Darkbloom Turns Paid, Hits $102K ARR with 250-Mac Distributed Inference Network

Darkbloom, an open distributed inference network built from idle Macs, has relaunched and switched from free to paid, reaching $102K ARR with 250 Macs online, per founder @gajesh. It also became the first private distributed inference provider on OpenRouter's paid tier, and is hiring engineers and operators after just four months.

Confirmed

Switched from free to paid; ARR of $102K (some post titles cite 450B tokens / $10.2K, likely typos; body figures prevail)
4.5B tokens processed cumulative; growth timeline shows daily volume rising from 100M tokens at April launch to 5B in August, with 1.64B… cumulative figures differ across posts, likely different cutoff dates
250 Macs online; owners earn roughly $120–200 per month per machine
Inference cost about 50% lower than typical API providers
Integrated with OpenRouter as its first private distributed inference provider
Reached $100K annualized revenue in four months; hiring for open distributed networks (networking, inference, sandboxing)

Why it matters

Proves consumer idle hardware can run low-cost commercial inference, giving Mac owners a monetization channel
OpenRouter integration brings distributed/private inference supply into a mainstream API aggregation ecosystem

2026-08-22 ~ 2026-08-23 · 8 related posts

Primary sources

Darkbloom hits $102K ARR with Mac-based distributed inference — gajesh · 2026-08-22 06:41 (UTC+08:00)
Mac Idle Compute Network Darkbloom Hits $102K ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-22 06:36 (UTC+08:00)
Distributed network Darkbloom hiring at $100k ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-23 05:45 (UTC+08:00)

[source] Mac Idle Compute Network Darkbloom Hits $102K ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-22
[source] Darkbloom hits $102K ARR with Mac-based distributed inference — gajesh · 2026-08-22
Distributed Inference Network Darkbloom Partners with OpenRouter, Hits $102K ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-22
Decentralized Inference Network Darkbloom Hits 4.5B Tokens and $102K ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-22
Distributed compute network Darkbloom hits 4.5B tokens served and $102K ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-22
Mac Compute Network Darkbloom: 5B Daily Tokens, $100K ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-23
[source] Distributed network Darkbloom hiring at $100k ARR — gajesh · 2026-08-23

1 near-duplicate retellings: gajesh