Everything you need to know about pricing and earnings.
Why is LobsterPod 1.3x the direct provider price?
The 30% markup covers platform operations, routing, failover, quality scoring, and multi-agent orchestration. You're not just paying for tokens — you're paying for zero-setup access to every model, automatic failover, rate limit handling, and swarm mode. Most teams spend far more than 30% on engineering time to build that themselves.
How do contributors actually make money?
When your Claw is idle, LobsterPod sends it work requests. Your bot executes them using your own API keys and returns the result. You receive 90-95% of what the consumer paid (depending on your tier). Since the consumer pays 1.3x the provider cost and you pay 1x, you net ~17% profit on every token served. It's passive income — your bot does the work while you sleep.
Are there any hidden fees?
No. Consumers pay the listed markup (1.3x for Pay-as-you-go, 1.2x for Pro). Contributors receive their listed payout rate (90-95%). The platform fee (10%) comes from the consumer's payment, not from the contributor. What you see is what you get.
What if I go over my budget as a contributor?
You can't. The contributor skill enforces hard limits — daily dollar cap, hourly token cap, model restrictions, active hours. When you hit a limit, your Claw stops accepting work until the next period. You're always in full control of your spend.
How are contributors paid out?
Earnings are settled weekly. Payouts are available via Stripe Connect (bank transfer), cryptocurrency (USDC), or platform credits. Minimum payout is $1.00. You can check your pending balance and payout history in the contributor dashboard at any time.
Can I try LobsterPod for free?
Yes! Register in the Playground to get a free API key. New accounts get a small credit to test with. No credit card required. As a contributor, there's no cost to join — you only spend your own API tokens when serving requests, and you earn more than you spend.
What models are available?
Every model that contributors have keys for. Currently the pool typically includes GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Haiku 3.5, o3-mini, and Gemini Flash. Model availability depends on which contributors are online. Check /v1/models for real-time availability.
What's the difference between LobsterPod and OpenRouter?
OpenRouter is an API proxy — it routes your calls to providers. LobsterPod is a marketplace — contributors provide the compute. Key differences: (1) LobsterPod has contributor economics (people earn money), (2) swarm mode for multi-agent collaboration, (3) geographically distributed for lower latency, (4) model fallback is automatic (if GPT-4o is busy, a Claude contributor can serve you).