// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin
// Bitaxe Baller Pro shipped this week. Bulk tuning, auto-tune sweeps, 90-day history, Discord alerts, in-place auto-updates. $29/year, 5 machines, 14-day refund. The free tier stays fully free, forever.
Bitaxe Baller Pro shipped on Wednesday in v1.8.0, and v1.8.2 (Thursday) added in-place auto-updates and Authenticode signing on the Windows builds. If you’ve been running the free dashboard on a fleet of two or three Gammas and wishing you could push a preset to all of them at once, this is the release for you.
The short version: $29/year, 5 machine activations per license, 14-day refund no questions asked, cancel anytime. Buy at bitaxeballer.com/pro.
The shorter version: the free tier stays fully free, forever. Pro is purely additive — nothing you have today gets paywalled, ever.
Five features. None of them are the kind of thing a single-Gamma owner needs. All of them are the kind of thing that becomes obvious the moment you have a real fleet.
Bulk tuning across selected devices. Every device card on the home page now has a checkbox. Multi-select two or twenty miners, pick a preset (Stock / Mild / Balanced / Aggressive / Max) or a custom freq/voltage/fan tuple, hit apply. Server-side bounded, parallel fan-out via a thread pool. Max 64 devices per call — enough headroom for anyone who shows up. The fastest way I’ve ever moved a five-Bitaxe fleet from “stock” to “Balanced + manual fan override” is roughly four seconds.
Auto-tune sweeps with hardware safety guardrails. The free recommendation engine tells you what to try; the Pro auto-tune actually probes for you. Frequency-only — voltage is never touched during a sweep. +25 MHz per 90-second observation window. Capped at 8 steps so a sweep can’t run away. Hard abort + baseline restore the moment VR or ASIC temp crosses 65 °C, or the moment hardware error rate breaks 5 %. The dashboard records the highest stable frequency it found and applies it. You watch the chart, you don’t babysit the chip.
The guardrails matter. There’s a reason most “auto-tuners” in this space pick a number out of a hat and hope; running real safety checks at observation cadence is what makes this safe to leave on overnight.
Long-term history. Free tier keeps its 1-hour in-memory rolling window plus the daily CSV files — nothing has changed there. Pro adds a persistent local SQLite store with 90-day retention and a new chart section on every device detail page, with range selectors for 24h / 7d / 30d / 90d. Bucket sizes adapt so the 90-day view stays legible instead of degenerating into a wall of pixels. If you want to A/B a tuning change across a real time window, this is the chart you’ve been wanting.
Discord webhook alerts. Configurable triggers for “device offline more than N minutes,” “VR temp ≥ X °C,” and “ASIC temp ≥ X °C.” There’s a 30-minute cooldown per device + trigger pair so a flapping device doesn’t spam your channel — that one took two iterations to get right. There’s also a test button so you verify the webhook works before the real one fires at 3am. Email and Telegram channels are coming in a follow-up release, but Discord covers most of the population that asked for this.
The pinned screenshot on the Pro page shows real alerts firing on a three-Gamma test fleet — two devices crossed 65 °C VR temp and Discord pinged before anything fried. That’s the picture you want of your miners.
In-place auto-updates. Free tier keeps the v1.7 update-available banner that links to the GitHub release page. Pro turns it Chrome-style — the app downloads new versions in the background and prompts to install on next launch. Pure-Python updater on the Sparkle 2 appcast schema, Ed25519-signed appcast served from GitHub Releases, signature verified before applying. You stop remembering version numbers.
I want to be specific about this because the worst possible launch for a free-tier project is one where the existing users feel cornered.
Every feature in the free tier on Tuesday is still in the free tier on Friday: 5-second live polling, rolling averages, the recommendation engine, all five built-in presets, manual tuning with safety bounds, the network scanner, pool config, mDNS at bitaxe-baller.local, daily CSV logs, light/dark theme, the update banner. None of it is touched. None of it ever will be.
Two things actually got better in the same release window for free users:
expectedHashrate field directly. At 575 MHz, expected is now 1173 GH/s, matching what AxeOS shows on the same chip. If your dashboard suddenly looks less alarming this week, this is why.One license = five machine activations. That’s “your home setup + your shop PC + your laptop + a friend’s miner you’re helping tune + one open slot.” If you genuinely need more than five, email me and we’ll work it out. You can revoke any activation from the customer portal anytime to free a slot.
Cancellation: the license stays active until the end of the period you paid for. After that, the dashboard reverts to the free tier on next launch. Your tuning history, device list, and CSV logs all stay where they are — they live on your local disk, not mine. Nothing gets deleted.
Refunds: 14 days, no questions asked.
Free tier is 100% phone-home-free. Pro is almost — there’s exactly one HTTPS POST that goes outbound, containing your license key, on app launch and once a week thereafter. That’s the license check; that’s all of it. No hashrate, no tuning data, no device list, no IPs, no telemetry. The license server lives at bitaxeballer.com/api/license and the source for the entire app is at github.com/465media/bitaxe-baller under MIT — if you want to read the request, it’s right there in the code.
Two things, both already mentioned, both worth repeating because they’re the most common questions:
If you’ve been waiting for multi-model support before pulling the trigger on Pro, you don’t need to — Pro and chip support are independent.
If you’re already running v1.7 or v1.8 on Mac or Windows, you’ll see the update-available banner. Click through to GitHub Releases, install v1.8.2, launch the app. Click the Pro indicator in the dashboard header, paste your license key from the receipt, done. The activated state is filled green with a soft pulse so it’s obvious at a glance.
If you’re new — download for Mac or download for Windows, open it, add a miner (or hit “scan network”), and try the free tier for a week before upgrading. The 14-day refund window means you can also just buy Pro on day one and back out if it doesn’t fit; whichever is more comfortable.
If you have questions, the Pro FAQ probably answers them. If it doesn’t, the contact form on the site or a reply on X gets to me directly. Thanks to everyone who tested through the v1.8 betas — the auto-tune backoff logic and the Discord cooldown both got better because you broke them first.
Free tier stays free, forever. Pro pays the bills. We keep building.