How to earn from your data.
There is a real market paying real money for one narrow kind of data: recordings of physical work and physical places, captured by the people who are already there. This page covers which data earns, what it pays, and how to get from a normal week to a listing.
Start by separating two markets
Most articles about how to earn from my data are about personal data: browsing history, location trails, survey panels. That market pays individual people fractions of a cent, because the supply is already collected and already free to whoever wants it. The market worth your time is a different one. AI labs training robots need recordings of the physical world, and there is no way to obtain those without a person going and capturing them.
- Recordings of skilled physical work, shot from the point of view of the person doing it.
- Long, continuous captures of ordinary places with the camera moving through them.
- Many short episodes of the same task, attempted by different people.
- Anything with pose or motion tracking recorded alongside the video.
- Rare settings: industrial sites, specialist procedures, equipment most people never see.
- Archives you already hold, if the rights are clean and the files are consistent.
- The mistakes and the recoveries, left in the files where a model can learn from them.
- Personal information about you or anyone else. There is no legitimate market here and it is not what labs are buying.
- Your browsing history, location history, or app telemetry. That already sits with the platforms, and it pays fractions of a cent.
- Social media posts and photo libraries, which are already scraped at zero cost.
- Static footage of an empty room where nothing happens for hours.
- Anything you do not have the right to license, however good it looks.
- Data covered by a customer NDA, or shot on regulated premises without clearance.
What an hour is actually worth
Labs are paying roughly $7 to $15 an hour for expert data today. The reason most people see far less of that than they expect is the layer in between: aggregators package supply, set the rate, and take close to half before anything reaches the person who did the recording.
What labs pay today for expert data.
The cut aggregators like Mercor and Scale AI take on the way through.
Take a tradesperson recording two hours a day, four days a week. That is around 32 hours a month. At the middle of the band, sold direct, those hours are worth roughly $350 a month, and the $1,500 SLAM kit is credited back in full once 90 qualified hours are submitted. Through an aggregator taking half, the same 32 hours return closer to $175. The hours are identical. The difference is who sets the price.
Four ways to earn from your data
These are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of providers record their trade work during the week, pick up daily-life hours around it, and hold back the portion they would rather train on themselves.
Record the job you already do
The highest-paying route by some distance. Skilled trade work is hard to stage and expensive for a lab to commission, so an hour of it carries a premium. This is the route most Butter providers take.
How to sell trade data →Record ordinary life around you
Cooking, tidying, repairs, shopping, moving through your own home and neighborhood. It pays less per hour than expert work and it accumulates quickly, because you are living anyway.
See the capture kit →License footage you already hold
Site cameras, body cams, inspection recordings, training libraries. If the rights are clean and the files are organized consistently, an archive can be listed without recording anything new.
Check it against the specs →Train on it yourself instead
Selling is one option. Some businesses hold their data, organize it properly, and use it to train or fine-tune a model of their own. Owning the asset is what makes either choice available.
See the data portal →How to earn from your data, step by step
Six steps from a standing start. Steps two and five are the ones that decide whether a set sells at the top of the band or fails review.
- 01
Work out what you already have
Before buying anything, list what your week produces: the work you do with your hands, the places you move through, the footage sitting on a drive already. Most people have an asset here and have never counted it.
- 02
Check who owns it
Ownership follows contracts, site agreements, and employment terms. Get a clear written answer on whether you can license what you record, and get permission from whoever controls the premises. Buyers ask about rights before they ask about anything technical.
- 03
Capture it in a form that is worth something
Video on its own is the floor. Pose, motion, synchronized timestamps, and consistent calibration are what move an hour up the price band. The Butter Kit records all of it while you work: $1,500 for the SLAM kit, credited back in full at 90 qualified hours, or $899 for the basic kit at 55 hours.
- 04
Build up hours with variation in them
Twenty hours across eight places beats a hundred hours in one. Vary the site, the time of day, the lighting, and the person holding the camera. Variation is the cheapest thing you can add and one of the largest multipliers on price.
- 05
Organize the files before you list
One episode per take, consistent naming, a manifest of what is in each file, a short README, and any labels you can add. Disorganized data gets discounted, because the buyer has to pay someone to fix it.
- 06
List it at your own price and sell direct
Put the specs in the title, set the number yourself, and submit for review. Approved listings go live to frontier labs, neo labs, and enterprise data teams, who buy from you without a reseller in the middle.
Read the terms before you upload
Six things that decide how much of the money reaches you. None of them are hidden. They are simply easy to skip past when a platform is asking you to start uploading.
- The middleman cutAggregators such as Mercor and Scale AI take 40 to 50 percent before the money reaches whoever recorded the work, and they set the price. Ask any platform what its cut is and who decides the rate, in writing, before you upload anything.
- ExclusivityAn exclusive license sells the same hours once. Non-exclusive terms usually pay less per sale and leave the asset in your hands. Know which one you are agreeing to, because the word is easy to miss in a contract.
- Perpetual, irrevocable, worldwideStandard language in most data licenses, and worth reading closely. It means the buyer keeps what they bought and can keep using it. Price the sale as though it happens once.
- Derived model rightsA model trained on your data does not go away when the license ends. That is standard across this market, and it is the reason to price the first sale properly.
- Personal data schemesAnything offering to pay you for browsing history, location trails, or personal profiles is a different business with a different track record. The market described on this page is for recordings of physical work and physical places.
- Upfront hardware costsAny kit you buy should have a payback path attached. On Butter the kit price is credited back in full once you submit 90 qualified hours on the SLAM kit, or 55 on the basic kit.
Questions about earning from your data
Can I really earn from my data?
Yes, for a specific kind of data. AI labs are paying roughly $7 to $15 an hour for recordings of real physical work and real environments, because simulation cannot produce them. Personal data such as browsing history is a separate market that pays individuals almost nothing, and it is worth keeping the two apart in your head.
How much can I earn from my data per hour?
Expert data sits around $7 to $15 an hour today. A well-structured set with pose tracking, many episodes, and several sites lands at the top of that band or above it. An unstructured single-location set lands at the bottom or fails review.
What kind of data pays the most?
Skilled trade work, recorded first-person, across many sites, with pose tracking and the mistakes left in. It is the hardest thing for a lab to commission and the most expensive thing for them to fake.
Do I need to buy equipment to start?
A camera you already own will produce something listable. A purpose-built kit raises what each hour is worth, because it captures pose and motion on one synchronized clock. The Butter Kit is $1,500 for the SLAM version and the full amount is credited back at 90 qualified hours.
How long before I earn anything?
Most providers need a few weeks of ordinary working days to reach a listable set, which is roughly 20 to 30 hours across several locations. Listings go through review before they are visible to buyers.
Who is buying, and what do they do with it?
Frontier labs, neo labs, and enterprise data teams. They train vision-language-action models for robots that handle objects, navigation stacks for machines that move through buildings, and world models that predict what an environment does next.
Do I keep owning my data after I sell it?
You keep the files and you keep the copyright. What a buyer purchases is a license to use them on the terms you set on the listing. Non-exclusive terms leave you free to license the same set again.
Is my privacy at risk if I record my work?
You control what goes in the frame, and every listing is reviewed before it goes live. In practice that means keeping faces, screens, documents, and customer information out of shot, and skipping jobs that are covered by an NDA.
Next steps
How to sell trade data
The highest-paying route, in detail: which trades labs want, what raises a trade set's price, and the rights you need before you record.
Read the trade guide →What buyers check first
Hours, episodes, modalities, pose, time sync, calibration, rights. The full list a lab skims, with a glossary of every term.
Read the seller guide →The Butter Kit
A wearable SLAM tracking device that captures pose alongside video, which is the single largest lever on what an hour earns.
See the device →Start earning from your data.
Create an account, request a kit, and list your first hours at a price you set yourself.
Already collecting? Go to your data portal
Looking to buy instead? See the marketplace