Host FAQ

Host questions, answered without the hype.

Short answers for people considering volunteering a Mac for the unpaid RenderMac beta.

Will I be paid during this beta?

No. Host testing is voluntary and unpaid. There are no earnings, wages, credits, reimbursements, or payouts, and test activity creates no future entitlement.

Could there be a paid host program later?

Possibly, but it would use separate terms and require a new explicit opt-in. Nothing performed in this beta is retroactively payable.

Is a MacBook Air M1 useful?

Yes for Remotion-class jobs we measured: HeavyMotion within ~25–30% of M2 Max wall-clock. See M1 Air host page.

Will rendering destroy my electricity bill?

Unlikely to be the dominant cost. M2 Max package energy for a 20-minute kinetic was about 5.4 Wh in our bakeoff. Thermals and time matter more. See power bakeoff.

Can I pause?

Pause is a core trust feature. Read thermal pause.

What jobs run?

Typed media services - stitch, encode, captions, Remotion-class work - not arbitrary untrusted shell access marketed as “compute.”

Does pairing make my Mac part of a public fleet?

You choose the pool when you create the code. org_private keeps the Mac inside your organization’s test capacity. shared_beta volunteers it for unpaid cross-organization routing tests. The legacy open public marketplace pool still requires separate terms and release gates.

Volunteer for the unpaid host beta

Host testers volunteer Apple Silicon capacity. There are no earnings, wages, credits, reimbursements, or payouts during this stage.

Join as unpaid host tester

One RenderMac account can use both dashboards. See the unpaid beta terms.