Is Alignerr legit? Who runs it, what it pays and what workers report

The short answer

Yes. Alignerr is a real platform run by Labelbox, a San Francisco data company founded in 2018 that has raised $189 million from investors including SoftBank's Vision Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. It states a rate on each job, pays weekly through Stripe Connect or PayPal, and workers on Reddit describe being paid.

Workers also report problems, and they are worth knowing before you hand over your ID. The common complaints are removals without explanation, completed work still unpaid after a removal, unpaid assessments and evaluation phases, and long gaps with no projects. People also use lookalike domains to pose as Alignerr recruiters, and Alignerr publishes no warning about it.

This guide covers who runs Alignerr, what it says it pays, what we found when we searched for lawsuits and regulatory actions, how to spot the fakes, and what workers report. The step-by-step sign-up is in our Alignerr onboarding guide, and the short reference record is the Alignerr company page.

Who runs Alignerr

Alignerr's homepage title reads "Alignerr | Powered by Labelbox". Its About page calls it "a Labelbox-led initiative" that connects subject experts with "specific projects from the world's leading AI labs", and its FAQ says "Alignerr is powered by Labelbox, a leading training data platform used by top AI companies to build and improve models."

The legal entity is separate. Alignerr's Terms of Use, effective 11 September 2025, are "a binding contract between you and ALIGNERR LLC", governed by Delaware law, with a San Francisco mailing address. Those terms include binding individual arbitration and a class action waiver, so a dispute with Alignerr is meant to go to arbitration, not to court. The contractor agreement you sign in the app is a separate document that we could not read from outside.

Labelbox, the company behind it

Labelbox's About page, checked on 3 October 2026, says it was founded in 2018, is headquartered in San Francisco, has raised $189 million and is profitable. It names Manu Sharma as co-founder and CEO, and says it works with "90%+ of leading U.S. AI labs". It lists Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, B Capital, First Round, Gradient, Databricks, SoftBank Vision Fund and Snowpoint as investors. Profitability and the AI lab share are Labelbox's own claims.

Outside sources match the basics. Forbes lists Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger as co-founders, Sharma as CEO, and about 200 employees as of March 2026, and says Labelbox raised money at about a $1 billion valuation in January 2022. That round was a $110 million Series D led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, with Snowpoint Ventures, Databricks Ventures, B Capital Group, Andreessen Horowitz and ARK Invest founder Catherine Wood taking part, as Pulse 2.0 reported on 18 January 2022. The same report named ArcelorMittal, Chegg, Genentech and Warner Brothers as customers of Labelbox's software at the time.

Labelbox started as labeling software for machine learning teams. Its About page now describes RL environments for AI labs and an agent platform for enterprises called Recursion. Alignerr is the human side: the people who write, rate and review the data.

In February 2026 Labelbox announced it had acquired Upcraft, a Chicago sales automation startup, to scale Alignerr, according to Pulse 2.0's report of 14 February 2026. That announcement described Alignerr as a network of "more than 1 million domain experts". Alignerr's own FAQ page says "Join 100,000+ Experts". Both figures come from Labelbox or Alignerr, and they differ by a factor of ten.

What Alignerr says it pays

Alignerr's homepage, checked on 3 October 2026, advertises "$80/hr Average pay", "1K+ Hired weekly" and "$1M Paid weekly". Its About page says you can "get up to $150/hr". These figures come from Alignerr, and an average across coders, doctors and transcribers tells you little about one job.

The rate that matters is the one on each listing, and Alignerr says payment details are listed in each project description before you start. On 3 October 2026 the homepage featured a Document Review Specialist card at $40–120 an hour marked "No experience required". This site had 3 Alignerr listings that day, all senior software engineering roles: agentic coding at $80–120 an hour, AI evaluation and benchmarks at $80–100 and AI infrastructure at $60–100. Our Mercor vs Alignerr comparison found Alignerr's own board on the same day listing 60 roles, mostly transcription work at $10–35 an hour.

Pay runs weekly. Alignerr's help centre says the billing cycle runs Monday to Sunday and payment is made by the following Friday, through Stripe Connect or PayPal depending on the country on your ID (checked 30 September 2026). Some projects pay per hour and others per task, and its help centre says "a few projects in their evaluation phase are unpaid". The onboarding guide covers the billing modes in detail.

The Zara interview

Some Alignerr jobs require a Zara AI interview or a domain assessment, and Alignerr says you are told if yours does. Zara is also the name of micro1's AI interviewer and the format looks the same, though neither company describes an arrangement. Plan on one attempt: Alignerr's help articles disagree on whether a retake is allowed even after technical problems, and the interview is marked failed if your camera is off. We found no Alignerr page saying the interview is paid. Our Zara interview guide explains how Zara works, and the onboarding guide has Alignerr's own rules for it.

Lawsuits, regulators and data incidents

We searched for lawsuits, regulatory actions and data incidents involving Alignerr or Labelbox on 3 October 2026. We found no regulatory action, no reported data breach, and no lawsuit brought by workers against either company.

The one federal case we found with Labelbox as a party is one Labelbox brought. Filed in the Northern District of California on 24 November 2025 (case 3:25-cv-10159), it is a trade secrets case against a former senior employee and against V7, another data labeling company. On 2 March 2026 the judge dismissed Labelbox's state law claims against V7 with leave to amend. The docket showed no final judgment when we checked. The case does not concern contractors or pay.

Workers have discussed a class action over unpaid work in Reddit threads, but we found no filed case. If one is filed, Alignerr's arbitration clause and class action waiver will be part of the argument.

The Better Business Bureau lists Alignerr as not BBB accredited. On 3 October 2026 its page showed 8 complaints in the last three years, all closed in the last 12 months. One, dated 8 May 2026 and marked "Unanswered", says Alignerr owes the complainant $3,240 for 18 tasks on a financial modeling project, removed without explanation. BBB complaints are claims from the people who file them; BBB does not rule on them.

Scams that use the Alignerr name

Alignerr's own pages carry no scam warning. A search of its help centre on 3 October 2026 for "scam", "fraud" and "phishing" returned nothing about impersonation. Workers report fake recruiters anyway.

In May 2026 a poster on r/alignerr described an email from someone calling themselves an Alignerr recruiter, sent from the domain alignerrcommunity.com and asking for details "that should already be in my profile". In July 2026 another r/alignerr poster reported an email from a self-described recruiter at gotalignerr.com, with a realistic-looking sign-up link. We checked both domains in the public registry: alignerrcommunity.com was registered on 21 January 2026 and gotalignerr.com on 13 February 2026, while alignerr.com dates from 28 April 2024. We found no Alignerr page that uses or mentions either one.

Alignerr also hires some people through Upwork, and its help centre says those contributors are paid by Upwork, so an Upwork offer naming Labelbox or Alignerr is not automatically fake. Check that it leads back to sign-in at app.alignerr.com.

The official addresses we have seen are:

• alignerr.com and app.alignerr.com, for the site and sign-in
• intercom.help/alignerr, the help centre, which carries the same content as help.labelbox.com
• support@alignerr.com, or the chat inside the app, for support
• connect.stripe.com, for Stripe payout setup

A sender's address ending in anything other than exactly @alignerr.com deserves suspicion, and a display name proves nothing. Nothing in Alignerr's published process involves paying a fee, moving to Telegram or WhatsApp, or buying equipment. Alignerr does use Persona for ID checks, so the safe way to verify your identity is to type app.alignerr.com yourself and start from there. Our guide to spotting fake AI training listings covers the wider warning signs.

What workers report

Everything in this section is what individual workers say, not what Alignerr states, and we cannot verify any single account.

The ratings

On Trustpilot, Alignerr had a TrustScore of 4.5 from 2,882 reviews when we checked on 30 September 2026, with 82 percent five-star and 9 percent one-star. Reviewers praise the Zara interview and smooth onboarding; the complaints are slow support, removals without explanation, and delayed or disputed pay. Trustpilot blocked our attempt to recheck on 3 October. Glassdoor also blocked us, so we do not quote a Glassdoor rating; when we last read reviews there, they were far fewer and more negative, and described weeks without projects.

Workers who were paid

An August 2026 r/alignerr post from someone who says they have worked on Alignerr since 2024 describes more than five projects at about $20 an hour and payment received, but also payments held "more than 2 months" and no project for five months. A July 2026 r/alignerr poster with an account more than a year old wrote that "the people and support from discord was good", before describing the account's removal.

Removals and unpaid work

Removal is the theme that comes up most. In September 2026 an r/alignerr poster wrote that they worked 65 hours on a coding model comparison task, received positive feedback, and were removed two days later by an email saying the project had downsized, with no payment yet. A late September post quotes a removal email in full, including "this decision is final, and we will not be reviewing requests for reinstatement." Another July 2026 poster describes five automated flags reading "fraudulent activity detected", an appeal with no reply, removal, and one payment still outstanding. A September 2026 post on r/alignerrunofficial says the worker was told payment "cannot be processed" while the account is deactivated.

Alignerr's FAQ addresses this. It says accounts may be suspended "for policy violations, low-quality work, or inactivity", that after a failed verification check "payment processing may be delayed while we manually review all completed work", and that "all accepted work will be paid, but fraudulent or incomplete work may not be." A separate answer says "all Alignerrs are paid for completed work", even work "graded to be low quality", with "the most extreme cases of fraud" as the only exception. Alignerr does not publish how long that review takes.

Unpaid screening and slow review

A July 2026 r/alignerr poster describes an unpaid quiz of at least two hours on one project. On another, a media project, they report being paid $18.25 for about five hours of work, because only part of it had been reviewed, and say they were told on Discord that there were only a few reviewers. Alignerr's help centre itself says some evaluation phases are unpaid. A September 2026 r/alignerr poster asks whether it is normal to have no tasks after finishing onboarding; the help centre says you may sit on a waiting list until a suitable project starts.

What Alignerr does not publish

• How many contributors are active, as opposed to the "100,000+" on its FAQ page or the "more than 1 million" in Labelbox's February 2026 announcement
• How long a manual review of a deactivated account's completed work takes, or a deadline for paying it
• The specific reason for a removal, or a published appeal process
• Which assessments and evaluation phases are paid, other than saying "a few" evaluation phases are not
• A pass mark or rubric for the Zara interview
• Any warning about recruiters impersonating it, or a list of the domains it uses
• How its "$80/hr" average is calculated

Before you apply

• Start from app.alignerr.com, typed in yourself, never from a link in an unsolicited email
• Read the rate and billing mode on each project before you begin, and do not start until the rate is clear, as Alignerr's help centre itself advises
• Treat interviews, quizzes and evaluation phases as unpaid unless the project says otherwise
• Keep your own record of task IDs, hours and dates, so you have evidence if a payment is disputed
• Apply to other platforms at the same time; see being accepted but getting no tasks and the Mercor vs Alignerr comparison

Sources

• Alignerr homepage, About page and FAQ page (alignerr.com), checked 3 October 2026, for the Labelbox relationship, advertised pay, "100,000+" and the FAQ answers on deactivation and payment
• Alignerr Terms of Use (alignerr.com/privacy), effective 11 September 2025, naming ALIGNERR LLC and setting out arbitration and the class action waiver
• Alignerr help centre (intercom.help/alignerr), searched 3 October 2026, and its payment, onboarding and missing pay rate articles as cited in our onboarding guide, checked 30 September 2026
• Labelbox About page (labelbox.com), checked 3 October 2026
• Forbes company profile of Labelbox, checked 3 October 2026
• Pulse 2.0, 18 January 2022, on the $110 million Series D; and 14 February 2026, on the Upcraft acquisition
• Labelbox, Inc. trade secrets case, No. 3:25-cv-10159 (N.D. Cal.), docket and order of 2 March 2026, via CourtListener
• Better Business Bureau profile and complaints for Alignerr, checked 3 October 2026
• Domain registration records for alignerr.com, alignerrcommunity.com and gotalignerr.com, from the Verisign RDAP service, checked 3 October 2026
• Alignerr's Trustpilot page, checked 30 September 2026
• Posts on r/alignerr and r/alignerrunofficial from May to September 2026, read through a public Reddit archive, attributed above as worker reports
• Labeling Jobs listing data for Alignerr, counted on 3 October 2026

Last checked 3 October 2026. We are not affiliated with Alignerr or Labelbox and we do not process applications.