Upbote Bots/ Are Their Returns Good?

I first used upvote bots last year I tried them three times, the results were not good I don't think I came out even, I lost a little. This week I tried three again, because I had made a goal of reaching level 58 on Tuesday, it was late and I wasn't going to make it so I used them and I did level up. I didn't even notice what return I got on them as I was just aiming at leveling up.

But this got me thinking, so I am going to spend a small amount of SBD and see how it works out. I am going to use this post, as you can see it was made yesterday, has only 2 cents and three upvotes (including mine), so I will see what my 0.50SBD gets me from a bot:

This is the bot I am sending my 0.5 bid to (no bot names, that is not the idea):

This is the confirmation of my bid:

Now I am just waiting on that upvote to see how things come out. as an FYI SBD is priced at this moment at $6.49 and Steem is at $6.05.

Here we have the result:

So this 0.5 bot upvote gave me $1.07, let's see if I made a profit:

I will get probably about 75% after curation= about $0.80

Half of this is converted to Steem and added to my Steem Power, this equals .4/6.05 which equals SP 0.066 . And I receive 0.4 SBD which is about $2.60. So I spent 0.5 SBD= $3.24 and got back $3.00 I actually lost a little on this transaction. Of course payout is in 6 days so depending on how SBD and Steem prices act I could get more or less, this is a gamble as know one knows what will happen.

As you can see investing in an upvote bot doesn't seem such a good ides does it? But wait, if you really have a lot of SBD you can make it work, see the profits or losses you can make with these bots is minimal, but there is an upside if you spend a lot on them, spend enough and these bots can send you to the hot or trending page, and here you are very probably going to get a lot of votes because people tend to upvote hot or trending posts more because they figure they will get higher curation rewards (I don't really know if this is true), so this is a say positive side effect of upvotes.

So my opinion is, if you need upvotes for a specific reason, which is not money they are good, or if you can spend a lot of SBD your return will most probably be very good because of the trending effect. But I really don't see where someone spending just a few SBD's is going to get good returns with them. Of course upvote bots are a good business, the owner gets to sell his VP and besides gets a cut of the curation rewards, that is why it seems every week a few new bots appear.

I think they are not a bad idea and can work out for some people, especially as I said the ones willing to spend a lot.