How Much HNT Will My Hotspot Earn?

One of the most fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions in all of the Heli­um space is: “How much will I earn?” 

Here’s how to get to a rea­son­ably accu­rate pre­dic­tion for your loca­tion. We’ll start with num­bers, do some more num­bers, do a lit­tle edu­cat­ed guess­ing, and end up with a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate of how much a giv­en spot will earn.

The Global Average

Start­ing at the top, the glob­al dai­ly aver­age for a Heli­um Hotspot that’s online is .091 HNT/day. How did I get that? Math.

I took the share of HNT we Hotspots get month­ly (26%), added in the unused HNT from Net­work Data Trans­fer, removed the Hotspots that are offline, and came up with a rea­son­able glob­al aver­age. Just in case you missed it above:

The Global Average For A Helium Hotspot is .091 HNT/day As Of March 6th, 2022.

So, is that YOU will get? On aver­age, prob­a­bly. Of course, if you’re read­ing this blog, you’re prob­a­bly above aver­age. In that case, how do we make a rea­son­able guess for how much YOU will make, in YOUR loca­tion. Lemme show ya:

Here’s how I’d do it: Take the Glob­al Aver­age as my start point, see if my Region­al Aver­age is high­er or low­er, take a look at local res 8 hex­es, decide whether or not my deploy­ment will be above or below aver­age, and make an edu­cat­ed guess off of that.

If you want help with that, try either of the Heli­um Cours­es on this site, or you can join the Gris­tle Crüe and jump in on week­ly calls where you and a bunch of oth­er folks into Heli­um can learn from me and each oth­er on how to crush it in Helium.

Here are all my sources for this info:

• Num­ber of Hotspots, DC burned, HNT Price: Heli­um Explorer
• Per­cent­age of Hotspots Online: DeWi ETL
• Num­ber of HNT Dis­trib­uted Per Month, PoC & Net­work Data Trans­fer Per­cent­ages: Heli­um Docs

Here are the resources used in the video:

• Hotspot­ty
• Heli­umVi­sion

I’ll fin­ish up with what Heli­um USED to be like. This was post was ini­tial­ly writ­ten in mid-March of 2021. I’m leav­ing it up most­ly for his­tor­i­cal pur­pos­es (and so some of the old­er com­ments make sense.) Rock on!

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LEGACY STUFF — READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO SEE WHAT HELIUM WAS LIKE IN MAY OF 2021

Oh, the oth­er ques­tion you’ll have is along the line of: If I only have XX hotspots in my city, and I own them all, how much can I expect to earn? There are many caveats to this, most­ly cen­ter­ing around how many of those hotspots can “see” each oth­er. One SUPER impor­tant thing to note from these exam­ples is that most hotspots own­ers do a poor job of deploy­ment, earn­ing on aver­age 2 HNT/day. An opti­mized hotspot with good place­ment should earn at least 8 HNT/day. If you’d like help with doing a much bet­ter job, con­sid­er hir­ing me to help you max­i­mize your earn­ings.

I’ll give you a few real world exam­ples of 7 day earn­ings. (data here, as of May 9th, 2021).

• Flagstaff, AZ — 6 hotspots — 79.52 HNT
• Jerome, AZ — 6 hotspots — 97.91 HNT 
• Mid­land, TX — 4 hotspots — 57.3 HNT
• Col­lege Sta­tion, TX — 4 hotspots — 68.25 HNT
• Char­lottesville, VA — 4 hotspots — 46.15 HNT
• Erie, PA — 4 hotspots — 25.89 HNT
• Elfri­da, AZ — 3 hotspots — 57.98 HNT
• Ari­zona, TX — 2 hotspots — 24.67 HNT
• Colum­bus, GA — 2 hotspots, 42.50 HNT
• Three Rivers, MI — 2 hotspots — 14.26 HNT

For those of you who want to see how I come up with aver­ages and be able to do it them­selves, here’s a 10 minute video that uses Site­bot. Site­bot used to be a superb resource, but has degrad­ed and is no longer good for this. Still, I’ll leave this up so you can see the thought process. 

This will show you how much HNT you should expect to earn on aver­age, and you’ll learn how to eas­i­ly refine that num­ber for your­self, in your city.

Before we move on, let me set some expec­ta­tions. This post was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in mid-March of 2021. We only had 22k hotspots on the net­work at the time. 3 weeks lat­er (April 5th) we had 25k. That num­ber will con­tin­ue to go up, prob­a­bly to 200k by the end of the sum­mer of 2021. With­in a few weeks of it being writ­ten, all the hard num­bers in this post will be wrong. Still, you can use the method in the video to cal­cu­late what the num­bers *should* be for the next few weeks for you. 

First, I’ll knock out my assumptions:

I’ll assume that you are NOT going to plug in your hotspot at Mom’s house and walk away. If you do that, you should expect to earn less than .1 HNT a day.

I’ll assume that you’re will­ing to spend mon­ey, time, and effort to opti­mize your hotspot place­ment. As in, more time than your friends and fam­i­ly think is “rea­son­able”.

As I learned long ago from Shawn Alla­dio (one of only two humans to ever ride a jet­s­ki over a 100′ wave) if you want to do awe­some things you should be unrea­son­able. Be like Shawn. She’s rad.

I’ll assume that you under­stand the gen­er­al intent of Heli­um. Psst, it’s to pro­vide as much use­ful cov­er­age as pos­si­ble for IoT devices run­ning on the Heli­um network.

Final­ly, I’ll assume you’re not con­tem­plat­ing a “lone wolf” place­ment, which is one where there is no pos­si­ble way for anoth­er hotspot to con­nect with you via radio signal.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s start high. Like, way high. The top earn­ing hotspot in the world (as of March 14th, 2021) is Rough Chili Bird, in Spring­dale, Arkansas. Before I tell you how much HNT they’re earn­ing, let’s define “top earning.”

Basi­cal­ly, no Heli­um data for earn­ings is use­ful at any­thing less than a 7 day cycle. 24 hour, even 48 hour stats are just too vari­able to be use­ful. As an exam­ple, here are the dai­ly earn­ings for a rea­son­ably high per­form­ing hotspot.

As you can see, they vary wild­ly day by day, and if you con­stant­ly fid­dle with it in order to improve, you’ll be respond­ing to noise, not signal.

Heli­um is all about signal.

Back to the world’s high­est earn­ing hotspot, Rough Chili Bird.

The Bird earned 2,850 HNT over the last 30 days. Yeah, that’s a lot. At cur­rent HNT prices well, peo­ple work a lot hard­er for a lot less mon­ey per month.

Sec­ond place is Docile Bone Pony over in Cam­bridge MA, earn­ing 1,787 HNT in the last 30 days. No, I don’t make these names up, and nei­ther do the hotspot own­ers. They’re ran­dom­ly assigned.

Here’s the top 10 earn­ers, pulled off of Site­bot.

So that’s the MOST you’re like­ly to make. You prob­a­bly won’t make that much. I went through a few cities (includ­ing my own, America’s Finest City) to give you some averages.

For your aver­age hotspot, you’re look­ing at right around 8 HNT/day.

I got that by going through and weed­ing out all the hotspots mak­ing less than 1 HNT/day. If they’re doing that, it’s pret­ty obvi­ous they’re not in this to crush, and that’s my goal. CRUSH.

I was curi­ous about the crush­ers, so I went through the top 1,000 Hotspots in the USA and found the aver­age was more than twice as high; about 23 HNT/day. You can rea­son­ably expect that if you opti­mize den­si­ty, ele­va­tion, and anten­na, in that order.

I went through a few exam­ple cities (San Diego, Seat­tle, Lon­don, and Berlin) and then I looked for the answer to the sec­ond most pop­u­lar ques­tion I get asked, which is:

“I live in a small city and could buy 5–10 hotspots right now. Should I do it? How much will I make?”

The stats are in the video, here’s the bor­ing stuff for those of us who read.

San Diego has 142 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 9 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 1,334 in the last 30 days.

Seat­tle has 90 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 8 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 706 in the last 30 days.

Lon­don has 188 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 8 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 1,266 in the last 30 days.

Berlin has 134 hotspots earn­ing more than 1 HNT/day. The aver­age hotspot earns 12 HNT/day, and the top earn­er pulled in 1,617 in the last 30 days.

Final­ly, I found a small clus­ter of hotspots that is typ­i­cal of any small deploy­ment in a city. It was on the south side of Cypress, in Limas­sol. While there are 10 hotspots deployed there, only 5 have been run­ning for 30 days or more. Those 5 aver­age 16 HNT/day, but the top earn­er only pulled in 592 in the last 30 days.

This should help you get a rough idea of how much you’ll make. For more on Heli­um Hotspot Opti­miza­tion you can read my guide over here.

If you’d like a dif­fer­ent take on earn­ings with an ori­en­ta­tion toward what might hap­pen in the future as the net­work grows, check out Steve’s arti­cle over on DeWi.

Best of luck with your deploy­ments, let’s grow this net­work togeth­er and CRUSH! If you’d like help with a Heli­um deploy­ment, from a sin­gle hotspot to an entire ecosys­tem, con­sid­er hir­ing me.

None of this is invest­ment advice. Keep read­ing and learn­ing. You could lose every­thing. I hope you don’t. I hope you win so big that you track me down and plant a big wet kiss on my cheek and slip a QR code with 10 BTC into my pock­et because you just have that much to spare. Here’s to your success!