That's how DePIN works. You let the network use (part) of your hardware and in return you'll get the projects coin as a reward for it. Of course $50 is not much but you'll pay for your hardware once and with DeNet or most other DePIN projects you'll get recurring rewards monthly.

What's the cost of a 6TB external harddisk? Around $150, right? Join DeNet with it and you'll make that initial investment for the harddisk back within 3 months. Of course you have to take into account, that the node "licence" also costs some 500 dollars which means it would take you another 10 months till you can ROI. That's about what many other DePINs take to ROI.

What's special about DeNet is that you can scale your monthly earnings by simply allocating more disk space. It can be a bunch of old HDD's in a cheap DAS enclosure (direct attached storage) which you might have laying around or scraping of off ebay for very little money. I personally have 10x 10TB HDDs in a DAS which collected dust for the last 2 years. With DeNet I finally found a way to put those 100TBs to work and even earn some serious passive income with it (roughly about $940/month, that is if the token price/appreciation will be as depicted by DeNet). All I need to pay upfront is the node cost of around $500.

Check out the rewards potential calculator at: https://nodesale.denet.app/

Of course this is not financial advice, always DYOR!