About Annotation Insider

Why it exists

AI labs pay people with real expertise to teach and grade their models. The work is legitimate, it pays reasonably, and finding it is unreasonably hard. Search for it and you get blanket pay ranges with no source, review sites quoting each other, and posts that exist to earn a sign-up rather than to tell you anything.

This site takes the opposite approach. Every rate comes off the platform's own job board rather than from a press release or another review. Nothing is retyped by hand, so nothing goes quietly stale. When a listing prints a figure that cannot be an hourly rate, we say so on the listing instead of folding it into an average.

How the reviews are written

Each platform review draws on two things kept deliberately apart: what the company publishes about itself, and what people who have worked there say. Company material is useful for the mechanics — how you apply, how screening works, when they pay — and it is marketing, so it is reported as the company's account rather than as fact. Worker reports come from Trustpilot, Glassdoor, Indeed and public forums, and every rating on this site says what it is a rating of, because a score built from people describing a recruiting interview is not a score for the job.

Where the two disagree, the review says so. Where a platform has a pattern worth warning about, the warning goes near the top of its page and not in a footnote.

How this site makes money

Some links to platforms are referral links. If you sign up through one, this site may be paid a commission, at no extra cost to you. That is the only way it earns anything: there is no advertising, nothing is sponsored, and no platform pays for placement or for a better write-up.

The obvious risk in that arrangement is a site that only says flattering things. Two rules guard against it. Reviews name the real drawbacks, including the ones that would talk a reader out of applying. And the pay figures are computed from the platforms' own boards rather than written by anyone here, so they cannot be quietly nudged upward. Two of the platforms covered here have no referral arrangement at all and are reviewed the same way. Full disclosure.

What we do not claim

No one here can tell you whether a particular platform will accept you, how much work you will be offered after you are accepted, or what you will earn per hour once unpaid time is counted. Those depend on your background and on the projects a platform happens to be running. The pay calculator exists so you can work the last one out for yourself.