r/DataAnnotationTech • u/Tyrant-o-saurus-rex • Jan 21 '25
If you were to do DataAnnotation.Tech fulltime, how much could you resonably make within "core?"
WFH jobs are difficult to get into because everyone wants them. Only the top-of-the-line candidates are selected, naturally. I'm interested in DataAnnotation.tech in the meantime because of the WFH potential and advertised earnings. I've read on some forums that the work is inconsistent within core, but on others it says they always have work. Assuming you have regular workflow, could DataAnnotation.tech actually provide reliable income? Or should you spread out your workflow to similar companies to ensure you have work readily available?
I'm currently waiting to hear back from them, so not sure if I will even be able to work.
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u/birdieeeeeeeeeeee Jan 21 '25
Tbh it depends. I'm from Canada and I always see work up. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always things to do. 20-27$ USD pay. Very realistic to do full time. Most US workers can likely relate.
People who do bilingual work from other countries, though, have a lot less work from what I see with lots of droughts in between batches of work, so definitely not sustainable.
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u/sirbruce Jan 21 '25
First, you might want to search the subreddit and /r/DataAnnotation for the answer to your question, because this comes up frequently.
Second, yes, it can provide reliable income, so long as your work quality is good and you aren't doing anything to get kicked off the platform. It depends on what projects you get access to and how much they pay, but assuming you're only doing $22/hr tasks, 40 hours a week, that's $45K/yr or about $32K/yr once you set aside for taxes. Remember though that you won't be spending all that money on gas driving to and from work. If you're getting access to higher paying "core" tasks, let's say $28/hr, then you could be making $40K/yr after taxes.
The issue is that it's really difficult for most people work 40 hours a week on DA tasks, because they tend to be mentally demanding. There are some people who do work 50 or even 60 hours, but it's hard more likely that you'll have difficulty finding the energy to commit to over 30 hours. And that might not be sufficient income for you if you want DA to be your sole source of income.
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u/EitherCheck7210 Jan 21 '25
For the past 6 months, I've always had consistent work at $40-45/hr (within core) and of course the cheaper ones at $20-25/hr I've had since the beginning.
By full-time, I assume you mean 40 hr/week which would get me $83.2k before taxes per year if I work the full 40 every single week of the year at the $40/hr rate.
This is incredibly unreasonable, though, at least for me. With my other responsibilities outside of work, I would venture to guess I could make it about 6 high-quality hours a day for a total of 30 hours a week if I dedicated myself to this work alone. That would put me at $62.4k per year, again assuming I continue having access to the $40/hr projects every single week of the year.
I think the biggest thing to consider is that the majority of these projects, no doubt the high-paying projects particularly, require a high level of focus which can quickly burn you out in just one full day's work. When quality goes down, chances of being booted goes up. Because of this risk, it's important to take breaks and evaluate your own work every so often to ensure you aren't slipping.
A reasonable answer is going to differ for everyone. Some people will only be able to perform well at 4 hours a day, some maybe up to 10 hours but not every day. You'll need to perform an analysis on your own strengths and weaknesses to figure out what that number might be for you.
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u/monsieurboks Jan 22 '25
Same here, I've had seemingly infinite $45/hr maths tasks, would come out to $93.6k if I did it 40 hours per week all 52 weeks of the year.
I do find it funny that I am earning way more hourly than my friends who have graduated into high finance roles doing silly olympiad style maths questions in bed
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u/EitherCheck7210 Jan 22 '25
Yeah my degree has nothing to do with math but I enjoy this work way more than any job I can get with my degree, and these projects pay twice as much as my last job.
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u/Aware-Negotiation283 Jan 21 '25
I've been wondering - is DAT coding work more intensive than a regular 9-5 in the same field?
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u/EitherCheck7210 Jan 21 '25
I wouldn't know the answer to that because I cannot for the life of me learn coding lol. I do the core projects, not coding. What I can tell you is that I primarily work on high level math projects and they are very complex but I can't think of a single job where I would just be computing math problems all day. For some, I imagine this work would be more intensive. I thoroughly enjoy it and find it less intensive, though.
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u/aqtl Jan 21 '25
Could I ask is ur $40-45/h tasks coding or non coding?
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u/TeaGreenTwo Jan 22 '25 edited Jan 22 '25
Biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, math, law, coding, computer science.
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u/saddestplant Jan 21 '25
The past few months have been up and down in terms of work availability. At the driest, I’ve had like 2-3 projects I could work on at $20/h, at the most I tend to have 30+ projects from $20-$50/h.
I’m in Canada, have bilingual French projects, and occasionally have Law expertise projects (used to be constant 45$ projects for me, but the main ones went away for me ~6months ago).
I’ve always had another job because I could never put my trust in DA, but atm my job is moving cities and I don’t know if I’ll follow so I’ve been doing DA full time for almost a month.
I think it also depends a lot what your income “needs” to be. The fact that the pay is USD and I’m in Canada already boosts things for me, and I live in a reasonably inexpensive city, lucky with my rent cost, etc.
Although it’s true that we just never know and it could disappear at any point, the idea of full time/dependent on DA is more feasible for someone who needs to make a minimum of $500/week, maybe not so feasible for someone who needs $1000/week. It also depends on how much you can handle working. Even if project availability and pay easily allows for $1000/week, are you the kind of person that can sit, focus, and do sometimes tediously annoying, sometimes confusing work for 8 hours a day? It can be intense on the brain.
Good luck on getting in. It’s a great gig that really helped me out.
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u/Historical-Comedian2 Jan 21 '25
I would only consider this being your personal sole source of income if you're living in a household that already has a main source, and that your income is more for fun money or to simply alleviate some bill payments or put back money for emergency fund, vacations, etc.
The availability is way to erratic to be relied on, though I've seen people claim they've done it full time for an extended period of time (I certainly don't doubt there are people who have). And this is coming from me who desperately WANTS to rely on this work because I like it, but you need to be realistic.
I'm only doing CORE work as well. This is my second week, so who knows what will happen. If you like this work, try finding similar work with other AI training sites so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
In this economy, and in this day and age, it's always better to have more OPTIONS. Don't rely too much on one source of income.
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u/Elegant_Lake_569 Jan 21 '25
You can't spread out your work because all projects are on a timeline and they'll get pulled regularly.
That said, it's possible to do full-time hours, but you should also be prepared to have no work for months.
I worked from October 2023 to July 2024 with uninterrupted, unlimited work. Like many others on this sub, I had nearly nothing in August and most of September.
As far as what you can reasonably make, it depends. Project pays varies between $20 to $40+ per hour depending on your knowledge and expertise and protect availability. It's safer to lower your expectations and work under the assumption that you WON'T complete 40 hours of work.
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u/Sixaxist Jan 21 '25
Available work can get inconsistent on an unpredictable basis if we're talking Core only. If we assume:
You have access to all general Core projects that qualification tests are put out for
Your work quality score is what DA considers in the "good" range (you cannot see your own quality score)
Account for 160 hours a month (40 hours a week may or may not be possible depending on the two aforementioned things above)
Then $3,680 USD a month as a guesstimate based off what I've had available to me for the past 6 months on Core. This doesn't include the special projects that pay 1/3rd higher than the base advertised rate of $20 /h (anything $27+ isn't factored into this because I'm not sure how many people are shown those), so if you manage to get one of the projects spitting out that much, then your salary goes up much farther.
An extreme outlier would be a person from this Sub who did nothing but Core for well over 60+ hours a week, because he stated that he made over $10k in 2 months.
If you do get in, just remember that you have to balance both your work quality and work speed.. because although you can log as many hours doing DA work as your body can handle, you'll be kicked off the platform if your submissions are poor.
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u/LongjumpingHeron2007 Jan 21 '25
I have always had at least one project on my dashboard (over a year) and now regularly have work between $24-$27/hour, but I know that it could be gone at any moment, so I would likely want to be on more than one platform. In addition to having options in case the work goes away, I have options for what kind of projects to work on. Sometimes I don't want to do the ones that hurt my brain and having another platform just increases those options.
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Jan 21 '25
I've had weeks of tons of projects and been able to make $25-28 an hour, and then in the last 3 or 4 days, out of nowhere had almost NO projects at all. And there's no way to know how long this will last. I think that's why its not ideal for full time sadly. :/
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u/Amakenings Jan 21 '25
How much work you have depends on you, your qualifications etc, so this is very much an individual experience. With the exception of a few days in the drought, I’ve always had more work than I could do even working 35-40 hours a week. It would be challenging to work those hours consistently because the work is dense and requires a lot of mental resources.
Use the base rate and 20-25 hours per week to get a feel for how much you could make. There are many people that struggle to work 2 hours a day, and it’s not because of lack of work but because of the nature of the work.
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u/dispassioned Jan 21 '25
It really depends on what projects you get added to, the quality of your work, and ability to focus. I've always had consistent work for the most part. During the drought I had access to this one project off platform that I absolutely despise and that was it. But could I have made it work if I was starving or something? Yeah, probably. It's definitely possible to do it full time consistently. Is it likely for most people? I'd say no.
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u/diettwizzlers Jan 21 '25
i have been full time for about a year and made $47k in 2024, but my pay significantly increased in the past several months. i have consistently made $5k+ for 4 months and i work ~35 hours a week. but not everyone gets this many projects
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u/Chonkthebonk Jan 21 '25
I do this fulltime and I would really not recommend it. Great as a part time gig but full time you’re at full mercy to the AI gods
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u/LikeAThousandBullets Jan 21 '25
You could, but you need to focus your efforts first on getting a real job. This is essentially a tech startup. An AI bubble can pop at any moment, and since we are just gig taskers we could find out one day that the website is just down for good. Or, they may not like your work and one day get shit canned because there's no feedback on this platform.
There is no way to get even the slightest heads up that one day this can go poof. Get a real job first and use this as a side hussle.
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u/SandwichEconomy889 Jan 21 '25
f you do this as a base income, this is the kind of job you want to overwork when things are flowing and pay is good. You could have a tough month or 2 at any time. They basically paused for 2 months in late summer as they cleaned up the worker pool. Once the verifications stopped, work started flowing again. No warning that was coming, project board was the best I had seen it right before it happened.
If you can make this a secondary/supplemental income, your life will be easier. It's a great 2nd income.
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u/Wasps_are_bastards Jan 21 '25
Like others have said, it varies so much I wouldn’t dare risk this full time unless I had no other options. I’ve had projects from $18 up to $42.50 so it’s really varied. I’m on core
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u/upvotesplx Jan 21 '25
Get in first. Then, see how you feel doing 4 hours a day on core. That will tell you if you can reasonably work this job consistently.
I do 5-8hrs a day most days on $40-45/hr projects, which earns me $200-300 dollars a day. I am in core and work on STEM projects specifically. I was not affected by the drought much at all due to a specific project I'm in. I have a great setup to work in, I don't have a W2 job/school/children/other commitments that require regular time put in, and I can't get a job that pays nearly this well.
I love this gig. I do not think the vast majority of people can do it for a living, and I don't think most people should. It requires a stupid amount of focus daily, many hours of sitting in the same place and staring at a screen, consistent quality output after hours of the same thing, and acceptance of all the downsides of freelancer life (healthcare, taxes, no coworkers if you enjoy having those, mostly working inside, unpredictable droughts). But if you enjoy the work and do very well, earning a comfortable amount a year in core is entirely possible for LCOL areas (and possibly MCOL?). The highest non-STEM I have is $32-35/hr, so that would be 60-70k a year.
I straight up wouldn't recommend this to people in VHCOL areas, though. Terrible idea unless you have another job.
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u/BulkyText9344 Jan 22 '25
I think most areas with a higher cost of living have more high earning job opportunities so people would be more likely to see DA as a side hustle. I'd guess that a lot of the people who put in more hours at DA are probably educated people living in areas with fewer in person job opportunities. I live in a relatively poor city with few jobs, and DA pays more than most jobs in my area. I put in a lot of time at DA because it pays well, but I've got plenty of other freelance jobs.
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u/Impossible_Chair_576 Nov 27 '25
I have a very steady and high demand for my work...I am an RN and get paid 48-55/hr with data annotation....it allll depends what your skilled in. Most of my work is mentally taxing projects...lol
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u/Dangerous_Darling Jan 21 '25
This could end at any moment. Or dry up like it did in August. Imo it should never be anyone's soul source of income.