AfterQuery

How it works

On the question of whether AfterQuery is legit: it is a real, well-funded company. It announced a $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April 2026, led by Altos Ventures with Y Combinator among the backers, and TechCrunch reported in September 2026 that a new round valued it at $3.2 billion. SiliconANGLE put its contributor base at nearly 100,000 developers, attorneys and other professionals at the time of the Series A. The work is building training data for AI labs: prompts, reasoning, rubrics and evaluations written by people who do the job for a living.

AfterQuery's help centre describes the contractor side in detail. Work is organised into expert pools. Each open pool has one assessment, built to resemble real project work, and AfterQuery states that assessments are unpaid, cannot be retaken, and come with no pass or fail notice. You are contacted if a matching project comes up, and a strong result does not guarantee one. Onboarding has four steps that unlock in order: sign the legal documents, verify your phone, verify your identity through Persona with a government ID and a selfie, and connect a Stripe account.

Everyone is paid through Stripe, straight to a bank account, and AfterQuery charges no fees. Rates are set in US dollars, but outside the US Stripe converts them and pays out in your local currency. The bank account must be in your own legal name and in the same country as your registered location. A mismatch triggers a manual Stripe review that delays pay. AfterQuery publishes a list of Stripe-supported countries alongside a list of unsupported ones, and tells people in the latter not to start work. It says Wise is planned for countries Stripe does not reach but is not available yet.

Worth knowing

Good:

• The payout cycle is published precisely, with an estimator in the help centre that shows which Friday a given week's work is paid
• Contractors on Trustpilot confirm the payments are real, and several praise clear task guidelines
• The expert pools reward genuine professional depth, in the same vein as expert programmes at Mercor and micro1

Less good:

• Only one attempt per assessment, unpaid, and with no result sent, so silence after an assessment tells you nothing
• AfterQuery's Trustpilot page scored 2.9 out of 5 across 111 reviews when we checked, and the most common complaint is work sitting at "Needs Review" for weeks or months before it can be paid
• The same reviewers describe weeks without available projects, accounts closed with pending work unpaid, and rejections with little explanation
• AfterQuery's help centre says most compensation is per task, and one Trustpilot reviewer reports tasks paying about $75 each but taking four to five hours, well under the hourly figures in its advertising

About this page

Facts above come from the AfterQuery Experts help centre at docs.afterquery.com (its payments, payment countries, assessments, onboarding and contract work pages), AfterQuery's Series A announcement, and reporting by SiliconANGLE and TechCrunch, last checked 29 September 2026. AfterQuery publishes no platform-wide rate, so the typical-pay fields are empty. Country eligibility depends on Stripe support for your bank and is not repeated here as a list. Worker reports come from Trustpilot and are attributed in the sentence that makes the claim.