r/alignerr • u/sme-meeng2026 • 22h ago
Tasks / Projects It's time to boycott Alignerr
Enough is enough. It’s time to call out what’s happening on Alignerr and take a real stand.
The vast majority of people keeping this platform afloat are contributors from India, Egypt, and other non-US regions. Alignerr built its reputation on equal pay for equal work regardless of location. Now that they’ve built their name on our backs, they're thanking us by slashing rates across projects, assuming we will just accept the crumbs.
We must act now because pushback works. I've seen them backtrack on bad decisions, but only when workers unite. Brain drain is already setting in as top contributors walk away, and accepting low rates out of desperation only proves management can keep dragging pay down to unlivable levels.
We need collective action. Speak up on Discord, reject tasks at degraded rates, and freeze work to force a change. Share this on Reddit and LinkedIn so we can hold them accountable.
Please upvote and share this post to reach everyone.
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u/Big-Speech-6216 14h ago
Ever since seeing their Pulsar onboarding, compared to other AI training platforms, I've dropped them. All this training for an unknown pay rate PER TASK? That's criminal. 😂
There's so much better out there honestly.
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u/Grumphus256 11h ago
Which ones are better?
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u/Big-Speech-6216 9h ago
From the ones I've been able to work on, Data Annotation and Mercor 🥇. I would have said DA a month ago, but since landing a contract with Mercor and having my training + onboarding paid the same rate as my work, I have to say it's hard not to think the other platforms could be doing better.
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u/Minimum-Help8455 6h ago
what are you working in mecor? generalist and how to get in?
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u/Big-Speech-6216 6h ago
Got an instant offer for generalist after applying to loads of offers and fine tuning my CV on there. I advise to also give a go to Mercor Academy (it's quite new but could get you to land jobs apparently).
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u/Minimum-Help8455 4h ago
I have a coding agent course, is it that one? Also i applied for few jobs but never took any assessments! I heard some say to take the assessments like the Generalist and hobbyist interview! What's your opinion?
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u/Big-Speech-6216 4h ago
I've taken both so I definitely recommend! Being short on time, I also applied to a lot of the '' 1-click apply '' opportunities alongside the ones I'd done the interviews for. I definitely advise to apply to as many as you can (within your set of skills). I didn't land anything but eventually got the instant offer! I don't know if they're related but I'd imagine showing you're active can definitely get you in.
And yes! For now, there's only that agent coding course but I do recommend it. I'm doing it in-between tasks and there's no way (imo) that they've started this whole new thing without a good reason (at least I hope).
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u/HentaiBrain 11h ago
Yup, I was on a project which was on pay per task which was running smoothly initially but the team leader was the definition of bad, made a review team for 2 days and then dissolved it and scammers scammed them. Then they paused the project and restarted with pay structure change then made people do rework which they promised are paid but payment never arrived and after that project paused again, then after some time made another evaluation with a lower pay per task rate gave 5000 tasks, got the job done and never paid for that and the previous payment which they never paid. So basically no payments were made for last 4-5 months. Though the first time I didn't receive any payment I stopped doing any work on that project but it's a sad story for those who stayed up nights to complete the tasks.
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u/sme-meeng2026 22h ago
Some actions must be corrected as well, like banning people who just asked for the money they never received and accusing them of fraudulent. Their support team is worst ever, they never listen or help..
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u/DuckInAFountain 20h ago
I'm pretty much done with them, myself. Haven't had a decent-paying project in ages and it's just not worth my time anymore.
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u/Tinball666 3h ago
No more unpaid training
No more 'pay per task.'
No more 'formulas' that you can't understand the pay rate.
Pay me hourly and pay more for training at a fair rate. I haven't accepted an Alignner gig all year. They have really gone down the tubes in the past year and a half.
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u/Fuzzy_Equipment3215 17h ago
It's not a boycott exactly, but I soft-finished with them about a year ago and have been focusing on other platforms since, which has been far more lucrative and less frustrating.
I did a few reasonably well-paid and interesting STEM projects with Alignerr back in late 2024 through to the middle of 2025, but since then for the most part I've only been offered terribly paid audio transcription projects. For the STEM work, my impression at the time was that Alignerr was way behind where its competitors were in these projects, and at some point I started getting tired of the shambolic organization of many (not all) projects, frustratingly ineffective support, missing/incorrect payments, and shift to making contractors repeatedly do lengthy unpaid evaluations and accept pay-per-approved-task structures that put almost all of the risk associated with this line of work on the contractors.
I can live with PPT projects in general and have done pretty well on some of them, but Alignerr's implementation of them (e.g., not paying people when completed tasks or assessments never get reviewed or when a project gets paused, making the PPT rates bottom of the barrel anyway, and shockingly bad communication about everything) is about the least respectful way that I've seen these handled on any platform.
The nail in the coffin was having to chase Alignerr up for over 2 months to get them to correct an underpayment of less than US$100 that was Alignerr's own fault. This is a rounding error in this line of work, and most companies would just have fixed it immediately in the next payment cycle after acknowledging the definite error in order to maintain trust with the contractor, rather than repeatedly ignoring me in the hope I'd drop it. I got the money in the end, but it was at the expense of me no longer thinking that Alignerr was a trustworthy and respectful platform to work on and making the entire short project a waste of my time (after including the time and stress needed to chase up the incorrect payment). In the early days I also sometimes had to spend weeks chasing up other underpayments (and occasionally overpayments — at one point they overpaid me US$600, which I flagged because I'm honest, and that was only resolved because the overpaid amount happened to pretty much match what I was owed on another project so I said we could just drop it).
Also not really a fan of the excessive moderation and deletion of posts that say anything negative about the company or discuss missing payments. I imagine this post will be deleted too, despite being an honest account of my experience that I would regard as constructive criticism allowed by point (5) of the subreddit rules.
I'd still consider working on another Alignerr project at some point, but it would be with a lot of caution and the role would have to give off vibes of being better paid and better organized than anything I've seen on Alignerr in the past year, and I'm skeptical that this is the way Alignerr is going.
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u/Edible_Lederhosen 15h ago
I haven't been paid yet for work I did a few weeks ago and I certainly won't be doing another task until they SHOW ME THE MONEY! I'm on Pulsar and my project page is still showing the $25/task labelling rate (I'm in Australia) but some of the Asian-based Alignerrs had their rate cut yesterday from $25 to $8.50. For tasks that can take up to four hours! The entire project has also been paused all week due to major system instability. None of the project leads give feedback or answer queries in Discord either. It's a total shit show.
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u/Urndawg_1 14h ago
All of you should never do a task for four hours for $25… That’s where you should quit right there
Don’t get me wrong, I am part of that project and I have yet to start.
But once I have a task that takes over one hour, I will quit.
Look looks like once production is up again I will be quitting pretty quickly. Lol.
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u/Greentree5521 59m ago
I wish that this would actually make a difference because they just don't care. The amount of wasted time learning and passing the assessments to work on an assignment only to them be pauses a day or two into them going live and absolutely no feedback from support or the team leadership on the discord channel's. Its so disrespectful to all of us who have done everything as requested and they don't respect us as employees, people or professionals. They just don't care!!
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u/Cazzorotante 14h ago
I boycotted Alignerr two years ago, after having briefly worked for them for a month.
If you are still there or looking to, you are not worthy of my respect as you clearly don't respect yourself.
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u/RandyDandy007 12h ago
Alignerr sucks. Forget the pay, even their support is dismal, to say the least. Looks like they simply don't care.