Billing System Features
Appen estimates the cost of a job at the time of job launch and holds this estimated amount from your account until the job is complete. The platform requires a minimum hold of $10 per job in your account.
Fig. 1: Launch Page
Payment Amount per Row
This is the amount that a contributor earns for completing one row.
To estimate the base cost of a single judgment on a source row, take payment amount per page and divide it by (Rows per Page – 1). If you have enough Test Questions in your job, there will be at least one Test Question shown per page by default. Test Questions are not considered part of the source data, which is why the payment amount is divided by (Rows per Page – 1).
Once your job is running, if the cost is likely going to exceed the estimate, you will receive an email notification asking you to allocate more funds to the job. Once your job reaches the amount held, your job will be paused automatically and you will receive an email that your job has been paused. We don't anticipate jobs exceeding the original estimate often, however there are three likely reasons spend could exceed more than the original estimate for the job:
- Poor test questions
- Dynamic judgments and high disagreement
- Over-collection due to manual rejections etc.
If more rows are ordered while a job is running, Appen will re-estimate the cost of the job and hold funds accordingly. When jobs are paused manually, funds will remain held for the job. If a job is canceled, any funds not distributed to the contributors are credited back to your account. The same is true when a job is finished. For example, if we hold $10 for a job that actually costs $2, $8 will be refunded to your account upon completion. You will be able to see where your funds are currently being held on the account page.
Fig. 2: Team Page
Contributor Bonuses
The platform also supports contributor bonusing. When issuing a bonus, funds are immediately held and distributed to the contributor(s) from your available account balance with markup incurred. If there are not enough funds in your account, we will return an error and not allow the bonus to be issued.
Note: There is a max of $20 USD for a single bonus.
Fig. 3: Contributors Page
Fig. 4: Bonus Contributors