📅 October 31, 2026 • Tom's Hardware
Ramp's blended token price index for Anthropic shows a 77 percent fall between May 1 and October 22, 2026, from 2.65 dollars to 0.62 dollars per million tokens, figures The Register cites while reporting a warning from Darkbloom, the company behind a network for renting out idle Macs. These are blended index values rather than Anthropic's own list prices. Darkbloom operates a network where people share idle Mac computers so that customers can run AI inference workloads on them, which places token pricing at the center of its economics. Renting out spare consumer hardware for inference is one of several models that emerged as demand for AI compute outgrew dedicated data centers.
Projected node earnings near 1.23 dollars a day
Against that backdrop, Tom's Hardware projects that typical earnings for a node would fall to about 1.23 dollars per day, a figure derived by applying the same 77 percent price drop to the current median of 159.86 dollars a month. The Register, which reported the warning first, puts the current median at 5.26 dollars a day, with a best case of about 192 dollars a month for a 64 GB M5 Pro Mac mini running around the clock. The model behind the network is simple, owners contribute spare compute capacity from consumer Mac hardware, and customers run inference on it at rates below data-center prices. When frontier labs cut their API prices as sharply as Anthropic has, the price gap that commodity hardware relied on narrows quickly, and with it the margin for everyone reselling that capacity. Darkbloom published the warning as a sign of where its market is heading.
Routing adds a second pressure
The report also points to a change in how traffic gets distributed. OpenRouter has rebuilt its default router around a combined Routing Cost that adds waiting time and retry cost to price, and the company says cost per request rose about 6 percent after the change. A researcher at Eigen Labs, which runs the network, describes the shift as OpenRouter moving away from price-only routing toward decode speed and prefill speed, which matters for networks that resell consumer hardware, where a lower price was the main edge. Routing platforms sit between users and providers, sending each request to one of many possible backends, so their selection rules effectively decide who gets traffic.
Impact
For builders and companies buying Anthropic tokens, the trend is straightforwardly positive, with the same budget buying roughly four times more tokens than it did in May on Ramp's blended index, which expands what is economical to build. For networks built on consumer hardware, the same trend removes the price advantage their business case depended on, which is what the projected 1.23 dollars per day describes. The broader signal is that inference is becoming cheap enough that the hardware class behind it matters less than speed and uptime, a shift that favors professional infrastructure over repurposed desktops.
Sources: tomshardware.com and theregister.com
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