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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 — two constraints apply:

  • Portal floor (0.5×): The portal rejects prices below 0.5× the GPU model's reference price with an HTTP 400 error.
  • Portal hard cap (4×): The portal rejects prices above 4× the GPU model's reference price with an HTTP 400 error.

Current limits are 0.5× (floor) and 4.0× (ceiling) of the GPU model's reference price. Fetch the live reference prices from:

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

For the full explanation of both caps, 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​

Your rental earnings are forfeited for a day if your node experiences a misbehavior event (crash, job failure, SLA breach). Misbehavior is detected by validators during job execution and task verification.

Common triggers:

  • Node becomes unreachable (network issue, crash)
  • Job execution fails or times out
  • Reported metrics (uptime, hardware) do not match actual conditions

If you receive a misbehavior warning, check your node logs immediately and restart the service. A single day of decline is the consequence; sustained misbehavior may result in a reduced validator weight, lowering emission earnings as well.