Standalone Windows monitoring kit for any NVIDIA card on Salad's demand list. Logs your GPU's power, pulls your earnings four times a day, and shows you a single dashboard with the answer in dollars, net of electricity, with the hour-by-hour pattern of when you were earning and when you were getting in your own way. No accounts. No SaaS. No subscription. Runs entirely on your machine.
I built this for myself first. I have an RTX 4070 that mostly sits idle: at night, while I'm at work, anytime I'm AFK. Salad pays you to rent a GPU like mine to AI inference customers while you're not using it. Sounds great and maybe a little too good to be true, but I wanted to know, like actually know, not "YouTube guy says" what it was earning after I pay my power bill, and whether my own occasional use of my GPU was costing me more than I thought.
So I wrote a small monitoring artifact for Claude: nvidia-smi sampler, Salad earnings puller, a dashboard. I've been running it for over a week now. Here is what it told me, exactly, in three places I would not have figured out otherwise.
C:\SaladMonitor\ to preview), plus a 7-day demo baked into dashboard.html itself, both distilled from a 9-day measurement run.You have an NVIDIA card from the list below (or know yours is on Salad's demand list), you run Windows, and your machine sits idle for any meaningful stretch of the day: at night, during work hours, while you're commuting, while you're watching TV in the other room. Whether you're a gamer who sleeps eight hours, a workstation user with after-hours dead time, a builder running a homelab on the side, or just someone with a capable PC that mostly sits at the desktop screen. This is for you.
The pitch is one sentence: your hardware can earn money while you're not using it, and right now you have no idea how much. This kit answers that question with hard numbers measured on your actual box, so you can decide whether it's worth running.
Common situations buyers come in with:
Cards the kit knows about and has estimates for:
If your card isn't on this list, the kit will still log power for local-only work, but the earnings half won't apply. Check Salad's current demand at salad.com/earn/demand.
nvidia-smi. AMD support is on the list, not in this version.This is the actual 7-day heatmap from my box, with my own annotations. Green = earning. Red = either I was using it or Salad demoted me. The kit makes it obvious which is which.
You can see the all-day red on 5/18 (running LM Studio cost me $2.20+ in foregone earnings) and the four-hour evening dip on 5/19 (I'd RDP'd into the box and stopped the container without realizing). The 5/17 gray strip is what a silent Salad outage looks like from the outside. Any of the usual culprits (Windows Update reboot, container crash, a VM that grabbed the GPU, a network mount that timed out) leaves this exact signature. The 5/20 row is partial: you're seeing today, mid-afternoon, while the loggers are still running. Without the dashboard you'd never know any of these happened until your weekly earnings came in low.
One demotion you don't catch typically eats 1-3 days of normal earnings. Salad's chef algorithm doesn't tell you when it's downgraded your machine. You only notice when the weekly total comes in low. The dashboard's chef-risk callouts surface the pattern at every six-hour puller fire, so you can restart the container and recover before the second day of penalty rates lands.
Here's what that difference looks like by card, assuming a single ~2-day demotion you'd otherwise miss vs. catching it within twelve hours:
| Card | Lost per missed demotion | Annual saved at 2 outages/mo |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12GB | $1.56 | $28 |
| RTX 3070 / 3070 Ti | $2.26-$2.61 | $41-$47 |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16GB | $2.96 | $53 |
| RTX 4070 / 5070 | $4.00-$4.35 | $72-$78 |
| RTX 4080 / 5080 | $6.96-$8.35 | $125-$150 |
| RTX 4090 / 5090 | $9.56-$13.05 | $172-$235 |
Realistic outage frequency for an active machine is one to three per month. Patch Tuesday reboot alone gets you to one, and that's before counting any RDP, VM, container crash, or "I started LM Studio and forgot" event. At two outages a month (typical), the kit pays for itself in:
And that's just the demotion-prevention math. The bigger compounding effect is behavioral: once you can see what every hour of gaming or local AI work is actually costing in foregone Salad earnings, you stop running the marginal sessions. Reschedule one weekly LoRA training run from "whenever" to "Sunday 2am when you'd be idle anyway" and you've recovered another $20-40/month on a 4080-class card.
Yes, partially. The GPU power and workload logging both work standalone. You'll get a dashboard that shows what your GPU is doing all day and what it's costing in power. The earnings side will just read $0. The kit will prompt you to install Salad if it's missing, but won't require it.
No. Everything runs locally on your machine. Logs live in C:\SaladMonitor\. The dashboard is a single HTML file you open in your browser. There's no account, no server, no telemetry. You bought a kit; you own it.
No. The runtime (logger, earnings puller, dashboard) is standalone Windows PowerShell plus a single HTML file. The bundled SKILL.md gives you a conversational setup and a built-in opportunity-cost coach if you happen to use Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or Cowork, but the README.md walks you through the same install in five steps without Claude anywhere. Most buyers will never open SKILL.md.
$29 is roughly one good week of Salad earnings on a mid-range card, about what a single missed demotion event costs you on a 4080-class GPU. The kit was iterated through months of real-world use on my own hardware until it actually answered the right questions. If it catches one outage you'd otherwise sleep through, or changes one decision you make about your hardware, it's already paid for itself.
Not yet. The kit is Windows + NVIDIA only. If there's enough interest, AMD via rocm-smi is the next port. Email me if you want a heads-up.
Salad's dashboard shows you a lifetime balance and a daily earnings number, both rounded. It doesn't show power cost, opportunity cost of local use, hour-by-hour busy patterns, the gap between "GPU online" and "Salad actually paying", or what processes were on the GPU when. This kit does. It's the dashboard you'd want if you cared about the actual unit economics.
It will, about once a month. The kit will note it in the dashboard ("earnings puller failing") and you re-paste a fresh cookie. The setup steps walk you through capturing it the first time; it's a 90-second process.
Yes, no questions asked, within 14 days. Reply to the receipt email. I'd rather refund a buyer who didn't get value than keep money that wasn't earned.
The kit will probably change what you do with your GPU. Some buyers will lean in, realize their card is sitting idle 60% of the day and start treating Salad like background income. Others will see how much they actually use their GPU and decide rental isn't the right frame. Both are wins, because both are now decisions made with the actual numbers in front of you.
That's what you're paying for, not earning, Understanding.