(CHOPPING SINCE 2021)

my history with salad

TLDR: discovered salad from a tech content creator one day in 2021, got invested, joined salad, ran it for a while, then quitted it since i got concerned about temps, then rejoined but crypto started dying, then earnings shot up with the container beta, then earnings plummeted to less than a cent per day, then shot back up again after getting sgs, then plummeted again. Became a tester for a new sgs workload, and now I'm earning ~$1.2 per day more or less, consistently, and I'm happy with it.

It was on a Friday evening on June 18, 2021 (hard to believe it's been five years already); I was scrolling TikTok and stumbled across a video from a tech content creator, "tarantech". I was skeptical, but convinced by the rough words of "making money by doing nothing", so I went on getsalad.io (that was the old download link; now it redirects to the new one), and gave Salad a shot on my first-ever laptop with a GTX 1650 Ti. During this time, Salad was in its alpha phase (0.5.5) and was crypto-mining only. I can't recall exactly how much I earned during that time, but I remember it was a damn lot for a 50-watt 1650ti, and mining was super profitable at that time. I ran Salad 24/7 and let the mini stopwatch under the "START" button climb and climb (back when that existed. I kinda miss that gimmick lol). It was so profitable that I even ran Salad in the background, earning as I played Roblox. (You can't do that anymore today btw. Don't try it.)

Before I joined Salad, I would use these scammy, sketchy offerwall sites to get "free robux". They sucked, barely worked, took too much effort. I stopped using those sites after joining Salad, since my 50-watt 1650ti was the one earning me Robux now, which led to my first ever redemption on August 1, 2021: A $10 Roblox gift card, without me doing anything. Salad was everything I needed to fulfill my "free robux" wish: effortless, easy, safe, reputable, reliable.

After a while of using Salad, I, for whatever reason, got concerned about my GPU temperatures, even though they were perfectly fine, and decided to "quit Salad". I then rejoined, but I was too late: Cryptomining started becoming unprofitable. In mid 2022, Earnings went further down, as ETH was dying out. I still ran Salad, but not as consistently since there was no incentive to.

Salad then decided to shift their business model in October 2022 and released what was called by the senior chefs a "secret workload that pays $1 a day", which then wasn't so secret anymore when the download link in the state of salad contagiously spread to everyone and was then revealed to be a "container beta" lol. I downloaded it on my first-ever laptop and an old HP laptop. From there, I have earned the most Salad balance I have ever earned consistently: $1 per day x 2 machines, totaling $2/day for months, with zero resource usage. I earned over $200 just from this alone lol. Additionally, not too long after, I got Bandwidth sharing (sgs-client) to work for the first time in several months, so that gave me an even bigger boost.

Then came Q1-Q3 of 2023, when my earnings decided to go from $2 a day to less than a fraction of a cent per day. During this time, Salad gradually rolled out lower-paying containers, which include: $0.75/day, $0.5/day, $0.25/day, and $0.10/day. Over time, the CPU container was coming to a full, non-beta release. My earnings were still okay, but way weaker than before. Salad also, at this time, removed CPU mining because there were "enough CPU containers to go around for everyone", however, that did not play out well: CPU container demand, not too long after, plummeted to the core. My earnings were at record lows now, and just as I thought it couldn't get lower, my sgs-client disappeared for months, and Salad was starting to put less priority into their mining workloads, and as a result, my earnings plummeted to less than a cent per day. GPU containers were also released, but my 1650ti stood no chance at getting any demand.

With CPU mining removed, no GPU containers, GPU mining selecting a bad algorithm due to less outlook on these workloads, no sgs-client, and terrible 10-cent CPU containers that lasted no more than a few hours or even seconds at most, I decided to mine externally and manually to Salad balance. Even then, mining was basically dead long ago, so earnings stayed low for a while.

Q4 2023 came around, and my earnings decided to start climbing back up again. I got sgs-client back after months without it, and that would carry my salad earnings up to today. During this time, I also switched from my old, terrible ISP, to a new ISP with fiber. Bandwidth sharing earnings increased hugely with 500mbps, and I also earned a record high of $2.60 in December 2023.

Earnings would stay like this for a while until bandwidth sharing in the US started to deteriorate: the 10 cent static pay on the first-ever US gateway, Daffodil, was removed, and traffic started getting weaker towards 2024. Throughout 24-25, dead gateways with zero traffic completely flooded the US bandwidth sharing system (which unfortunately still resides today).

Then around the end of 2025, a new sgs customer in the US started testing their gateway, and I volunteered to be a part of the closed testing. It has two gateways that pay 48 cents per day.

Today, I still run those two testing gateways (hopefully they become successful), along with two more US gateways that are active, giving me ~$1.20 more or less per day. CPU containers are also a lot more reliable now, so in some cases, more. Electricity usage is super low at around 10ish cents per day more or less (i just guess it based off a constant 50w draw total lol). I now have almost 1000 dollars of lifetime balance racked up, and I mainly just get the Salad balance into my bank account now via paypal.

what'd i tell a new chef lol:

If you live in a bandwidth-supported country with good enough demand and a little bit of luck, you do not need a good computer to earn. Salads bandwidth sharing (despite there definitely being things in need of a reform, such as dead gateways), is still the best and safest option out there. Not in an "advertising Salad" way, but these other apps that offer bandwidth sharing SUCK (coming from experience), and no other app that offers bandwidth sharing except Salad meets all the criteria for being safe, a non-pay-per-time model, non-abusive, and strong earnings (depending on the gateway but in general), with PayPal transfers.

PC Specs: GPU: RTX 5090, Ryzen 9 9950X, 64 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD
Daily Earnings: Usually $4–$5 per day, occasionally $5–$7 depending on available workloads.
Chopping Hours: 313 hours at the time of posting, and still counting.
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I'm a gamer and freelancer. While searching for ways to earn extra income with my powerful PC, I came across Salad. I spent time researching how it works before I started using it. After seeing how it performs, I became a regular user, and now I'm building a second PC dedicated to running Salad.
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For New Chef:

Use a GPU with at least 16 GB of VRAM for better opportunities.
Don't expect earnings right away. It may take min to hrs before you start receiving jobs.
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How I Calculate Earnings:

( Earnings - Electricity Cost ) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Happy Chefing! 🍽️

GPU: RTX 4090 (single machine, runs 24/7)

Daily earnings: typically $1 to $5, averaging around $2.87/day net after power

Chopping since: February 2, 2025. Dashboard shows 9,058 total hours, some of that lost to downtime (more below)

My story

I was skeptical about Salad at first. The usual security worries, plus I figured I'd only make pocket change for games, and I didn't want to burn through the life of a 4090 I paid a lot of money for.

What changed my mind: I'd already bought the 4090 for AI work, so it was sitting idle a lot of the time anyway. Once I tried Salad, the security concerns didn't hold up, and the earnings turned out to be enough to cover real purchases on Amazon, not just games.

It hasn't been smooth the whole way. A Corsair Power Bridge adapter on my 4090 overheated and melted, which damaged the card's own power connector and caused random freezes and reboots whenever I launched a game. On top of that, unexpected Windows updates kept interrupting long runs. Both cut into my uptime and my earnings more than I expected.

Profit math (bonus)

• Average power draw: 263.28 W
• At BC Hydro's residential Tier 1 rate (11.87 cents per kWh), that works out to roughly $45 in electricity over 2 months
• Net profit after power: $172.38 per 2 months, or about $2.87/day

I also keep a day-by-day log of income against power use; here's a recent stretch:

What I'd tell a new Chef

Track your usage from day one so you know your real profit, not just your gross balance. And figure out an update and restart schedule that fits your setup, so Windows or driver updates don't catch you mid-run. I ended up writing down what worked for me after the restart issues; happy to share if anyone wants it.

I started out a couple years ago on salad after seeing a sponsor spot on a tech channel I watch. I honestly didn't expect much other than some extra cash for games or Amazon. I've earned about $750 so far with 12,100 chopping hours. It's been a really nice thing to run when I'm not doing anything or just watching YouTube and browsing. With a 5090 my earnings stay consistent at around $5-6 a day when running all day which it usually does when I chop.

My 5080 is more variable and is usually only a dollar or so a day. I don’t run it as much as I used to due to the rapidly growing cost of SSDs but it's still beneficial when I am able to run it. I'd say if you have a hardy enough system it's worth running due to the ease of it all.

I've been chopping for just over 2 years. After crypto mining became unprofitable and Ethereum bailed on us I needed something new or had to sell my GPU's. Salad was the something new. I have just over 50 rigs with GPU's ranging from 4090's - 3060's running at 6 different locations. At one of my locations I solar mine and have generated just over 1.4MWh of power for Salad. To the newbie, windows updates are a nightmare.

Hey, I just installed Salad on my main PC (R7 7700 + RX7900XTX + 32GB DDR5-6000) and I'm simply wondering how doing other tasks, as well as pausing the chopping process actually affects the workloads. F.ex. if I pause the chopping often, will it become harder to get jobs? Kinda like getting shadowbanned. And another question is how much it'll affect the jobs that I do get if I do somethng else while Salad is running? F.ex. Watching YT or even mining Monero on the CPU while salad is running.

At least earlier I noticed that while the application still reported me having an active job, my GPU utilisation was like 0-10% and my CPU util was between 0-20%. The fans did ramp up randomly like something was being done occasionally, but other than that, idk. Pausin and restarting seemed to resolve it tho.

EDIT: While I'm here, might as well ask about the rewards; I'm from EU and I only see mainly USD related rewards (f.ex. the 5$ PayPal gift card) and I was wondering if I could still use that or if I have to find a reward that uses EUR (such as the steam gift cards that seem to constantly be out of stock)

Running a Intel i9 12900k, 128GB DDR5 and Asus TUF RTX 4090 in idle for a couple of years I stumbled upon Salad.com some months ago thinking "eh, what's the worst that can happen?".

Almost 3 months later it has payed 4 games on Steam, some bills, and latest an Arctic Freezer Pro III 360. Not at all what I was expected when I started. Hitting about 4-5$ a day, 20-25$ per week, 100-105$ A MONTH!!!

Positively surprised about the outcome so far, and sad that I did not get started earlier.

• RTX 3060 Ti desktop (main)
• Laptop (secondary)
• Daily Earnings: ~$1.00-$1.40 combined
• Total Time Chopping: Since August 2023 (~3 years)

As of now, I have 2 main machines - My 3060Ti and an Laptop. I earn around $1.00-$1.40 per day on average, I have been chopping since 2023 august iirc so that makes it 3 years of chopping (damn!! thats long)

So, I first heard about Salad in April 2023 from a YouTuber. I hooked up my 3060 Ti, expecting some decent passive income. I chopped for 14 months and made... a whopping $19, I was super disappointed. I was doing it all wrong because my setup was just mining instead of catching container jobs. I gave up and wasted my idle GPU power for about a year.

And then, at the start of 2025, I decided to try again. My generous, wildly ambitious goal? Make an $8/month passive income source. I made a fresh account and started chopping. The first few months were still a bit rough, occasionally falling back to mining, but I was actually breaking that $8 mark.

Then came May 2025, I was in the discord since Aug 2023, but I was kind of a douche because I used to join and then rejoin but on May 2025, I was bored and decided to look into the Hindi section. That community is amazing. I learned about SGS sharing or BW sharing from the guys there, and I saw people making crazy earnings, like $30+ a month. That was huge for me. So, I bought a dedicated Mini PC, hooked it straight to Ethernet with 24/7 uptime to do SGS sharing, and oh lord, it all took a turn. My earnings climbed past $16, then $18, then $20, and finally stabilized around $23-$25 a month.

It was all coming really good and I decided to fix an power jack issue on my T620 (mini PC) just few weeks ago and the repair guy unethically took the mini PC from me telling that the repair costed more than the T620 itself and he refused to undo his repair and kept the mini PC, basically stole it from me :(

Now, I've replaced it with a laptop alongside my 3060 Ti. Combined, they yield about $1.20 a day. I'm still incredibly grateful because that is literally 5x my original goal. It's been an amazing adventure of occasional lows followed by great highs.

And I do have something to Say to new comers that and that will be, go to discord and engage man...you may encounter some weird folks there but majority of them are there to help and are generous, I made mistake trying to be on my own for 1.5yrs but in the end...you do learn seeing what others are doing.

CONVERSION OF SALAD BALANCE TO INR (Calculation took half an hour lol)

I used to redeem Amazon INR gift cards. When the real exchange rate was 88 rs = $1, Salad GCs gave me 65rs = $1 Salad. I was taking a brutal 28% loss on every dollar.

By early 2026, I got access to PayPal withdrawals. After taxes and fees, I was getting 86rs per Salad Dollar (while the actual rate was 91rs). Exponentially better lol

The turning point of 2026 for me was the Render announcement and zero fee withdrawals on Render(yipeee!!). Now, with zero fee (or 1-2% after exchanging), my crypto-to-INR swap gives me about 98-99 Rs per Salad Dollar.

With that being said, I did spend most of my salad balance into supporting my music career (guitarist) and If Im being honest, I did buy 2 guitars in the past year and salad contributed around 30-40% in both of them, its huge because all of it was passive

AND FOR ELECTRICITY COSTS, NO! I HAD SOLAR FROM THE VERY BEGINNING THEREFORE ITS PURE PROFIT BABY!

Using a 4090 at first for about a year now(BOSS PC), then added my wifes 5070 (CLAU PC). Salad has been good so far in our first foray of 'lending' out our computers.

Right now working towards our biggest payout of 1000$ for a little R&R in a couple months. Keep it coming salad!

For anyone willing to try Salad, just let it run when you don't play or use computer. It add's up!

Hey everyone,

I've been using Salad's bandwidth sharing for quite a while now, and I'm finally looking at getting a dedicated GPU for it.

I'm torn between:

• RTX 5070
• RX 9070 XT
• RTX 5060 Ti 16GB

And before anyone says "check the Demand Monitor"... don't. 😂 I'm looking for real-world experiences, long-term earnings, stability from people who've actually used these cards.

Also yes, I'd love to buy a 5070 Ti... if my wallet stopped identifying as a potato.

Which one should i pick?

You said Monday!

GPU : RTX5070

$3.456/day

6,774 hours chopping

I have been using Salad for a long time and have gained a variety of experiences.

While there are occasional quiet periods, there are also times that feel like peak seasons.

I have tried alternatives like Clore during slower periods, but I found that Salad’s appeal lies in the ease of cashing out earnings and the low barrier to entry.

Also, as the image shows, there is no strict requirement for high VRAM; if there is demand, you can still accept high-paying jobs.

For these reasons, I have continued to use Salad to this day.

I game on my pc for about 7 hours per week. The downtime is enough to get decent container jobs while not gaming. Total electricity cost has been about $500 (varying electricity rates between $0.00 - $0.10 / kwh)

I have nearly paid off the cost of my entire PC because of Salad. Bought my PC in 2023.

In a nutshell, Salad has given me an almost-free PC to play video games with. 'Nuff said.

thank you salad!

Started on Salad back in Feb 2024 with just a 3070. I had a few GPU's when Salad was really, really good. I've had 4070's, 4070 Ti's, 4090 FE, and my current 5090 FE. It's not the same anymore and I put my 5090 on to check the earning rates. Otherwise, I've left the platform.

This was before the Youtuber friends showed up.

This was after they all showed up. Dried up pretty quickly.

I personally think they should have implemented some sort of seniority system to keep folks around, especially those who had systems with generally good uptime. Forget about Star Chef IMHO and put in a better system.

Salad is generally for those that want to earn when they are not gaming and not for dedicated machines, but there are many, many folks that have setup dedicated machines because of the ease of use.

To make Salad more successful, they really need to turn of Crypto mining by default and force WSL to current before the first run. It will help new folks from having issues and coming to the discord and asking the same questions over, and over again.

My pc has a Nvidia Geforce RTX 5060 8gb, and 32gb. Its earning too low. Why???

I have a rig given to me by a friend and I have almost no need for since I game on a steam deck but it’s has what’s listed below and I would like to make a passive income nothing crazy maybe gas money at the end of the month or buy a ¢0.50 taco a Jack in the box. Is this still viable or should I scrap it instead ??

AMD Ryzen 3 3200g
RX570 4gb
16 gb of RAM
1tb HDD

So almost 3 years ago I downloaded salad for i think the most common reason people usually download salad for ig is TO GET REAL MINECRAFT JAVA. I did not had my own money and I didnt wanted to ask my parents for a game to purchase so I was like always searching "how to get minecraft free" on yt and ended up finding salad.

My plan was that i will run it for like 3-4 months, reach 24$ ( at that time cost of minecraft was 23.99$ , I still remember ) , buy minecraft, and then just delete it. And I did buy it and deleted it too, but I was not finished with my online purchases yet

Weeks later , I wanted to buy a rank so bad in the hypixel server of mc which is like 10$ so i had to install it again and I kept it running in the background and it kept earning. As we know that keeping laptop in sleep mode disables salad and windows laptop goes to sleep when u close the lid ,but there is an option to turn this feature off in settings , I didnt knew this at that time and my mom always used to tell me that i should not keep my laptop open all night , so what I used to do is that i used to make a ball from handkerchief and stuff it inside in a way that the laptop would look like its closed but it was on and then i used to put the laptop delicately inside my laptop bag and go to sleep keeping salad on for chopping lol. Though this account is my 3rd account created 2 years ago for salad as the other 2 accounts i had was one for school and other one was for games , so i contacted a mod and made sure both the accounts are closed ( as its against the tos ) so that i can make a new salad account only for salad.

As of now i earn about 50-70 cents a day which is good for me , though some random days i go job less as well but its part of the thing , I most of the time redeem amazon balances to buy something irl or master cards to buy stuff online like games or anything. Salad to me is almost like an app which gives 10-15$ pocket money every month for me to spend on things i like , though i dont buy things often as i like to save my balance for future aswell.

Its been 3 years now and its still on my pc with 2308 chopping hours as shown in the picture above . Sounds crazy as I came here just to get one block game and now whenever my friends say " damn how u got the money to buy that" , i always tell them about salad and recommend them to use it too and what I will tell to new chefs is first of all ITS NOT A VIRUS or anything harmful for yr pc , that is all MYTH , its just an app which uses yr pc parts / internet (like games use) to earn u some money$$$$ , also u guys can join salad discord server as well if got any doubts , the community managers are superb there and very helpful too.

This is my short story on how i started using salad , how am i doing currently and what ill tell to new chefs about salad. :)

Hello Team, here we are with our Salad kitchen a mix for 4090/4080Super/5070/4070TiSuper/3070 GPUs it took a while before got this litte room separated of the living room.

My History on Salad

I started with a few 3060 GPUS Getting 3-4 USD per day, now I'm around 23-25$ USD
I'm on Salad since july 2024

I found Salad as alternative for the cripto mining, and i'm very happy for the results, even when sometimes was a dificult period of the network i have the hope of the team is doing the best to keep the great proyect running for us.

Be patient and keep yours rigs running, make a plan to keep upgrading your GPU base on your earnings, and keep this project running!!!
Now i have 11 machines running!!!! Yuuuuuhuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!

Logs show this. It connects fine (TCP test passes, it gets an extranonce), but the authorize step fails every time. After enough retries the watchdog kills it with CUDA_ERROR_NO_DEVICE. Anyone know a solution?

Extranonce is set to
Authorizing...
WARN: failed to stratum2-authorize on kawpow.auto.nicehash.com:443:
       can't receive authorize response
ERROR: No connection, retry after 10 secondsExtranonce is set to
Authorizing...
WARN: failed to stratum2-authorize on kawpow.auto.nicehash.com:443:
       can't receive authorize response
ERROR: No connection, retry after 10 seconds

If the total chopping hours doesn't say it... I don't know what will. I've been with Salad for a while. I think I've been with them since they first started. I originally started on a GTX 1080. Now, I'm on an RTX 4070. I generally earn anywhere between $1-$3 per day... depending on the day. My expectations with Salad was to make money passively. Honestly, that met my expectations. I do in fact make money... with my computer being idle. For the new chefs: if you happen to have a gaming computer, then chop with Salad. You'll be making more money. It definitely won't replace your job... but it does give you a little fun money for sure.

Side tangent... The money I've earned so far has helped me grow a game collection my kids will enjoy playing. Right now, I'm working on a private homelab server. I'm hoping to add lancache to the server so others within my network can enjoy installing games MUCH faster than what my internet service provider can provide. Eventually, I hope to build a gaming ecosystem that my kids will be able to learn and enjoy. It's taking a long time to get this far. I wouldn't still be chopping on Salad if it weren't for my kids. They are my motivation. Anyways... side tangent is over.