Your price floor is the one number automation never crosses. Every other setting can be tuned, scheduled, or second-guessed; the floor is a promise to yourself that no rental will lose you money. Most hosts set it by feel. This guide sets it by arithmetic: electricity, plus hardware wear, plus the minimum margin that makes the noise and heat worth it.
What the floor is, and what it is not
The floor is your break-even plus a margin you choose. It is not a target price, not a competitive strategy, and not a guess at what the market pays. The market decides your actual price; the floor decides whether you participate. When the market clears below your floor, the right outcome is an idle machine, because a rental below break-even is you paying someone to heat your garage.
A floor set too high is a fixed price in disguise: automation has no room to move and your machine sits idle above the market. A floor set too low invites the race to the bottom to eat your margin. The fix for both is the same: calculate it instead of feeling it.
The three ingredients
- Electricity. Watts drawn under rental load, including CPU, fans, and PSU losses, multiplied by your $/kWh rate. This is your dominant recurring cost and the easiest to measure precisely.
- Wear and replacement. Fans, thermal paste, pads, PSU stress, and the fact that a card running 24/7 will be replaced someday. A simple method: spread a realistic replacement or refurbishment budget over the hours you expect to run.
- Your minimum margin. The smallest profit per hour that justifies keeping the machine listed at all. This is a choice, not a measurement, but it must be above zero.
Worked example: single RTX 4090 rig
A one-card 4090 system, power limited sensibly, draws about 450 W at the wall under rental load: roughly 350 W for the GPU plus 100 W for CPU, board, drives, and PSU overhead. At $0.14 per kWh:
| Component | Math | $/hr |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 0.45 kW x $0.14/kWh | $0.063 |
| Wear and replacement | $350 budget over 25,000 hours | $0.014 |
| Minimum margin | your call, here $0.05 | $0.050 |
| Floor | sum | $0.127, round to $0.13 |
So this host should never rent below $0.13 per hour. Note how far that sits below a typical 4090 clearing price: the floor is protection, not positioning. On most days the agent or the host prices well above it, and the floor only matters during a price war or a demand slump.
Use wall power, not the GPU spec sheet
Lower your costs, lower your floor
The floor is not fixed forever. Every watt you shave moves it down and widens the band of market prices where your machine earns. The highest-leverage move is the GPU power limit: most cards deliver nearly identical rental performance at 80% power, which in the example above cuts electricity from $0.063 to roughly $0.052 per hour. Our power limit guide covers how to set and persist limits, and the open source nvidia-power-limit walkthrough has the exact commands.
A lower floor does not mean you charge less on a normal day. It means that on a bad day, when the market clears at $0.15, you are still earning while higher-cost hosts sit idle on principle.
The same arithmetic scales to bigger rigs, with one wrinkle. An 8x 4090 server drawing 3.2 kW at the wall costs $0.448 per hour in electricity at $0.14 per kWh, but the floor you enter is per GPU hour if that is how your marketplace prices, so divide by eight and add per-card wear and margin: roughly $0.056 plus $0.014 plus your margin per card. Multi-GPU rigs also idle at meaningful wattage, so a machine that rents rarely is losing money even before the first discounted rental, which is an argument for keeping utilization high, not for inflating the floor.
Setting the floor in practice
- 1Measure or calculate wall power under real rental load.
- 2Multiply by your electricity rate, add your wear allowance and minimum margin, and round up to the nearest cent.
- 3Enter the result as the machine's Price Floor. Recheck it when your power rate changes or you adjust power limits.
Floors move with the calendar
Demand is not flat across the week, and your floor does not have to be either. Some hosts run a firmer floor on weekdays, when professional demand pays better, and a lower one on weekends to stay rented through the slow days. The Price Scheduler supports exactly this with day-of-week floor overrides. Once your base floor is calculated, the next number to tune is the gap you keep to the cheapest competitor: that is the bid offset, and it decides how the space above your floor gets used.