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If you have a good residential broadband connection, you could be making money with a Raspberry Pi by simply sharing extra bandwidth that you do not use.
There are several ways to make passive income from the Raspberry Pi, you can:
- Mine Cryptocurrency (low return)
- Share your unused disk space (medium return)
- Share your unused bandwidth (high return)
In this article, we will focus on sharing your unused bandwidth to EarnApp and receive your passive income in return. All you need is a Raspberry Pi.
For the operating system, we will use Ubuntu Server 20.04.3 LTS (which supports RPI 3,4,400 on the 64-bit version).
For the Raspberry Pi, I used an old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 that I had lying around. but you can use any Pi that supports Ubuntu.
What is EarnApp?
EarnApp is a bandwidth-sharing service that connects residential IPs with vetted customers for sharing bandwidth for mostly web scrapping: https://earnapp.com/i/4usvzmr
Their tagline is:
Earn passive income while your devices rest. Make big money, safely, by sharing the unused resources on your resting devices.
According to their FAQ section:
BrightData works with over 10,000 customers like major banks, universities, social networks, ecommerce sites, and many brands you know. BrightData enables these qualified customers to download publicly available web data using the user’s Internet connection — data like web statistics, price comparison, and other verified business processes.
Checking out their earnings calculator, I could be making around $75 for sharing around 5GB of my bandwidth.
The payouts can be paid to PayPal or Amazon Gift Cards.
All of this sounds quite good, is easy to set up, and is (very) passive income.
Let’s see how we can start earning money.
Installing Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi
Installing Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi is a very straightforward process, you can find detailed documentation on the Ubuntu website: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-your-raspberry-pi
After the installation and boot of the Raspberry Pi, we can log in with SSH and should be presented with the beautiful and familiar Ubuntu server start screen:
Welcome to Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-1042-raspi aarch64)* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
System information as of Mon Jan 10 17:28:39 UTC 2022
System load: 1.2 Temperature: 45.1 C
Usage of /: 13.8% of 13.93GB Processes: 137
Memory usage: 28% Users logged in: 0
Swap usage: 0% IPv4 address for eth0: xxxxxxxxx
A small detail, we can even see the temperature of the Raspberry Pi, mine seems to be at 45 degrees Celcius just after boot.
Setup EarnApp
First, we need to create an account with EarnApp, this can easily be done with ‘Sign in with Google’, just go to EarnApp at: https://earnapp.com/i/4usvzmr
Setup Raspberry Pi
To set up the Raspberry Pi all that is needed is to run a script and then link the device in the Dashboard.
Let’s install the script first:
$ wget -qO- https://brightdata.com/static/earnapp/install.sh > /tmp/earnapp.sh && sudo bash /tmp/earnapp.sh
We get the following output:
Installing EarnApp CLI
Welcome to EarnApp for Linux and Raspberry Pi.
EarnApp makes you money by sharing your spare bandwidth.
You will need your EarnApp account username/password.
Visit earnapp.com to sign up if you don't have an account yet
To use EarnApp, allow BrightData to occasionally access websites through your device. BrightData will only access public Internet web pages, not slow down your device or Internet and never access personal information, except IP address - see privacy policy and full terms of service on earnapp.com.
Do you agree to EarnApp's terms? (Write 'yes' to continue): yes
Installing...
Creating directory /etc/earnapp
Fetching aarch64
--2022-01-10 12:20:54-- https://brightdata.com/static/earnapp/aarch64
Resolving brightdata.com (brightdata.com)... 3.92.97.199, 3.90.158.189
Connecting to brightdata.com (brightdata.com)|3.92.97.199|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: /static/earnapp/aarch64?md5=77036544-58fafdfb [following]
--2022-01-10 12:20:55-- https://brightdata.com/static/earnapp/aarch64?md5=77036544-58fafdfb
Reusing existing connection to brightdata.com:443.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 77036544 (73M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘/tmp/earnapp’
/tmp/earnapp 100%[==============================================================================>] 73.47M 3.13MB/s in 25s
2022-01-10 12:21:20 (2.98 MB/s) - ‘/tmp/earnapp’ saved [77036544/77036544]
d360e24e2b66b916bfbf6e46ac2ab7dd /tmp/earnapp
running /tmp/earnapp install
✔ Moving /tmp/earnapp to /usr/bin
✔ Service earnapp enabled
✔ Service earnapp_upgrader enabled
✔ EarnApp is installed and running.
✔ EarnApp is active (making money in the background)
See usage options by running earnapp
⚠ You must register it for earnings to be added to your account.
⚠ Instructions:
⚠ 1. Copy the following device ID to your clipboard:
sdk-node-0807c022ab7647b8bc0822dbxxxxxxxx
⚠ 2. Go to the EarnApp dashboard https://earnapp.com/dashboard
⚠ 3. Click on "Link device"
⚠ 4. Paste the device ID
All that is required now is to go to the Dashboard and link the device by copying and pasting the device ID, by clicking ‘Link device’ on the Dashboard.
We can check if the EarnApp is active and running on the Raspberry Pi with the command:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ earnapp status
✔ Current status: enabled
EarnApp will run as a service, which means it will automatically start when you reboot the Raspberry Pi.
Results
Of course, there is a lot of criteria about sharing the bandwidth that can cause that I share more (or less) and that will influence the monthly earnings.
If there is a lot of traffic for a specific country, there will be more earnings, and if there is less traffic, the earnings will drop.
According to their calculator, I could potentially earn around $75 for sharing around 5GB per month.
So far I have made $587.63 since January 2022.
Conclusion
Sharing bandwidth is a good possibility of making some passive income.
While the earnings depend a lot on your country and the bandwidth needs and use, it is quite simple to set up.
With a Raspberry Pi, you also don’t need to have a power-hungry PC running 24h and wasting electricity.
With 5 minutes of setup and configuration you have a set and forget passive income Raspberry Pi, so why not do it and earn some extra (small) income.
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