For teams buying AI training data
Appen pricing
Appen publishes no price list: there is no pricing page on its site, and each project is quoted. Its reports describe revenue from projects with AI model builders and from prebuilt datasets, without unit prices.
Read against Appen’s own pages and the press on 2 Nov 2026. Every figure below links its source.
The figures
What Appen charges, keeps and pays
Each figure as its source published it, with whose money it is: what a buyer pays, what the vendor keeps, or what the person doing the work receives.
| Figure as published | Whose money | Basis | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median buyer pays $37,500 a year, range $16,160 to $235,927annotation, transcription and evaluation services (buyer deals in Vendr's data) | Paid by the buyer | Reported by a third party | Vendr, Feb 2026 |
| Managed service quoted as a total project cost or a monthly retainer, often $10,000 to $100,000+ a monthmanaged service (project management, QA and workflow design) | Paid by the buyer | Analyst estimate | Vendr, Feb 2026 |
| Enterprise buyers typically commit $250,000 to $1,000,000+ a yearenterprise agreements (minimum annual commitment) | Paid by the buyer | Analyst estimate | Vendr, Feb 2026 |
| Self-service pricing is typically per task, starting around $0.01 to $0.10 per simple annotationsimple annotation (self-service) | Paid by the buyer | Analyst estimate | Vendr, Feb 2026 |
| FY23 revenue from Google $82.8 million, 30.3% of Appen's revenue; Google ended the contract effective 19 March 2024data annotation and rating services | Paid by the buyer | Stated by the company | Appen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement, 31 Dec 2023 |
| Crowd expenses 59.7% of revenue; gross margin 40.3% (FY24: 60.7% and 39.3%)data annotation services (all) | Kept by the vendor | Stated by the company | Appen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement, 31 Dec 2025 |
From our dataset of published figures on what AI companies pay for human data: every vendor’s figures in one report.
About Appen
What Appen sells
Human data for generative and frontier AI: reinforcement learning from human feedback, fine-tuning, reasoning, model evaluation and safety, agentic, multimodal, speech and physical-AI data, plus prebuilt datasets, from a contributor network working in more than 500 languages.
Appen Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: APX). It reported US$73.9 million of revenue for the quarter to 30 September 2026, up 34% on a year earlier, at a gross margin of 43.3%.
- Quarterly activities report, Q3 FY26 (Appen Limited (ASX), 29 Oct 2026)
- Appen home page (Appen, 2 Nov 2026)
What an expert hour costs
Start from what the expert is paid
Every vendor's price for an expert hour is the expert's pay plus the vendor's share. We read the pay of every open AI-training role on the major platforms every hour, so here is what each kind of US expert is paid for AI work today.
| Expert | Typical rate | Range | Measured from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physicians | $125/hr | $100 to $270 | 66 rates, 13 platforms |
| Lawyers | $110/hr | $75 to $400 | 96 rates, 20 platforms |
| Psychologists | $85/hr | $35 to $95 | 9 rates, 5 platforms |
| Accountants | $80/hr | $60 to $125 | 42 rates, 16 platforms |
| Actuaries and insurance experts | $80/hr | $50 to $125 | 18 rates, 8 platforms |
| Finance professionals | $80/hr | $60 to $150 | 166 rates, 21 platforms |
| Cybersecurity experts | $80/hr | $60 to $125 | 31 rates, 7 platforms |
| Biologists | $80/hr | $40 to $125 | 39 rates, 11 platforms |
| Environmental scientists | $80/hr | $45 to $100 | 16 rates, 7 platforms |
| Mechanical engineers | $80/hr | $55 to $135 | 37 rates, 15 platforms |
| Electrical engineers | $80/hr | $65 to $145 | 23 rates, 14 platforms |
| Chemical engineers and materials scientists | $80/hr | $40 to $135 | 18 rates, 10 platforms |
| Economists | $75/hr | $50 to $120 | 16 rates, 6 platforms |
| Software engineers | $75/hr | $40 to $150 | 206 rates, 21 platforms |
| Mathematicians | $75/hr | $40 to $200 | 46 rates, 15 platforms |
| Chemists | $70/hr | $40 to $125 | 36 rates, 13 platforms |
| Pharmacists, dentists and other clinicians | $65/hr | $40 to $135 | 68 rates, 19 platforms |
| Paralegals, law students and notaries | $65/hr | $60 to $150 | 11 rates, 5 platforms |
| Physicists | $65/hr | $45 to $200 | 30 rates, 16 platforms |
| Nurses | $60/hr | $50 to $125 | 12 rates, 8 platforms |
| Nuclear and CBRN experts | $60/hr | $40 to $130 | 19 rates, 8 platforms |
| Civil engineers and architects | $55/hr | $45 to $120 | 16 rates, 11 platforms |
| Writers and editors | $55/hr | $35 to $120 | 18 rates, 8 platforms |
| Teachers | $50/hr | $45 to $75 | 29 rates, 10 platforms |
| Translators and linguists | $30/hr | $20 to $75 | 19 rates, 6 platforms |
Typical rate: the middle of what the open roles naming that profession pay, for roles open to US experts; the range runs from the 25th percentile of those roles to the 90th-percentile advertised ceiling. Read live.
What other vendors keep
- Scale AI: Monetizes per task, marking up the cost of labor, for 50%+ gross margin (analyst estimate, Sacra, 11 Oct 2026).
- Handshake: AI data business gross margins around 30%, versus about 80% for the job board (analyst estimate, Sacra, 11 Oct 2026).
- Mercor: Percentage-based recruiting fee, typically 30%, for direct talent placements (analyst estimate, Sacra, 11 Oct 2026).
- Mercor, Handshake, micro1: Roughly 60% to 70% of top-line income paid out to domain specialists (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 22 Sep 2026).
- Mercor: Third-party analysts estimate Mercor's take at roughly 30% to 35% of billed hours, with contractors receiving 60% to 70% of gross billings (analyst estimate, HeroHunt.ai, 6 Sep 2026).
- Handshake AI: Pays about $60 million a month to more than 30,000 individuals, on a run rate of about $1 billion (stated by the company, Handshake (job board), 5 Sep 2026).
- micro1: Gross margins on off-the-shelf data as high as 80% to 90% (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 20 Aug 2026).
- micro1: Net annual run rate $150M to $200M on a $500M gross run rate (about 30% to 40% retained) (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 20 Aug 2026).
Alternatives
Alternatives to Appen
Expert data from US professionals, run end to end
Evaluations, rubrics, fine-tuning data and red-teaming by US doctors, nurses, lawyers, finance professionals, scientists and engineers from our own network. An expert hour is priced at what that kind of expert is paid today (the table above) plus our fee for running the project, and the quote shows both.
Looking for paid work at Appen rather than buying data? Appen: open roles, pay and whether it is legit.
Questions
What teams ask about Appen
How much does Appen charge?
Appen publishes no price list: there is no pricing page on its site, and each project is quoted. Its reports describe revenue from projects with AI model builders and from prebuilt datasets, without unit prices.
What have buyers paid Appen?
Median buyer pays $37,500 a year, range $16,160 to $235,927 (reported by a third party, Vendr, Feb 2026). Managed service quoted as a total project cost or a monthly retainer, often $10,000 to $100,000+ a month (analyst estimate, Vendr, Feb 2026). Enterprise buyers typically commit $250,000 to $1,000,000+ a year (analyst estimate, Vendr, Feb 2026).
How much of the price does Appen keep?
Crowd expenses 59.7% of revenue; gross margin 40.3% (FY24: 60.7% and 39.3%) (stated by the company, Appen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement, 31 Dec 2025).
What does Appen sell?
Human data for generative and frontier AI: reinforcement learning from human feedback, fine-tuning, reasoning, model evaluation and safety, agentic, multimodal, speech and physical-AI data, plus prebuilt datasets, from a contributor network working in more than 500 languages.
What should a buyer know about Appen as a company?
Appen Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: APX). It reported US$73.9 million of revenue for the quarter to 30 September 2026, up 34% on a year earlier, at a gross margin of 43.3%.