Buy AI Training Data
A practical guide to buying training data without overpaying for hours you cannot use.
Price per hour is the wrong unit
Almost every training data quote is expressed in cost per hour, and almost every buyer eventually learns that this number tells them very little.
Two datasets at the same price per hour can differ enormously in value. One has 200 distinct speakers, native-speaker transcription, and a documented annotation guideline. The other has 12 speakers recorded repeatedly, transcription of unknown provenance, and no guideline. The second is not cheaper — it is a dataset you will end up re-buying.
The unit that actually predicts value is cost per usable hour after you have subtracted the portion that does not fit your requirement.
What you are paying for
Production cost breaks into parts, and knowing them makes quotes comparable.
- Speaker recruitment — the dominant cost for uncommon languages, where finding qualified speakers is the bottleneck rather than recording time.
- Recording — studio time and equipment for clean data, or field coordination for in-the-wild collection.
- Annotation — usually the largest line item, and the one that scales steeply with annotation depth. Transcription alone is a fraction of transcription plus intent plus diarization.
- Quality control — pilot review, cross-checking, and re-work. Providers who quote without this line are either not doing it or hiding it.
- Compliance — consent collection and documentation. Small in cost, but its absence makes everything else worthless.
Questions to ask before you commit
These are the questions that most often change a buyer's mind about a quote.
- How many distinct speakers, and how is that enforced?
- Will I see the annotation guideline before production starts?
- Can I review a pilot batch and reject it?
- What is the re-work policy if the delivery misses spec?
- What exactly does the consent documentation cover, and does it cover my intended use?
Buying from us
We do not publish prices because every project is quoted from its specification. Submit the requirement — language, hours, speaker count, conditions, annotation — and you will get a real number with a real timeline rather than a range.
If the requirement is not something we can source well, we will say so. That has cost us orders and it is still the right way to run this.
Questions we get asked
How long does a quote take?
Usually a few days where the language has an established producer pool, longer for a low-resource language or an unusual specification. We would rather take an extra day than quote a number we cannot hold.
Can I buy a small amount to test?
Yes, and we would encourage it. A pilot batch is the cheapest way to find out whether a producer can meet your bar before committing to the full run.
What payment terms do you offer?
Terms are set per project and confirmed in the agreement before production starts. Nothing is invoiced before the scope is written down.
Keep reading
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AI Data Brokerage
A data broker sits between the people who need training data and the people who can produce it. We source to order — no inventory, no license resale, no recycled datasets.
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AI Training Data Providers
What to check before you sign with a training data provider — and how we compare on each point.
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AI Training Data Marketplace
Marketplaces sell what already exists. We source what you actually need. Here is when each model makes sense.
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Full data catalog
36 data categories across 120 languages, and how to specify each one.
Submit a sourcing request
Tell us the language, the hours, and what the data needs to look like. You will get a real number and a real timeline — not a range. If we cannot source it well, we will tell you that instead.
- Pilot batch before the full run, so problems surface early.
- Consent documentation delivered with the data.
- No medical or clinical data. No recorded telephone calls.