The GoMining maintenance fee, explained: what you pay every day and how to lower it

Every morning GoMining credits your miner's reward with the previous day's maintenance already taken out. People call it "the fee" as if it were one number. It isn't: it's electricity, which depends on your miner's efficiency, plus a service fee, which depends only on its size. The platform publishes both, and the whole formula fits on one line (official documentation, checked 2 September 2026):

Net reward = pool reward − (electricity + service) × (1 − discounts)

Let's take the parts one at a time, with a 100 TH miner at 12 W/TH — the only tier sold new — as the running example.

Line 1: electricity

Your miner draws watts in proportion to its hashrate and its efficiency: 100 TH at 12 W/TH is 1,200 W. Run that for 24 hours and it's 28.8 kWh. GoMining charges electricity at $0.05 to $0.07 per kWh depending on the data centre your miner lives in (about miners); you don't choose the data centre, so the calculator lets you set the rate and defaults to the low end. At $0.05 that's $1.44 a day; at $0.07, $2.02.

Written as a formula, which is how the methodology and the calculator use it: $/kWh × 24 ÷ 1000 × W/TH × TH. The thing to notice is that W/TH multiplies straight through. A 28 W/TH miner pays $3.36 a day for the same 100 TH: not a bit more, 2.3 times more.

Line 2: the service fee

A flat $0.0089 per TH per day, the same for every miner regardless of efficiency, which covers the physical upkeep of the hardware in the data centre. For 100 TH that's $0.89 a day. It's been the published figure since at least July 2026 and GoMining's own ROI article from June 2026 uses the same number.

Adding them up

100 TH at 12 W/TH, electricity at $0.05: $1.44 + $0.89 = $2.33 a day, or about $71 a month, before any discount. That's $0.0233 per TH per day, which is exactly the figure GoMining quotes in its own material for a 12 W/TH miner, so the formula isn't an estimate: it's the bill.

Here is the same sum for each efficiency tier you'll meet on the platform, at both ends of the electricity range, and — the column that actually matters — how much of today's gross reward the bill eats:

No discounts. The bill columns are arithmetic and don't depend on bitcoin; the last column does, because it divides the bill by what 100 TH mines today at $0.05/kWh. Above 100% the miner is losing money.

Read the last column as a health check. Under half of gross is a comfortable miner; around two thirds is a miner whose year is changed by its discounts; past 100% is a miner paying to exist. Efficiency moves you between those states more than anything else you control.

How it's charged

Daily, automatically, out of the reward. Rewards are computed for each full UTC day and credited the next morning between roughly 02:00 and 05:00 UTC, net of that day's maintenance. By default the deduction is in bitcoin; you can instead pay from a GOMINING token balance in your virtual wallet, and if that balance runs dry the platform falls back to bitcoin. There is no invoice, no due date and no unpaid state.

Paying in tokens changes two things. It's what activates the largest of the discounts (next section), and it switches on Reward Protection: on a day when the reward doesn't cover the maintenance, the result is zero rather than a negative balance — no payout and no debt (official payouts guide). It doesn't make a bad day profitable; it stops it from digging a hole.

Why the bill doesn't fall when bitcoin does

This is the part that decides whether a miner is a good idea, and it's simple: the reward is paid in bitcoin, so its dollar value moves with the price every day. The bill is set in dollars — kWh and service fee — so it doesn't move at all. Here is the same 100 TH miner at 12 W/TH under three prices:

12 W/TH, $0.05/kWh, no discounts, network hashrate held at today's value. The middle row is today; the others are 30% below and above it.

A 30% drop in bitcoin is not a 30% drop in what you keep. Because the bill sits in the middle of the gross and doesn't move, the net falls by a lot more than 30%, and for a less efficient miner it flips negative. The mirror image is also true: a 30% rise flows almost entirely into the net. Mining is a leveraged position on the bitcoin price, and the maintenance fee is the leverage. Each tier's exact break-even price is here.

The discounts, and what they apply to

The discounts apply to the sum of the two lines, not to either one separately, and they stack:

• GOMINING token balance: 1% for every 18 days of maintenance the balance would cover, up to 20% at 360 days. Locked veGOMINING counts too.
• VIP tier: 0.3% at Bronze II up to 6% at Elite, set automatically by your TH, your veGOMINING votes or your referral activity, whichever is highest.
• Service button: +0.3% per consecutive day you press it, capped at 3% after ten days.
• Solo mining: a variable extra set by the weekly holder vote; not applied to miners in Miner Wars.

The three documented ones add up to 29%. On our $2.33 a day that's $0.68 saved, and the bill drops to $1.65. How each discount is earned, and what the token one really costs, is worked out here. One honest caveat repeated from that article: a 29% discount on a big bill is still a big bill. Discounts soften a bad W/TH; they don't fix it.

Three ways to make the bill smaller

1. Efficiency, before anything else. It's the only lever that acts on the bigger line. Going from 15 to 12 W/TH cuts electricity by 20%; from 28 to 12, by 57%. It's why every new miner is 12 W/TH and why older ones can be upgraded step by step in the app.
2. The free discounts. The button costs a tap a day and the VIP tier costs nothing. Together they're worth up to 9%, and they're the first thing to switch on.
3. The token balance, if it suits you. Up to 20%, but it ties up capital that grows with your fleet and moves with the token price. Worth it for some fleets, not for all; run your own numbers before deciding.

What you can't change is the kWh rate: it's fixed by the data centre. If your electricity at home is cheaper than $0.05, the comparison with mining at home is worth reading; for almost everyone it isn't, and that gap is the whole reason the model exists.