Appen

How it works

Appen is an AI training data company founded in Sydney in 1996 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange as APX. Its contributors work through CrowdGen by Appen, which replaced the older Appen Connect portal, so anyone searching for Appen Connect or Appen CrowdGen ends up in the same place.

CrowdGen describes four steps: apply and get verified, get matched to projects in your domain, contribute by evaluating, annotating, generating and refining content, and build a record. The domains it names are code, engineering, finance, law, linguistics, medicine, research and science. Matching runs off your profile, and CrowdGen's own migration notes say age, gender, location and languages all count. Worked hours are approved with one click, errors go through a dispute process, and earnings sit in a built-in wallet until you withdraw. Contributors who came over from Appen Connect had to set up their payment method again; CrowdGen says it could not transfer the old one.

Appen's About page claims 1M+ vetted contributors in 170+ countries and 235+ languages, and CrowdGen says it has paid 500,000+ contributors. Neither publishes a list of eligible countries. Because projects are matched on location and language, what you see depends heavily on where you live and what you speak.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Joining is free, and the CrowdGen FAQ says you can work on more than one project at a time
• The invoicing cycle and the dispute process for wrongly recorded hours are documented in CrowdGen's help centre rather than left to guesswork
• Unusually wide language coverage, which suits bilingual contributors; see which languages pay what

Less good:

• The switch to CrowdGen started badly. In October 2024 Appen's chief executive, Ryan Kolln, published an apology after data migration problems delayed payments and showed contributors wrong amounts
• CrowdGen holds a TrustScore of 1.6 from 126 Trustpilot reviews, 86 percent one-star. Recent reviewers describe ID verification "stuck for nearly a month", accounts deactivated straight after sign-up, and onboarding that led to no paid work. Appen's own Trustpilot page scores 1.4 from 371 reviews, with September 2026 reviewers alleging that project rules were changed after the fact and logged hours cut
• On r/CrowdGen in September 2026, one US contributor reported being "Removed for Administrative Reasons" from a project that "had plenty of work", with neither support nor the project manager able to explain it; a Canadian contributor said they had seen only one or two projects since the move to CrowdGen
• Google ended its search quality rater contract with Appen from 19 March 2024; Search Engine Journal reported it had accounted for 26 percent of Appen's revenue

About this page

Facts above come from crowdgen.com (the homepage, the Appen Connect migration page and the payments help centre) and from Appen's About page and October 2024 payments update at appen.com, last checked 29 September 2026. CrowdGen advertises a top-end hourly figure that it says varies by location and skills, not a typical range, so the pay fields on this page are empty. Worker reports come from Trustpilot and r/CrowdGen and are attributed where they appear. For open work, browse language jobs.