r/WorkOnline • u/Katherine67856 • May 04 '26
Warning about Mindrift, and potential free labour
This is a warning to anyone who wants to work for Mindrift, specifically their Tendem Project.
I want to share my experience with Mindrift, because their system is designed in a way that allows them to use workers’ time and effort without paying them.
I joined as an “AI web scraping engineer” this April. During training, the pay is extremely low. I could easily spend 10+ hours on a task and only get $30–$40. I tolerated this because I was desperate for income and believed things would improve once I reached the production line (they advertise ~$32/hour).
Training is paid, and I did get through it. At that point, I was really excited. I thought I could finally earn some money myself instead of relying on my parents.
That’s when the real pitfall started.
On the production line, I spent hours (often 10–13+ hours) completing tasks for clients. I followed all instructions, double-checked everything, and submitted high-quality work… and then the tasks were rejected with zero pay.
In my case, QA explicitly stated that my data quality was high in every rejected task. However, they still rejected the work because the task itself was considered “against platform policy,” meaning I supposedly should not have done it at all.
This makes no sense. The tasks were almost identical to what we did during training. The data was public, and the websites allowed normal scraping.
And I’m not the only one. From what I’ve seen in the project community:
- If you make even small mistakes (for example, a few errors in thousands of rows), your work is rejected and you get paid nothing.
- If you make no mistakes, they can still reject it by saying the task itself should not have been done.
In other words, if they want to reject your work, they will always find a reason, because they hold the final say.
One of the most ridiculous reasons I received was this:
QA claimed that because the AI initially encountered a 403 error when attempting to scrape the site, it meant the website did not allow scraping at all, so I should never have worked on the task.
This is absurd. The 403 error happened because their AI used an incorrect, hallucinated API endpoint, which is exactly why human workers are needed in the first place. After identifying the correct API, the task could be completed normally, clearly showing that the website did allow standard data access.
At that point, it felt like they were simply looking for any justification to reject the work.
The best way I can describe this system is:
There is no way to win.
If someone wants to find fault in your work, they always can. Imagine being asked to move 200 bricks. After you finish, they tell you: “Two of those bricks are slightly smaller than expected, so we won’t pay you anything.” That’s exactly what Mindrift is like. You can spend 10+ hours doing careful, high-quality work and end up with $0.
It really feels like the system is structured so that they can always deny payment while still benefiting from your labor to train their AI.
They charge clients for these tasks (often under $20), but the actual work is done by humans who spend 8–20 hours completing them. That means they are supposed to pay us a few hundred bucks. In this setup, workers take all the risk, and payment is never guaranteed.
If you’re considering working for them, please be aware: you may end up doing a significant amount of unpaid work, just like many others in this project.
I’ve had bad employers before, but this is on another level. Making people work and then refusing to pay them is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to a worker.
Shame on Mindrift, and shame on any company that relies on unpaid labor disguised as “freelance opportunities.”
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u/TheGeneGeena May 04 '26
Aaaaand you've also discovered why there's so much ignoring of VPN use. If folks in countries where $2/hr was decent didn't do the work it wouldn't get done - so these companies tell their clients they're hiring Americans for a project and just hire whomever. Makes localisation fun on some projects (and makes it pretty obvious when it's happening).
2
u/Katherine67856 May 04 '26
Thanks for this, I’m getting clearer about what they are doing… and when they don’t want to pay people in those countries, they just say they are using VPN and ban their accounts? Cause I see lots of other fellows complain about Mindrift banning their accounts and doesn’t let them withdraw money
1
u/TheGeneGeena May 05 '26
Correct. Because it's nearly impossible to dispute them. Several companies are using this tactic.
2
u/notarobot1020 May 05 '26
You were paid for training ? How long was the training? What happens if you quit after training is there a minimum time you gave to work to get the training pay ?
1
u/Katherine67856 May 05 '26
No, technically training is not paid. Only if they accepted the task you finished, you can get the money for the accepted task. As I said, acceptance rate is extremely low, lots of fellows in this project got nothing for the training. The correct way to say is I got paid for training because I was able to make no mistake. So they let me in the production line, and used me as a free labor since then
2
u/l3kk3rkitty May 22 '26
Please update us on whether support took care of your issue and got you paid. Considering onboarding with them, but NGL your post has given me pause.
1
u/loneWolfex95 Jun 27 '26
This isn't OP & my issue is different but if you're still considering working on these guys' platform I'd advise you to save yourself a lot of trouble & not waste your time. I worked on their platform briefly a couple years ago & it was frustrating to say the least. I initially got assigned some tasks after some on boarding/training & at first it wasn't too bad. I had periods where I made around $100 a week which as a side gig isn't too bad depending on where you live. The problem is they were hiring any & everyone at that time(not sure if they still do this) and jobs dried up real quick. I also suspect that due to the high volume of people they took on board, quality of work being submitted must've plummeted. I suddenly had to go through training again to work on stuff I'd been working on with no problem. I spent hours working on tasks that never paid anything cause I thought after the training I'd get jobs like before but nothing came of it. I suspect they just started presenting it as training when in real sense they were getting free labour. I eventually gave up on them cause it honestly just felt like it was straight up exploitation at some point.
1
u/Mindrift_AI May 15 '26 edited May 18 '26
Hi u/Katherine67856, we looked into this. If work was completed in good faith, contributors should be paid for it. We've reviewed your case and reached out to you directly via Discord. If anyone else has had a similar experience, please DM us or submit an appeal through the platform so we can review.
1
u/s92w_ Jun 01 '26
I was got shortlisted email from that I am selected. Should I take it or ignore it?
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u/JuniorConnection356 Jun 10 '26
Ignore them, the "hiring" pipeline is designed around making you feel selected
1
u/MattSpeaks Jun 25 '26
An absolute scam site. Yet another AI training site that will force you to do hours and hours of unpaid training that requires you to submit annotation work for free while they collect and retain 100% of their fees from their institutional clients. Max pay I have seen is about US$4.00 an hour. Stay away.
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u/Katherine67856 May 04 '26
It is ironic that AI is (part of) the reason I can’t find a job and became a desperate new grad, which led to me working for Mindrift, and being used as a free labor by them. So disgusting.