# Cash Raven

> An app monetization SDK for developers. A small Rust core relays a capped, consented share of a user's unused bandwidth for public web data collection, and pays the app's publisher up to $0.50 per user per month. Earned daily — a user counts for a day once their device has been sharing for 60 minutes, and each qualifying day is worth one day's share of the monthly rate. No ads are shown to users. Cash Raven is Rayobyte, in business since 2015.

## What it is

Cash Raven is an alternative to advertising for monetizing an installed user base. The developer integrates an SDK; users who opt in share a strictly capped amount of unused bandwidth in the background; the developer is paid monthly, on earnings accrued a day at a time.

- Earnings: up to $0.50 per user per month. Earned daily — a user counts for a day once their device has been sharing for 60 minutes, and each qualifying day is worth one day's share of the monthly rate. A month is the sum of its days, so a month in which a user qualified on 20 of 30 days pays for 20 days, not for the whole month. Users are counted once per network connection. Per-country rates are not published publicly; the full rate card is in the developer dashboard after sign-up.
- Self-serve: the first 100 devices go live immediately with no sales call. Past 100, new devices are refused until custom pricing is set and compliance approves the build, usually within a business day.
- Platforms: Electron and Node.js, Windows (cr_sdk.dll), macOS (universal dylib), Linux (libcr_sdk.so), and Android including Android TV and Fire TV (an AAR via Gradle or Maven). Go, Python, Swift, C, C++, C# and Rust bind through a stable C ABI. Missing platforms usually ship a binding within a week.
- Every SDK download contains the library, the native core, a README.md and an AGENTS.md written for AI coding agents.

## Consent and device protection

- Opt-in is the only code path that enables sharing. Every integrating app must ship a visible opt-out control, verified by compliance in the submitted build.
- The consent wording is published centrally and fetched by every SDK on launch, so all platforms show the same current text.
- Device protections are enforced inside the compiled Rust core with no API to disable them: a bandwidth ceiling, daily and monthly data caps (tighter on mobile data than WiFi), a CPU and RAM budget, and a port and network denylist. The relay is a background task and yields to the app it lives in.
- The SDK is NOT idle-only. It runs continuously within those limits and, when a limit is reached (a data cap, or sustained load on the device), opts the device out on its own and checks back later.
- Nothing personal is accessed: only the IP address and the bandwidth.

## Where the traffic goes

Public web data collection — price and availability monitoring, flight and hotel search, SEO and ad verification, market research, and AI training data. A permanent, growing blacklist blocks .gov and .edu, banks and financial institutions, card processors and payment sites, login and authentication endpoints, sensitive API endpoints, any domain with a reported abuse complaint, and users' own local networks. Customers run under usage limits and alert policies; tripping one forces identity verification through Sumsub before any further traffic.

## Pages

- [Home](https://cashraven.io/): the product, the four-step integration, the earnings model.
- [How it works](https://cashraven.io/how-it-works): the request path, device-protection caps, the consent pipeline, why Rust — and the FAQ for people whose devices share bandwidth.
- [Platforms & SDKs](https://cashraven.io/platforms): OS-first SDK picker with integration code for every binding.
- [Earnings](https://cashraven.io/earnings): the daily-accrual model, a worked example, payout cadence.
- [Ethics & safety](https://cashraven.io/ethics): who buys the traffic, the blacklist, the KYC trigger flow.
- [Docs](https://cashraven.io/docs): integration guides per platform, the SDK reference, and the FAQ for developers.
- [Blog](https://cashraven.io/blog): articles on app monetization.
- [Create a free account](https://cashraven.io/signup).

## Questions and answers

### How does Cash Raven monetize an app without ads?

Cash Raven's SDK relays a small, capped share of a consenting user's unused bandwidth for public web data collection, and pays the app's publisher for it. Users are never shown an ad and never see a slowdown — the SDK yields the moment the device needs its resources.

### How much can a developer earn with Cash Raven?

Up to $0.50 per user per month. Earned daily — a user counts for a day once their device has been sharing for 60 minutes, and each qualifying day is worth one day's share of the monthly rate. Devices on hosting, datacenter or VPN IPs are not counted. A publisher whose users qualify 45,000 times across a 30-day month earns up to $750 that month. The full per-country rate card is in the dashboard after sign-up.

### How is a month's earnings calculated?

Day by day. 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 number of days in the month; the month is the sum of its days. Users are counted once per network connection — so several devices on one home or office connection count as a single user. Devices on hosting, datacenter or VPN IPs are not counted. If 2,000 users qualify on days 1–15 and 1,000 on days 16–30 of a 30-day month, that is 45,000 user-days, and at the top rate 45,000 × ($0.50 ÷ 30) pays $750.

### Do I need to talk to sales to start?

No. Sign up, add your app, and your first 100 devices go live immediately. Past 100 devices, new devices are refused until partnerships@cashraven.io sets custom pricing and compliance approves the build — usually within a business day.

### Which platforms does the Cash Raven SDK support?

Electron and Node.js, Windows (cr_sdk.dll), macOS (universal dylib), Linux (libcr_sdk.so), and Android including Android TV and Fire TV (an AAR via Gradle or Maven). Go, Python, Swift, C, C++, C# and Rust bind through the stable C ABI. If your platform or language is missing, we ship a binding in about a week.

### What do users consent to, and can they opt out?

Opt-in is the only code path that enables sharing. Every app must ship a visible opt-out control, and compliance verifies it in the submitted build before the device cap lifts. The SDK also opts a device out on its own when a protection limit — a data cap, or sustained load on the device — is reached.

### What is the bandwidth actually used for?

Public web data collection: price and availability monitoring, flight and hotel search, SEO and ad verification, market research, and AI training data. A permanent, growing blacklist blocks .gov, .edu, banks and financial institutions, card processors, login endpoints, sensitive APIs, any reported-abuse domain, and users' own local networks.

### How does Cash Raven protect a user's device?

Named guarantees enforced inside the compiled Rust core, with no API to disable them: a bandwidth ceiling, daily and monthly data caps (tighter on mobile data than WiFi), a CPU and RAM budget, a port and network denylist, and no access to anything personal — only the IP address and the bandwidth. The relay is a background task and yields to the app it lives in.

## Articles

- [What app subscriptions actually pay, and why churn quietly decides it](https://cashraven.io/blog/what-subscriptions-actually-pay): A subscriber is worth their monthly price divided by your churn, so at the median 14% monthly churn a $10 plan is worth about $71 over its life, not the $120 a year the pricing page implies. Here is what that math does to each category.
- [How indie game developers actually make money](https://cashraven.io/blog/indie-game-monetization): The three models that work for games, who each one is for, and the honest answer for the free game whose players will never spend a cent.
- [Passive income from a UWP app, when subscriptions are not the answer](https://cashraven.io/blog/monetize-uwp-apps): UWP apps run inside a sandbox that constrains background network work and a store that takes a cut of everything. What survives those two constraints, and what to check before you build around any of it.
- [The email to send an SDK vendor before you integrate](https://cashraven.io/blog/sdk-vendor-questionnaire): Fourteen questions, copy-pasteable, that separate a monetization SDK you can defend from one you cannot. Including what a good answer looks like and which non-answers are disqualifying.
- [Monetizing an Electron app](https://cashraven.io/blog/monetize-electron-apps): Electron apps sit open for hours, which makes them unusually good at the one monetization model that pays for time rather than attention — and unusually bad at the ones that need a purchase moment.
- [The Android foreground service deadline that only breaks on real phones](https://cashraven.io/blog/android-foreground-service-deadline): Android gives you about five seconds to call startForeground() after starting a foreground service. Miss it and the app dies on boot — on cheap hardware, in the field, never on your emulator.
- [Where shared bandwidth actually goes](https://cashraven.io/blog/where-shared-bandwidth-goes): If your users opt in to sharing bandwidth, someone is buying it. Here is who, what they use it for, what is permanently blocked, and the parts of this that should still make you uncomfortable.
- [Freemium or paid upfront? The decision is made by your product, not your preference](https://cashraven.io/blog/freemium-vs-premium): Only about 2% of freemium users ever pay, and about 3% of Play Store apps charge upfront. Those two numbers describe the same trade. Here is how to work out which side of it your app belongs on.
- [Software licensing for indie developers, without the enforcement fantasy](https://cashraven.io/blog/software-licensing-models): Perpetual, subscription, seat-based, usage-based — and the question underneath all four, which is how much of your life you are willing to spend stopping people who were never going to pay.
- [Funding an open source project when donations do not work](https://cashraven.io/blog/monetize-open-source-projects): Sponsorships fund a small number of very visible maintainers and almost nobody else. What the other models actually are, which ones survive contact with a permissive licence, and how to add revenue without changing what your users get.
- [Mac app monetization when your users hate subscriptions](https://cashraven.io/blog/monetize-macos-apps): Mac users will pay once and resent paying monthly, which leaves indie Mac developers with a revenue model that does not compound. What the alternatives actually are, and the Gatekeeper details that shape all of them.
- [How developers actually make money from free Windows software](https://cashraven.io/blog/monetize-windows-desktop-apps): Windows has no payments rail a small developer can rely on, which is why free desktop tools with real install bases so often earn nothing. The five options that exist, what each costs, and the antivirus problem nobody warns you about.
- [Monetizing an Android app when you will not ship ads](https://cashraven.io/blog/monetize-android-app-without-ads): You have daily active users and no revenue, and you have already ruled out ads, in-app purchases and a subscription. Here is what is actually left on Android, and the platform details that decide whether it works.
- [How to evaluate a passive income SDK (including ours)](https://cashraven.io/blog/passive-income-sdks-compared): Bandwidth-sharing SDKs all make the same promise and differ in the places that decide whether you regret integrating one. Here are the eight questions that separate them, and how to get real answers.
- [How much do apps actually make per download?](https://cashraven.io/blog/how-much-do-apps-make-per-download): The average is $1.40 and it will tell you almost nothing about your app. What the per-download number hides, what each monetization model really pays, and which one fits what you built.
- [How we count what we pay you for: daily accrual, precisely](https://cashraven.io/blog/what-average-dau-means): The arithmetic behind every Cash Raven payout, written out — what a qualifying day is, why the rate is still quoted per month, and what happens when your fleet grows mid-month.
- [App monetization without ads: what actually pays, and what it costs your users](https://cashraven.io/blog/app-monetization-without-ads): Ads, subscriptions, IAP, and bandwidth sharing — what each one earns per user, and what each one takes from the experience you spent years building.

## Contact

partnerships@cashraven.io