For teams buying AI training data

Surge AI pricing

Surge AI publishes no price: there is no figure anywhere on its site, and projects are scoped with its team.

Read against Surge AI’s own pages and the press on 2 Nov 2026. Every figure below links its source.

The figures

What Surge AI 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
Charges 50% to ten times more than competitors; per-project fee model, no public price listexpert-labeled datasets and agent feedback (per-project fee model)	Paid by the buyer	Reported by a third party	Contrary Research, 1 Sep 2026
Surge reportedly generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 from work with AI labshuman data and RLHF	Paid by the buyer	Reported by a third party	TechCrunch, 2024
Expert rates of up to $75 to $125+ an hour; software engineer and data scientist up to $150+; generalist up to $50expert contract roles (coding, data, finance, legal, medical, STEM)	Paid to the worker	Stated by the company	DataAnnotation, 25 Oct 2026
Approved annotators earn 30 to 40 cents per working minuteapproved annotators	Paid to the worker	Analyst estimate	Sacra, 25 Oct 2026

From our dataset of published figures on what AI companies pay for human data: every vendor’s figures in one report.

About Surge AI

What Surge AI sells

Human data and post-training for frontier AI labs, an expert workforce, off-the-shelf datasets and expert-built benchmarks.

Reuters reported in July 2025 that Surge AI, bootstrapped by founder Edwin Chen and profitable, had over US$1 billion of revenue in 2024.

Surge AI home page (Surge AI, 2 Nov 2026)
Scale AI's bigger rival Surge AI seeks up to $1 billion capital raise (The Star (Reuters), 1 Jul 2025)

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 Surge AI

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.

How our expert data projects work

Appen pricingAppen 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.Shaip pricingShaip publishes no price: its pricing page shows no figure, rate card or minimum, and asks buyers to talk to its team for a quote tailored to the project.Toloka pricingToloka publishes no rate card. On its self-service platform the buyer prepays an account balance and sets the hourly rate it will pay within Toloka's suggested range; fees are shown in the account at checkout, exclude VAT, and purchases are non-refundable. Enterprise projects are quoted.TELUS Digital pricingTELUS Digital publishes no price or pricing model: its AI training data page offers projects by quote.Scale AI pricingScale AI publishes no price: its pricing page is a form to book an introductory call. The press reports that most of its revenue comes from charging model makers for access to its network of specialised human trainers.Prolific pricingProlific publishes its prices: buyers pay participants plus a platform fee, usually 42.8% for companies and 33.3% for academic and non-profit customers, with no contract or subscription. Participants must be paid at least US$8 an hour. Managed projects are quoted.

All 25 data vendors and how each prices

Looking for paid work on DataAnnotation rather than buying data? DataAnnotation: open roles, pay and whether it is legit.

Questions

What teams ask about Surge AI

How much does Surge AI charge?

Surge AI publishes no price: there is no figure anywhere on its site, and projects are scoped with its team.

What have buyers paid Surge AI?

Charges 50% to ten times more than competitors; per-project fee model, no public price list (reported by a third party, Contrary Research, 1 Sep 2026). Surge reportedly generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 from work with AI labs (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 2024).

What does Surge AI sell?

Human data and post-training for frontier AI labs, an expert workforce, off-the-shelf datasets and expert-built benchmarks.

What should a buyer know about Surge AI as a company?

Reuters reported in July 2025 that Surge AI, bootstrapped by founder Edwin Chen and profitable, had over US$1 billion of revenue in 2024.