In this tutorial, I will give you a few ways for making money with Raspberry PI by using bandwidth sharing apps. This post isn’t going to tell you ineffective ways claimed by many other websites like “create your blog”, “mine crypto coins”, “sell storage”, and so on. I’m going to share with you some bandwidth sharing apps that I’ve tested and I’m currently using.
Please note that this tutorial applies only to Raspberry PI computer boards, as the Raspberry PI Pico series are microcontrollers and the following tutorials will not apply to this board.
You can run these applications on any device: personal computers with any OS and mobile devices.
The concept of the companies behind this business is that they usually sell marketing research to their customers. As the web can change the page contents depending on the visitor’s country, their customers usually want to check that their advertisement or content is published correctly even from different IP addresses. Here comes into play the bandwidth sharing from people: their customers will use your device’s internet access to download the pages of interest for them and they will be able to make these checks appear from different countries and devices.
On the other hand, you will earn by sharing your bandwidth. Moreover, you will be able to earn more by inviting your friends to use the same apps: by providing them with your referral ID, the bandwidth sharing companies will give you part of their revenue, based on how much your friends will earn but without affecting their earnings.
Below are some classic questions from people interested in this kind of app when searching for making money with Raspberry PI.
Let me be clear, this kind of “business” won’t make you rich.
If you want to keep your Raspberry PI active only for bandwidth sharing, you should take into consideration the cost of the energy used by your Raspberry PI to stay on 24 hours / 24. You can calculate it according to the following procedure:
Even if you can see that the energy cost is really low in my case, if you already use your Raspberry PI for other home services and you already have it on all day, then you could consider adding these apps, as they aren’t power-hungry and will add just a very small additional load to your computer board.
In order to check if you’re really earning with bandwidth sharing you should add to this the usage of your Raspberry PI board which will stop working a day. Consider that I currently used my main RPI server for 4 or 5 years and it’s still there, fully working. I just suggest you to use a case with a cooling system, which will always keep your board at the right temperature. With the link in the following image, you can check these cases in your local Amazon store.
Then, you can compare these costs with the money you can make. I will share with you my earnings in a few paragraphs.
The legality of bandwidth sharing apps depends on several factors.
It is important to choose these applications from companies that have a strong reputation in controlling the traffic of their customers. and avoid law infringement. I’ve looked for the companies I’ve used in my tests and that I’m currently using, so I decided to filter all the available opportunities and use only them for their reputation.
This depends on your country. From mine (Italy), every day I usually see an average total bandwidth usage of 2 GB from all the apps I will show you. This traffic is usually spread during the day and I can’t see any problems of slow internet for my home with my internet line.
Also, this depends on your country as they usually pay your bandwidth based on the country where your Raspberry PI connects.
In my country (Italy), I usually get an average of 0,20$ for every GB. So, I usually get around 10$ from my bandwidth sharing and some additional dollars from the referral programs.
As usual, I suggest adding from now to your favourite e-commerce shopping cart all the needed hardware, so that at the end you will be able to evaluate overall costs and decide if to continue with the project or remove them from the shopping cart. So, hardware will be only:
The first step is installing the Raspberry PI OS. I suggest using Raspberry PI OS Lite (64-bit version, for boards supporting it) as this doesn’t have a desktop environment software, so leaving your Raspberry PI fast and light (and with lower power consumption). If you need a desktop environment, you can also use the Raspberry PI OS Desktop, in this case working from its terminal app. Please find the differences between the 2 OS versions in my Raspberry PI OS Lite vs Desktop article.
Please make sure that your OS is up to date. From your terminal, use the following command:
sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -yHere’s the list of the apps I currently use. In each tutorial, you will also find my referral links. If you appreciate my work for you, please use them so that I will be able to earn from the company’s revenue without affecting your earnings.
All of them support at least Paypal as the payment method, and some of them also support cryptocurrencies.
EarnApp is one of the first apps I tested. The good side of this app is that your payments will be automatically withdrawn to your payment account at the reach of a minimum threshold of 2,5 USD. The following link will give you a detailed tutorial to use this app:
EarnApp with Raspberry PI: earning by sharing unused internet bandwidth
Here’s another great app. The payout threshold here is a bit higher (5 USD), but they apply a transferring fee (4%). For this reason, I usually withdraw the earnings from this app only around 20 USD.
Pawns.app with Raspberry PI: passive income by sharing internet bandwidth
This app gives me higher earnings, compared to the other. But they allow you to withdraw your money only from 20 USD.
Honeygain and Raspberry PI: Earn by Sharing Internet Connection
Interested in more cool ways to use your Raspberry PI computer board? Take a look at peppe8o Raspberry PI computer tutorials!
Enjoy!
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