Those little miners were honestly never meant to ROI (IMO) They are simply to see what mining is like, I bought the gridseeds right when they first came out for 2400 for 10, and I think after I sold them for 600 6 months later, that they came close to breaking even with the money from the sale included...

You just have to get the right equipment to make money... and right now, there really isn't much that's profitable.

I started off with 3 280x's that were making me 75 dollars a day for a while in the good ol days, then I ramped my GPU mining up to 15 GPUs that were making about the same as the original 3 by the time I got them all...

Then a few months later I sold most of them in order to buy antminer S3's , which are machines that will actually make something.

At this point it's hard to tell where I am with ROI, but I know for sure that my original miner paid itself off, as well as almost all of the video cards I sold till this point. I am keeping 1 5 280x miner and one 3 270 miner in case there are things that are worth video card mining in the future, but otherwise I am moving solely to ASICs, and only to ones with good power ratio.

Anything else is simply for fun, any of the USB devices are just for fun, and at this point anything less than a modded S1 is just for fun. Sorry you lost out, but honestly you didn't lose much, and you bought miners that were only meant for a hobby, not for actually making money.