Where JouleBook fits
Almost everyone evaluating JouleBook already runs a fleet manager. The right question is not which to choose — it is what each one is for.
They answer different questions
| Fleet managers | JouleBook | |
|---|---|---|
| Foreman, Braiins, Hive OS | Is my fleet healthy? | Is my fleet profitable? |
| Controls miners | Yes | Never |
| Shows hashrate | Yes | Only as an input |
| Per-machine profit | No | Yes |
| Pool payout ingestion | No | Yes |
| Priced by | Machine | Site |
These are complements
Foreman, Braiins and Hive OS are good products. Several are free. If you are running a fleet without one, that is the gap to close first — knowing which machine earned what is not much use while you cannot tell which machines are down.
JouleBook expects to sit beside them. It reads your pool payouts and, optionally, the telemetry your fleet manager already collects. It writes nothing to your hardware and changes nothing about your operations stack.
Why hashrate is only an input here
A fleet manager shows hashrate because hashrate is the thing to watch when you are keeping machines running. JouleBook uses hashrate to weight a payout split and to compute efficiency — and then reports money, because money is the thing to watch when you are deciding what to keep powered on.
That is also why pricing is per site rather than per machine. Fleet managers charge per machine because their cost scales with machines. A profit and loss statement does not.
Where a spreadsheet still wins
If you have one site and a dozen machines, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine, and the free tier exists partly so you can decide that for yourself without paying. The spreadsheet stops working somewhere around the point where you have more than one payout scheme, more than one site, or a client asking why their invoice changed.
Start free — one site and 25 machines, permanently.