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For teams buying AI training data

Prolific pricing

Prolific 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.

Compare data vendors

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

The figures

What Prolific 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 publishedWhose moneyBasisSource
Platform fee usually 42.8% for corporate customers, 33.3% for academic or non-profit; minimum participant pay $8.00/hr, recommended at least $12.00/hrhuman participants for research and AI data tasksBuyer's price and worker's payStated by the companyProlific, 11 Oct 2026
Researchers tend to pay domain experts up to $150 an hour per AI task completedPhD domain experts for AI tasks (computer science)Paid to the workerStated by the companyProlific (job board), 8 Jun 2026

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

About Prolific

What Prolific sells

Verified human participants for AI data collection, human feedback and evaluation, and for academic and market research, including a pool of verified domain experts, self-serve or fully managed.

Prolific supplies credentialed experts for AI training work, as its own pages describe.

  • Pricing (Prolific, 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.

The live rates are unavailable right now.

What other vendors keep

  • Appen: Gross margin 43.3% in Q3 FY26 (39.2% a year earlier); 39.2% for January to September 2026 (stated by the company, Appen Limited (ASX: APX), ASX announcement, 29 Oct 2026).
  • 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).

Alternatives

Alternatives to Prolific

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

By field: Medical · Legal · Finance · Coding · Science and engineering · Red-teaming and safety · Languages

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

All 25 data vendors and how each prices

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

Questions

What teams ask about Prolific

How much does Prolific charge?

Prolific 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.

What have buyers paid Prolific?

Platform fee usually 42.8% for corporate customers, 33.3% for academic or non-profit; minimum participant pay $8.00/hr, recommended at least $12.00/hr (stated by the company, Prolific, 11 Oct 2026).

What does Prolific sell?

Verified human participants for AI data collection, human feedback and evaluation, and for academic and market research, including a pool of verified domain experts, self-serve or fully managed.