How to sell your trade data.
Every hour you spend wiring a panel, prepping a line, or servicing a unit is a demonstration of skilled work that no lab can generate in simulation. This page is the whole path from an ordinary work day to a listing that labs buy direct.
What people mean by trade data
Trade data is a recording of skilled work being done properly, captured from the point of view of the person doing it. When people ask how to sell my trade data, they usually have hours of their own working day in mind: the hands, the tools, the order of operations, and the moment something goes wrong and gets corrected. Robotics labs buy it because that combination is the one thing they cannot manufacture.
- ElectricalPanel work, conduit runs, fault finding. Two hands, live tools, and a long sequence of steps that has to happen in order.
- Plumbing & HVACWork in tight spaces, valve and fitting handling, diagnostics on equipment that is already installed and already failing.
- Construction & carpentryMeasuring, cutting, fastening, and moving a body through a site that changes shape every week.
- Commercial cleaningThe same task repeated across hundreds of rooms and dozens of buildings. High episode counts and real variation come free with the job.
- Kitchen & food prepKnife work, plating, and dish flow. Some of the densest two-handed manipulation anyone records.
- Auto & equipment repairDiagnosis, disassembly, reassembly, and the amount of force a hand applies when a fastener is seized.
- Warehouse & logisticsPicking, packing, palletizing, and navigating aisles at working speed while carrying something.
- Salon, dental & lab workFine motor procedures with a strict sequence and very little tolerance for error.
Who pays for trade data, and why
The buyers are robotics labs training models that have to act in the physical world: vision-language-action models for arms and humanoids, navigation stacks for machines that move through buildings, and world models that predict what a room does next. Simulation gives them infinite cheap repetition. It gives them almost nothing about how a seized bolt behaves, how a real kitchen is lit at 6pm, or what a competent person does in the two seconds after a part slips. The seller guide breaks the three buyer types down and lists what each one checks first.
You cannot fake competence
A lab can hire actors to walk around a warehouse. It cannot hire them to perform 200 hours of correct electrical work. Skilled trades sit at the top of the value curve for exactly that reason.
The work is the dataset
Teleoperated data costs a lab a great deal per hour to produce. Your jobs are on the calendar anyway, so the capture rides along on work you were being paid for regardless.
Trades repeat themselves
The same task, across many customers, in many buildings, with real variation baked in. That shape of dataset is what labs struggle hardest to buy anywhere else.
What trade data is worth
Expert data is trading at roughly $7 to $15 an hour today. The spread inside that band is wide, and it has very little to do with your trade. It comes down to how structured, how varied, and how usable your set is on the day a buyer opens it.
What labs pay today for expert data.
The cut aggregators take before the money reaches the person who recorded the work.
- The same job recorded across many sites and many customers.
- A second person on your crew recording the same task their own way.
- Work that is rare or hard to stage: panel upgrades, confined spaces, specialist repairs.
- Real diagnostics, including the wrong guesses that came before the fix.
- Continuous recording through the full job, awkward parts included.
- Pose or SLAM tracking captured alongside the video.
- Written consent from the site owner, on file and ready to show.
- Footage where your hands are out of frame for most of the take.
- One unbroken recording with no job boundaries and no labels.
- Customer faces, screens, documents, or addresses left visible.
- Audio full of customer conversation you have no right to license.
- Files renamed by hand into an order nobody else can follow.
- Heavy phone compression that smears the detail at the tool tip.
- A month of the same task in the same room.
How to sell your trade data, step by step
Seven steps, in the order they actually happen. The first one is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether any of the rest is worth doing.
- 01
Settle the rights before you record
Confirm you are allowed to license footage shot on a customer's premises. Get written permission from whoever controls the site, make sure your crew is covered by an agreement, and decide up front which jobs are off limits. Every buyer asks about this before they ask about hours.
- 02
Get a capture device
A phone on a chest strap will record video. Buyers pay more when pose and motion arrive alongside it, which is what the Butter Kit captures. The SLAM kit is $1,500 and is credited back in full at 90 qualified hours. The basic kit is $899, credited back at 55 hours.
- 03
Record whole jobs, start to finish
Press record when the job starts and stop when it ends. One job is one episode. Keep the false starts, the wrong guesses, and the re-tries in the file, because correction behavior is a large part of what a lab is buying.
- 04
Spread the work around
Different sites, different times of day, different people on your crew doing the same task. Ten jobs across ten addresses are worth far more than ten jobs at one address, at the same hour count.
- 05
Review before you upload
Scrub customer faces, screens, paperwork, plates, and addresses. Listen back for names and account numbers in the audio. One unhandled clip can take a whole dataset out of review.
- 06
Write the listing with the specs in the title
Hours, episode count, modalities, number of sites, and the trade itself. Buyers scan a marketplace the way you would scan a parts catalog, so put the numbers where they can be read before anyone clicks.
- 07
Set your price and submit for review
You set the number. Butter reviews the listing for rights, specs, and completeness, then it goes live to frontier labs, neo labs, and enterprise data teams who buy direct from you.
What you need before a job is sellable
Rights are the first question every buyer asks and the most common reason a technically good dataset gets rejected. Sort this out once, at the top, and it stops being a problem for every job after it.
- Written permission from whoever owns or controls the site you recorded on.
- Your crew told what is being captured, and covered by an employment or contractor agreement that allows it.
- No customer personal information in the frame or in the audio: faces, screens, paperwork, plates, addresses, account numbers.
- Nothing recorded on a job that sits under a customer NDA.
- Regulated premises such as clinics, schools, and secure facilities treated as a separate conversation before anything is recorded.
- A clear answer to the question of who owns the footage: you, your employer, or the site owner.
Questions about selling trade data
Can I sell my trade data if I work for someone else?
Ownership follows whatever your employment contract and the site agreement say. Plenty of tradespeople own their footage outright, and plenty do not. Ask before you record, and get the answer in writing. If you own the business, you are usually the one who can grant the license, once the site owner has agreed.
How many hours do I need before it is worth listing?
Around 20 to 30 hours spread across several jobs and a few different sites is a listable set. Under ten hours from a single location rarely clears review, because a buyer cannot tell whether a model would learn the task or just learn that one room.
Do I need special equipment to sell my trade data?
Any camera produces video a buyer can look at. What raises the price is pose tracking, synchronized timestamps across every stream, and consistent calibration, which is what a purpose-built capture kit gives you without any extra work on the job.
How much does trade data pay?
Labs are paying roughly $7 to $15 an hour for expert data today. Where you land inside that band comes down to structure, diversity, and how usable the set is on the day it arrives. There is more detail on what shifts the number in the guide to earning from your data.
Do I sell my trade data once, or license it more than once?
You set the terms on the listing. A non-exclusive license lets you sell the same hours to more than one lab over time. Exclusivity usually commands a higher price for a single sale, and it ends there.
Who actually buys this?
Frontier labs, neo labs, and enterprise data teams training vision-language-action models, navigation stacks, and world models. The seller guide breaks down the three buyer types and what each one checks first.
How is this different from going through a data aggregator?
Aggregators such as Mercor and Scale AI package supply and take 40 to 50 percent before the money reaches whoever recorded the work. On Butter you keep the pricing decision and the buyer relationship, and the sale happens direct.
What happens to customer privacy?
You are responsible for what is in the frame, and Butter reviews every listing before it goes live. In practice this means blurring faces and screens, keeping paperwork and addresses out of shot, and skipping any job covered by a customer NDA.
Next steps
How to earn from your data
The wider picture: which data pays, what the numbers look like, and the four routes to earning from what you already record.
Read the earnings guide →What buyers check first
Hours, episodes, modalities, pose, time sync, calibration. The full spec list a lab skims before deciding, with a glossary of the terms.
Read the seller guide →The Butter Kit
A wearable SLAM tracking device for ego-motion capture. Strap it on, hit record, and go about the job. Credited back in full with qualified hours.
See the device →Ready to sell your trade data?
Create an account, request a kit, and list your first hours at the price you set. Frontier and neo labs buy direct, with no aggregator in the middle.
Already collecting? Go to your data portal
Looking to buy instead? See the marketplace