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Rental fees

When a renter books your GPUs on the Lium platform, they pay an hourly USD price. That payment is split: you receive your share, and Lium retains the platform fee. Earnings are billed daily and paid to your coldkey in alpha tokens.

What is a rental fee?​

A rental fee is the USD amount a renter pays per hour (or per epoch) for access to your GPUs. The price is set by you (the provider) and displayed on the Lium portal. When a renter books GPUs for 10 hours at $1.26/GPU/hour for 2 GPUs, the total rental fee is $25.20.

This fee is split between you and Lium daily. You receive your share; Lium covers infrastructure costs (billing, on-chain transfers, validator operations, API hosting).

Your share​

You earn 95% of every rental payment. This value is configured in production and cannot be changed per-provider; it is the same for all providers on Subnet 51.

Example: If a renter pays $100 for your GPUs in a day, you receive 95% × $100 in alpha-token equivalent, paid to your coldkey.

How the price is set​

You set the hourly price for your GPUs using the Provider Portal → Node Management interface or the CLI. The CLI command runs inside the self-hosted provider Docker container — replace <provider_container> with your container name (e.g. from docker ps):

docker exec <provider_container> pdm run src/cli.py update-executor-price \
  --address <IP> --port <PORT> --price <USD/hr>

The update-executor-price command sets the hourly rate on the node. This rate is advertised to renters and used to calculate daily billing. For self-hosted provider setup, see Self-hosted provider.

Price limits​

You cannot freely set any price — but only the portal rejects prices up front. The CLI command above accepts any non-negative number and writes it straight into the node's local database:

  • Floor (machine_min_price_rate × the GPU model's reference price): the portal rejects it with HTTP 400. Nothing else on the platform checks the floor.
  • Hard cap (machine_max_price_rate × the reference price): the portal rejects it with HTTP 400, and a price set any other way is still caught — the platform stops saving or refreshing the node, so it drops off the marketplace, and the validator scores it 0.
  • Soft limit (the GPU model's market p90 × soft_limit_price_rate): nothing is rejected; an idle node priced above it stays rentable but earns no unrented incentive — see Price and the unrented incentive.

Both the floor and hard-cap multipliers (0.5 and 2.5 today) are platform settings Lium retunes. Read the allowed range from the machines endpoint, which carries it per GPU model as p_min and p_max alongside the reference price:

curl https://lium.io/api/machines

For the full explanation of all three limits, see Price limits in Managing Nodes.

Where to see your history​

Log in to the Provider Portal at provider.lium.io/dashboard and navigate to Payments. You will see:

  • Daily rental income (in USD equivalent and alpha received)
  • Rental utilization by node
  • Historical trends
  • Unpaid balance (if any)

For details on payout mechanics and the current feature-flag status, see Getting Paid.

When fees are withheld​

If a rental fails because of a problem on your node, that rental's fees for the day it fails and the day before are withheld and refunded to the renter. See Penalties for the triggers, the exemptions, and how to dispute one.