10-13 · ramp-up
First days online. Net climbs from a rounding error to $2.51/day as Salad's chef rating warms up.
May 16 · blind spot
A logger gap left ~10 hours unmeasured, the exact failure that became the kit's silent-gap detection. The box was up; I just couldn't see it.
May 17 · the crash
An LM Studio session demoted the machine from AI workloads to nickel mining. Net fell to $0.33, and I could see precisely which hours did it.
May 18-20 · recovery
Stopped running local AI on that card, watched the chef rating climb back. Net recovered toward $1.30+/day. The dashboard told me it worked before the weekly total ever would have.

First payout

$50.00 first cash-out · June 2, 2026 · day 24

The first real money out, not just a number on a dashboard. I redeemed $55.50 of Salad credit for a $50 PayPal reward (that ~$5.50 gap is about 10% off the top), and it landed in PayPal the next morning, sent on behalf of Salad Technologies.

Salad reward bar at 100 percent, 55.50 dollars of credit redeemed

$55.50 credit redeemed

Salad confirmation that the reward is on its way

Reward on its way

PayPal sent you 50 dollars on behalf of Salad Technologies

$50 in PayPal

What it nets at different electricity rates

Electricity is the variable that decides this. On a good full day my 4070 grossed about $3.18 and pulled about 4.3 kWh. Here's what that leaves after power at a few different rates. Mine is $0.1527.

Your electricity rate	Net on a good day
$0.10 / kWh	$2.75
~$0.15 / kWh (mine)	$2.52
$0.20 / kWh	$2.32
$0.30 / kWh	$1.89
$0.40 / kWh	$1.45

One cut the thumbnail videos skip: the dollars are Salad credit, not cash. Moving $50 to PayPal cost me $55.50 of credit, about 10% off the top. Every net number on this page is in credit, before that cash-out cut.

Is Salad worth it for your GPU?

Punch in your card, your electricity rate, and how many hours a day it sits idle. You get a net per day and per month, how long until it pays for itself, and a straight answer: run it, marginal, or leave it off.

Your GPU

Electricity rate ($/kWh)

Idle hours per day

Card cost (optional, for payback)

Show real cash after the ~10% PayPal cash-out cut (otherwise these are Salad credit)

$0.00net / day

$0net / month

--card payback

Earnings are estimates from observed Salad demand (the 4070 is anchored to my real logged numbers). Your chef rating, the workload mix, and demand swings will move them. Measuring your own card is the only way to know for sure.

Salad vs Vast.ai, right now

Salad and Vast.ai work in different ways. Salad pays a flatish rate for every hour the card is online, with no setup, and that rate has dropped hard lately. Vast.ai is a marketplace. You set a listing price, keep the machine on and available, and you get paid when a renter picks your card, plus a bit more for the storage and bandwidth you offer. It can pay a lot more per rented hour, but it takes real setup (Linux, Docker, an open port, a price that competes) and you don't control the demand. Here is where my 4070 lands today. The Salad column is measured on my own rig. The Vast.ai column comes from Vast's own marketplace calculator using this card's exact inputs, so I am treating it as a vendor estimate until I list the card and log it the same way I logged Salad.

Saladmeasured on my rig

net / day, averaged across every logged day since May 10 on my 4070 (the good days and the recent slow ones together, today included), which works out to about $--/mo. This is real measured credit after power, not a single-day snapshot; the best day ran about +$2.50, the current rate is near $0.01/hr.

Vast.aiestimated, not yet measured

net / day with electricity already taken out, about $--/mo. It comes from Vast's own calculator for this 4070 ($0.07/hr listed, 200GB storage offered) at the utilization set below. About half of that figure is GPU rental and about half is storage and bandwidth income, which only shows up if you offer them.

Vast.ai utilization, 78% of hours rented. Vast's current marketplace snapshot for a 4070 is about 78%.

That 78% assumes a competitively priced, reliable listing that stays online. A residential 4070 behind home internet, unverified or often offline, can rent far less and would land below the low end of this range. The electricity rate comes from the calculator above.

Salad GPU earnings, answered straight

Is Salad worth it on an RTX 4070?

On my used 4070, a good full day nets about $2.50 after electricity at my rate ($0.1527/kWh). Call it $45 to $60 a month if it runs around the clock, and that's before the cash-out cut. Some days are worse. One demotion dropped a day to $0.33. Whether it's worth it comes down to your power rate and whether the card is sitting idle anyway.

How much does an RTX 4070 actually earn on Salad?

Measured on mine since May 10: roughly $1.00 to $2.50 net a day depending on demand, about $45 so far. The daily chart above is the real spread, slow days and all. Your card and your rate will move that number.

Does Salad raise my power bill or wear out the GPU?

Power is the real cost. Mine draws about $0.60 a day running full time at $0.1527/kWh, already subtracted from every net number here. Capping the card to 140W dropped its temperature about 7 degrees with barely any earnings hit. Nothing's broken on the card. It's the same kind of load as a long gaming session, at lower clocks.

What about the cost of the card and cashing out?

Two things the thumbnail videos skip. I paid $479 for the card used, so Salad alone takes the better part of a year to pay it back. And the dollars are Salad credit, not cash. Moving $50 to PayPal cost me $55.50 of credit, about a 10% cut. Worth knowing before you count the chart numbers as money in your pocket.

Salad versus just turning the PC off?

If your power is cheap and the machine's on anyway, Salad turns idle hours into a few dollars a day. If power's expensive or you'd otherwise shut down, some days barely clear the electricity. That's the call the calculator above is for.

Why do some days drop so hard?

Salad pays more for AI jobs than for the crypto mining it falls back to. Running your own GPU stuff, a local model or video work, can bump the machine down to the low-paying jobs. That's the May 17 day on the chart, $0.33. Catching it the day it happens is the difference between a $2.50 day and a $0.33 one.

Who's behind this

I'm Jordon. I do digital marketing and AI automation at Warmer Digital. I'd never heard of any of this until I went looking for a way to rent out my GPU while I wasn't using it. Then I hit Reddit, where the answer is either it's a waste of time or you're an idiot for running Salad, mostly from people with newer expensive video cards and no actual numbers attached. So I measured mine instead. This page is just my numbers, kept current.

Snapshot baked in; refreshes from the live log when published.