We’d rather you size up the trade-offs honestly than sign up on a hype line and leave disappointed. These are the five questions hosts actually ask before joining — answered plainly, with the numbers we’d want to read if we were in your seat.
Payouts vary by a full order of magnitude — a slow archive-tier drive earns roughly ten times less per terabyte than a fast full-SSD rig, and the on-site earnings calculator shows your actual bucket before you commit. We pay weekly in USD, but any given week can dip below the average when buyer demand cools, so treat the calculator's range as the honest floor, not the upside. Run the $/million estimator before you quote yourself a number — the math it prints is the same one the contract offer is built on.
Uptime is the job. When the host is offline, payouts drop with it — there is no SLA in either direction, so demand is matched in real time on both sides. Plan on a NAS- or home-server-grade connection, and turn off sleep modes and aggressive power-saving, because the agent self-reports drops and your dashboard will show them. Take the marketing language out of it: 'always on' is the requirement, not '99.9% guaranteed.'
You do. A single always-on HDD-class host draws tens of watts; an SSD rig draws less, and a large multi-drive enclosure draws more — plug the host's actual wattage into your local $/kWh before committing, and subtract that line from the payout line. The honest trend at this point in the market is that SSD-class hosts economically beat HDD on a $/TB basis, and slower drive classes are slowly being priced out.
What's on the drive stays encrypted — Spillway stores buyer blobs that the host cannot read, so you don't carry the buyer-content side of the liability. Drive wear and hardware failure are on the host; buyer-side content provenance and legal compliance are on Spillway. We're honest about where the v0 contract still has rough edges: the cohort is small, the host agreement is still evolving, and indemnification scope today is thinner than it will be later — read it before you sign.
In the US (and in most jurisdictions) payouts are ordinary self-employment or miscellaneous income to the host — not investment income and not capital gains. Spillway issues a year-end summary statement, but you keep your own records; consult a local tax professional for your situation, because we are not tax advisors and do not give tax advice.
Run the calculator against your actual drive and your local electricity rate — then come back with a confident number. If the math works, the intake is right here.