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I think it's close to break even most of the time. If you want you can check it out quite easy most of the times someone uses the paid upvote bots.

How do you check it out? The curation rewards (the 30-minute rule, f example) and the different rewards (SBD; STEEM and VESTS [SP]) always confuse me when I'm calculating the ROI.

Via steem world.org you can check what amounts someone transferred to paid upvote bots. Or you can check his wallet, that provides of course the same info. And then you check his pending pay out.

Of you use steem world.org you can check power upvote the pending pay out value. That makes it a bit more easy to see if buying an upvote was profitable or not.

This time yes. I got a bit lucky with the 3.5 day average steem price going up after using the bots this time. However the last time I used them (Think this is my 3rd ever post I used the bots) I did loose some $ when the price went down.