Every Cash Raven payout is a sum over days: for each day one of your users qualified, one day's share of your per-country rate. This post is what a qualifying day is, and why the rate above it is still quoted per month.
If you are still deciding whether to run bandwidth sharing at all, what each monetization model costs your users is the prior question and the better place to start.
The definition
A user counts for a day once their device has been sharing for 60 minutes in that day, measured in UTC, first of the month to the last day of the month. Each qualifying day is worth your monthly rate divided by the number of days in that month, and the month is the sum of its days.
There is a bar and it is worth stating plainly, because the old version of this page said the opposite. A device that shares for 59 minutes on a Tuesday earns nothing for that Tuesday. Above the bar every qualifying day is worth exactly the same amount, whether the device shared for one hour of it or for all twenty-four — we are paying for a usable exit on a given day, not for hours.
Why the rate is still per month
Because that is the unit you compare us against another network on, and because for a fleet that is up every day it is the same money either way. If the same users qualify on all 30 days of a 30-day month, the sum of the days IS the monthly rate: 30 × (rate ÷ 30). Quoting the rate per day would divide the same earnings by thirty and make the offer look thirty times worse than it is.
Daily accrual changes the answer in exactly one place: a partial month. Half a month of traffic now pays for half a month, which is what it should always have done.
The arithmetic
Say you ship an update on the 15th that doubles your install base, and then it settles. A 30-day month:
- Days 1–15: 2,000 users qualifying
- Days 16–30: 1,000 users qualifying
2,000 × 15 + 1,000 × 15 = 45,000 user-days
45,000 × ($0.50 ÷ 30) = $750 for that month
Not 2,000 × $0.50 (your peak, held for two weeks and billed for four). Not 1,000 × $0.50 (your last reading). The days you actually earned, added up.
Why not peak, and why not final
Peak would pay you for a spike you held for an hour. Final would pay you nothing for three weeks of traffic if your fleet dipped on the 30th. Both are easy to game and neither matches what was delivered. Summing the days is the only version of this number that is both fair and boring, and payout metrics should be boring.
It is also the version that does not need a rule about which days to count. The old average divided by the days it happened to have data for, which quietly paid a full month for a fleet that ran for a fortnight; a sum has nothing to divide and nothing to argue about.
Where to watch it
Your dashboard shows the month's earnings as they accrue, day by day, alongside projected and paid-to-date figures, broken down per app and per country. The earnings page has the same model with a slider on it if you want to sanity-check a number before you integrate. The per-country split matters because your rate is per-country: 1,000 users a day in one market and 1,000 in another are usually not the same money.
What "up to $0.50" means
$0.50 is the top rate, per user per month. For how that compares with what other models pay, the per-download numbers put it next to ads, subscriptions and in-app purchases. Rates vary by country, and your full rate card is in your dashboard from the moment you sign up — we do not publish per-country rates publicly, because a rate card without your geo mix next to it is a number that misleads more often than it informs.
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Create your free accountFrequently asked
How is a month's earnings calculated?
By adding up the days. A user counts for a day once their device has been sharing for 60 minutes in that UTC day, and that day is worth the monthly rate divided by the days in the month. If 2,000 users qualify on days 1–15 of a 30-day month and 1,000 on days 16–30, that is 45,000 user-days, and 45,000 × ($0.50 ÷ 30) = $750.
Is there a minimum time a device has to share before a day counts?
Yes — 60 minutes in a UTC day. A day below that earns nothing. Above it, every qualifying day is worth the same, whether the device shared for an hour or for the whole day.
Does Cash Raven pay on peak devices or on the days actually earned?
The days actually earned. Peak would pay for a spike held for an hour and is easy to game; summing each day's qualifying users matches what the network actually received, and a partial month pays for the part of it you were there for.