Data prices · Software & startups

What AI labs pay for software data

AI labs pay for the record of how software teams plan, decide and ship: briefs, tickets, pull requests, reviews and what happened after release. The clearest public prices are for coding tasks with automatic checks, which Epoch AI puts at $200 to $2,000 each, and for shut-down startups' work archives, which Forbes reported selling for $10,000 to $100,000 per company.

What buyers want

Records your team already keeps

01

Decisions with reasons

What the team chose to build, the options it rejected and why, written down at the time.

02

Plan to merged change

How a brief became tickets, commits, reviews and a merged pull request, with test results.

03

Outcomes

Rollbacks, incidents and follow-up fixes, which show whether a decision was right.

04

Checkable tasks

Bugs and features with tests that fail before the fix and pass after, which labs can turn into graded tasks.

Price signals

What public deals and research show

$200-$2,000

Per RL task, per multiple interviewees. Around $20k for rare, very complex software engineering tasks.

Epoch AI, 2026

~$20k

Per website replica (a "UI gym") that agents practice in, per SemiAnalysis as cited by Epoch AI.

Epoch AI, 2026

~$300k

For a high-quality replica of a complex product like Slack, per one interviewee.

Epoch AI, 2026

$10k-$100k

Per shut-down startup for Slack, Jira, email and other records, across nearly 100 deals in a year.

Forbes, April 2026

Nobody publishes a price per pull request or per ticket. Work history from a company that is still operating is priced deal by deal, based on the factors above.

The wider market

$203M

Data licensing contracts Reddit disclosed in early 2024, with terms of two to three years.

TechCrunch

$250M+

Reported value of News Corp's five-year content deal with OpenAI, including cash and credits.

Press Gazette

$10k-$100k

Per-company payouts for shut-down startups' Slack messages, tickets and email archives, across nearly 100 deals.

Forbes, April 2026

$200-$2,000

Typical price per reinforcement learning task, according to Epoch AI's interviews with people who build them.

Epoch AI, 2026

Pricing factors

What moves the price

Links between records
A ticket tied to the commit and review that closed it is worth more than either alone.
Tests and outcomes
Labs pay for results a grader can check, so passing tests and post-release history raise the price.
Years of history
Longer runs of records show change over time and how outcomes played out, which a single year can't.
Exclusivity
Licenses are non-exclusive by default. RL environment founders told Epoch AI that exclusive deals cost roughly 4 to 5 times more.
Rights you can prove
Buyers pay for data you own or are allowed to license. Data held for customers without their permission won't sell, so our calculator cuts the estimate when rights are unclear.

Our calculator

How we estimate software data

Our indicative model starts from a base value per system for about five years of history at an 11-50 person company, then applies a sector weight of 1.2x, your history, team size and rights. It is an estimate we confirm on a call, not a market price.

SystemBase value
Plans, tickets & decisions (Hamster, Linear, Jira)$40k
Code repositories$40k
Support tickets & chat$15k

Recurring

Paid again every month

Software teams create new tickets, reviews and merges every week, so a refresh term pays out on each monthly batch. Teams using Hamster record the chain from brief to outcome as they work, which keeps each batch linked without extra effort.

How recurring revenue works

Rules that apply

We sell recorded decisions and outcomes, never your source code unless you choose to include it. AI providers' terms generally forbid using their outputs to build competing models, so we confirm with a lawyer before including any coding-agent transcripts.

Source: Forbes on workplace data sales

Valuation

What is your data worth?

No access to your systems needed. We confirm the number on a 30-minute call.

1.Your industry
2.Systems you'd consider sharing
3.Years of records
6y
4.How big is your business?
5.Can you license this data?

Estimated first sale

$62k to $200k

$10k$100k$1M$10M
Then every month$2.1k to $6.7k

The first sale covers your history. Monthly income comes from new records the SDK sends once it's set up.

6. Where should we send your offer?

We won't share your details, and we sign a mutual NDA before any data moves.

Questions

Software data, answered

Do you sell our source code?
No, unless you choose to include it. We license the plans, tickets, reviews and outcomes your team recorded, and secrets such as API keys are removed before anything leaves your machine.
We're still operating. Is this only for shut-down startups?
No. Operating companies can license history now and keep earning as new work is recorded, which a shut-down company can't do.
What if we use AI coding agents?
The human parts of that work (the goal, corrections, which edits were accepted, whether the change merged) are worth something. We check AI providers' terms with a lawyer before including any transcripts.

Keep reading

Selling software data
Data types

Selling software work history: plans, tickets and pull requests

AI labs pay for the record of how software teams decide and ship: plans, tickets, pull requests and outcomes. What sells, what stays out, and how to record it.

5 min read

Pricing

Episodes, records and environments: the three things AI labs buy

Records are de-identified rows, episodes are human actions with outcomes in order, and environments are working replicas. Each sells at a different price.

6 min read

Pricing

What AI labs pay for data in 2026

Public AI data deals range from $10,000 startup archives to a $250M news license. Here are the sourced figures and what each one actually bought.

5 min read

Prices in other industries

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