Sell Day Passes on Your Rental, Keep Half

A dish at a festival is often the only working internet for a hundred feet in every direction, and people notice. So picture somebody walking up to your camp and offering you twenty dollars to get their phone online for the day. Until now you had two options: hand out the code to your own reservation, or say no.

There is a third one. If you have rented a Starlink kit from us and it is sitting inside an event we know about, you can turn on sharing and sell time-boxed day passes on your dish's WiFi to the people around you. You keep half of what each sale nets, as credit against your own rental.

What you do

Nothing, until your dish is somewhere that matters. When it is, the controls appear on your reservation page.

You set the price. That is the only decision. Everything else, how long a pass lasts, how much data it carries, how many people can be on at once, comes preset, and the card shows you a suggested price and the range you are allowed to charge inside.

You can also do this from the sign-in page on the dish itself, which matters more than it sounds: at an event, your rental is frequently the only working internet you have, so turning sharing on cannot require you to already be somewhere else.

That screen appears once, right after you put in your own code, and only when your dish is at an event. Say no and it does not nag you. It also tells you exactly why it appeared: which event, and how far your dish is from the middle of it.

What a buyer sees

Somebody standing near your camp joins your WiFi and gets the same sign-in page you do. They do not have a code, because they do not have a rental. So underneath the code entry there is a second option, and it appears only when the dish they have joined is actually selling passes.

Duration, data, and total are quoted live from your listing, never from anything baked into the page. They pay by card on that screen without leaving it, which is a smaller detail than it looks: a hosted checkout page would need to redirect them somewhere on the open internet, and they are inside a walled garden that does not allow that. So payment happens in place.

The moment the charge clears, their device, and only their device, is let through for the window they bought. When it expires, the router closes it. That is not a scheduled job sweeping a table and hoping to run on time. The expiry is handed to the router as part of granting access, so the hardware enforces the end of the pass.

Somebody who buys a pass and then wanders over to a different one of our dishes keeps their access without paying twice, and without their clock being extended.

The money, exactly

This is where these schemes usually get vague, so here is the arithmetic on a real $25 pass, as our software actually computed it:

• Pass price: $25.00
• Card processing: $1.03
• Data cost (2GB): $1.00
• Net: $22.97
• Your share: $11.48
• Our share: $11.49

The split is on net, not on the sticker price. We subtract the real card processing fee and what the pass's data actually costs us, then divide what is left. The default is an even split, and the odd cent goes to us rather than being rounded in a way that makes the two halves stop adding up.

Two consequences of splitting net rather than gross, both intentional:

There is a price floor. You cannot list a pass so cheap that the sale loses money before anyone's share is calculated. The system works out the break-even from the processing fee and the data cost and refuses anything below it.

You can never owe us money. If a buyer's card turns out to cost more to process than we assumed, and the sale nets out negative, your share is zero and we absorb the loss. You took no payment risk and offered no card. Nothing in this can produce a bill for you.

Every sale's numbers are frozen onto that sale when it happens. Processing fees move, our data costs move, and the share percentage is ours to change. None of that reaches backwards into a pass that already sold.

Your own rental is not the product

The part we were most careful about: selling access must not quietly cost you something.

Guest data does not come out of your allowance. Each pass's data is added to your rental's own included data. The renter in the card at the top of this post has a 50GB plan and has sold three 2GB passes, so their rental now includes 56GB, and their own dashboard on the dish says 56GB left. That is the same number in the online view in our portal post, which is the same rental. You are never billed overage on bytes you were paid for.

Your connection is not slowed or interrupted. Granting a pass lets the buyer's specific device through on the same dish and changes nothing about yours. There is no separate lane and no throttle in it.

There is a cap. A preset limit on how many passes can be live at once keeps a dish from being sold past what it can actually serve. That is the "3 / 10" on the card at the top of this post.

You get credit, not a payout

We do not send you money. This is the design decision most likely to disappoint somebody, so here is the reasoning rather than just the rule.

Paying out cash to individuals means becoming a money transmitter: onboarding you as a payee, collecting tax identity, issuing tax forms, and running the compliance that goes with all of it. That is a large, permanent, regulated business, and we would be building it so that a renter could get eleven dollars.

So your balance moves the money that is already between us. At the end of your rental it first cancels out anything you owe on that rental, and whatever is left is refunded against what you already paid. If a balance somehow cannot be applied to real money on file, it does not get silently written off or invented into a payout. It raises an alert and a person deals with you directly.

Your balance itself is an append-only ledger. Every sale appends a credit, a refunded sale appends the reversal, and settling appends the drawdown. Nothing is ever edited, and your balance is always the sum of those entries rather than a number in a field that could drift away from its own history.

Where it switches on

Sharing is not a switch in your account, and it is not a switch in ours either. It is a question about where your dish is.

We enter events we know we are renting into: a place, a radius, and dates in the event's own local time. While your dish is inside one of those, during those dates, you see the sharing controls. Outside, you do not.

This replaced an on-off setting we could flip. A global switch had no relationship to where any dish actually was, which meant it could go live for somebody's dish parked at their house. A geofence cannot switch on by accident, it expires by itself when the event ends, and it puts the offer where there are actually people to sell to. Burning Man is the case that motivated the whole feature.

On our side, the guardrails are the share percentage and the price floor and ceiling, and nothing else.

The ceiling exists because of whose problem an outrageous price is. Someone charging $200 for a day pass at an event damages our name, and we are the ones who eat the resulting dispute, not the renter who set it.

Every offer, every sale, and every balance is visible to us in one place, including any balance that needs a human.

If you have a rental coming up

If you are taking a kit to a festival, a rally, a race, or a burn, check your reservation page once you are on site. If we know about the event and your dish is inside it, the card will be there.

If you are heading to something we have not entered yet, tell us and we will look at it. And if you just want the internet and have no interest in running a small business from your camp, ignore all of this. Nothing here turns on unless you turn it on.