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Payments & payouts

How providers earn credits and get paid in USDC on Base.
Every request that reaches your Mac produces credits. Credits accumulate through the week; each Monday 00:00 UTC the coordinator sweeps unsettled credits and marks providers over the payout threshold ready. Payouts settle in USDC on Base.

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What you earn per request

For every billed request the coordinator computes:
Default rate card: Default provider share: 0.90 (90%). The operator can override this globally or per-model. Both grossCredits and providerCredits use banker’s rounding — ties round to the nearest even quotient, eliminating systematic bias across large volumes of small requests.

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Worked example

1,000 prompt tokens + 500 completion tokens at default rates and 90% provider share:

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When you get paid

  • Settlement cadence: every 7 days, at Monday 00:00 UTC.
  • Minimum payout threshold: 500,000 credits accumulated. Below the threshold, credits roll to the next window.
  • Payout rail: USDC on Base. See Network overview → Metering & billing for the settlement path.
Credits accumulate all week; at Monday 00:00 UTC the coordinator sweeps unsettled credits for every provider over the threshold and marks them ready for payout.

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Settlement-capable traffic and the receipt deadline

For settlement-capable traffic (v0.3+ signed receipts), a provider receipt must arrive before the coordinator’s pending_deadline_seconds window closes. Receipts arriving after the deadline are non-settling and non-recoverable — they cannot create provider credit, payout readiness, or a new buyer debit. Missing, malformed, or unverifiable receipts settle as FaultBreakerQualifying with zero provider credits. Details: Operations → Verified model settlement.

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Checking your balance

Balance, per-model breakdown, and last payout are visible in the Malibu app. The underlying endpoint:
Response shape:
Rate limit: 60 requests per minute per provider. Optional day-range filter: ?from=YYYY-MM-DD&to=YYYY-MM-DD (max 31 days).

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Provisional vs pinned

Newly installed providers join at the provisional tier — lower routing weight, capped pool size. The operator promotes providers to pinned after observed pool stability, uptime, and review. Pinned providers get higher routing priority. Self-serve promotion is on the roadmap.

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Why your Mac might drop mid-window

  • Lid-close sleep drops the WebSocket. caffeinate prevents display and user-idle sleep during a run but not lid-close sleep. The binary reconnects automatically on wake; in-flight requests during the sleep are lost.
  • Heartbeat reaping. If no frame arrives within 90 seconds (default pool.heartbeat_miss_threshold_s) the coordinator closes the connection. Streaming inference chunks count as heartbeat activity.
  • Warmup gate. After reconnect the coordinator holds the provider in a warmup state for up to 90 seconds while verifying it can handle requests. Requests during warmup route to other pool members.
Buyer-facing docs state this plainly: “provider availability can change as Macs sleep, wake, or disconnect from the network.” Availability is best-effort — the mechanisms above are what that sentence describes.