Spillway is one intake form, one agent install, and a payout that arrives every week. This page walks the whole flow top to bottom so you can decide whether your hardware and time are a fit before you commit a single byte.
Step 01
You start by telling us which drive holds the spare capacity — a second bay on a NAS, a USB shelf hanging off a small server, anything with a chunk of unhungry space. There is nothing to install yet; we just need to know how many terabytes you can put to work and where the host sits, so the rest of the journey can be sized to your hardware.
New to the math? See what your host could earn — or, if you’re ready, jump straight to the intake below.
Step 02
Once you've seen the payout range and you're happy with the fit, the Spillway agent gets installed on the host. The agent does the unsexy work — proving the drive is online, pushing usage up to the agreed cap, and reporting back so the team can spot trouble before it costs you revenue. The exact install path depends on what your drive runs, and we walk you through it after you've confirmed the sizing.
New to the math? See what your host could earn — or, if you’re ready, jump straight to the intake below.
Step 03
As buyers rent time on your drive, payouts accrue against the rate bucket your hardware fell into — a slower archive drive earns less than a fast SSD, and you can see the bucket on the calculator. We pay out weekly in USD, so a small drive still adds up while a big one compounds; the earnings verifier on the site lets you sanity-check any payout range you're quoted before you commit.
Want to see your earnings range first before you commit? Run the bandwidth-aware earnings calculator, or see how close hosting gets you to $1M.
Four numbers, an email, and the offer is on the table. No agent install yet — we follow up with the install and the contract after you’ve seen the estimate.