Hey! So I have two spare computers, with 7th gen i5s and 16GB of ram. What would be the best way to try and monetise them? I’ve found one or two websites which allow you to rent out your servers essentially as a VPS on a fairly long term way with a decent payout. However I tried sending them an email and got no response. Are there any other such services?
(The website was this )
The amount of money you can gain from renting out your equipment vs. the electrical cost is not worth the effort you will need to employ to make this work. Especially for these entry-level spec computers. The best way to monetize is to liquidate them into cash and churn that cash into something more profitable, which is not easy, but it works for those who are creative and passionate enough. Another method is to make them do tasks that frees up your time, or you can delegate tasks that will help you. Good luck on your monetization efforts
The only reason why I’m considering this kind of monetisation is cause my original plan of flipping office computers into low end gaming machines is not working
Maybe don’t try to market them as gaming PCs and just market them as great workstation PCs. Also, it depends on the market and your inventory imports. If your market is people who can afford current Gen laptops, they will not like your PCs. If you market them as home theater media streaming PCs for those who want something better than a firestick, then it will make a better selling point. Either way, if you have a steady supply of these low-end PCs, then think about multiple markets instead of limiting your client base to just cheap gaming PCs. There is so much more a computer can be. Do some market research on your local or online markets and make the PCs capable of solving their needs.
I tried doing such market analysis and it did seem that the low end gaming market was filled with overpriced stuff that I could easily undercut with apparently even some semi professional sellers present.
OK, I understand your idea. However, I will have to throw some cold water on you. You did a market analysis, and you saw the margins for low-end gaming PCs were too high. However, what you didn’t do is market analysis on the clients. You half ased it and got burned. From my experience, customers do not do much research or think logically about what they spend their money on. It’s true that people will most likely make bad financial decisions. They will see your lower priced PCs and overthink it. They will believe that the lower priced stuff is also lower quality and a worse deal. There is a range in which they believe a PC should cost, and by undercutting the competition, you estranged your client base. On the other hand, presentation and words matter a lot to people and the algorithms(search engine optimizers). They don’t care about acronyms or technical words. If you look at how Apple and other giant tech brands marker their technology, you will find that specs take a back seat. On the flip side, the experience and capabilities take center stage. Making your clients feel welcomed and meeting their desires without accidentally coming off as “cheap garbage” is a tricky balancing act.
If you don’t want to do this type of marketing and selling, then just make the PCs work for you instead.
Why do you need to have “scamming people” as a business model instead of selling those machines as what they are?
They’re born for office use and are still perfect for office use. They’re not and they’re never been gaming machines. You’re trying to deceive those people that they just know “Intel i7 is good”, but they don’t know that a 1st gen Intel i7 is worse than a 10th gen Intel i3. They’ll immediately return it as soon as they discover it can’t run even old games at 720p 30fps
Find which line you like (optiplex, thinkcentre, HP), stock only similar computers and sell them to small businesses, 5-6 years old machines are still overkill for accounting and email.
I resell old thinkcentres with a 100% margin without any kind of lie or omission and customers are happy and buy again. Then because I only stock the same stuff I have plenty of spare parts and I can give fast replacement
Im not scamming? I upgraded the machines, doubling the ram and adding a dedicated graphics card. I’m actually attempting to create value
I did that with my personal machine. It works well.
Ah ok I thought it was just adding some RGB and vinyl wrapping to cover the scuffs
Nah. I did the arguably poor choice of only upgrading the internals
I run one of these office machines as a desktop/server. My desktop is a vm with vfio and it works well.
Its especially nice as I can basically though in tons of ram and even a external GPU and power supply with an adapter. Don’t call someone a scammer just because they want to make money
I assumed it was one of those listings “Intel i7 gaming PC 16gb RAM” that are RGB lipstick on 10 years old e-waste
I’ve been too harsh with that sentence, I regret it
Really? You could just throw in a GPU and call it a day.
You shouldn’t have any issue selling these machines as there is still a market
You could sell the hardware. That’s about it unless you want to save money by self hosting
This. If there was something profitable to do with old computers besides sell them, the ewaste merchants would have figured it out by now
Because you don’t have dozens of ipv4 addresses and you don’t give a SLA or a business invoice you have to severely undercut prices.
A VPS with that cpu performance can be rented for free from Oracle or from $2 from ovh.
So you have to rent it to 50 different customers just to break even the electricity price. Impossible
Not to mention bad customers who pay the low fee just to see if you’re hackable
Build a home lab and learn skills that get you a well-paying job.
Sell them second hand, that is the only way you can make money off that old hardware.
Solar panels and mining crypto when the sun is out and electricity is free. Nothing else will bring you any profit. And it’s unlikely you’ll be able to mine anything in any time length that is useful
This is assuming you already have solar panels. You’d never recoup the costs of purchasing them for this.
It also assumes that you can’t directly sell power back to the grid, which without power efficient mining hardware would still be a more valuable thing to do with the electricity.
Not much of an issue today but, eventually grids will have to stop accepting back feeding solar systems. So some day, maybe.
In belgium, eletrical prices are so high that it only takes 7-8 years including the installation costs. Without batteries that is. Batteries would double it, depending on capacity.
But someplace like North Dakota, it would take around 15 years to recoup the investment due to low energy prices and toxic, anti-solar policies paid for by energy companies.
That will bring at least a few cents a year!
Another angle to consider is the liability of you being responsible for the content on your system. Someone could rent your machine to host very illegal content. At which point, as far as the authorities are concerned, it is coming out of your IP from your computer. You might be able to explain it away, or you might not. It’s not a hassle that’s worth the while.
You could try self host some services to reduce subscriptions such as jellyfin or navidrome. You could run a tor relay and accept donations. Host and maintain sites or services for someone. As others have said selling them is probably going to net you the most
