
Ask HN: MTurk is no longer available to non-US companies. How are you coping? - chrisacky
As of 22nd August (tomorrow for the hermits among us), Mechanical Turk is giving the huge middle finger to anyone who wants to be a requester and create HITs on MTurk if they aren&#x27;t a US resident.<p>I have used MTurk for years and it is infinitely easier than using alternative websites. For example, my startup which is still in somewhat of it&#x27;s early stage launch (I plan on doing a Show HN next week) has used it for about a hundred thousand HITs already.<p>I run a vacation rental marketing platform ( edit: www.rentivo.com for the curious) that also builds websites for home owners and agents and handles their payment processing issues. We need to do things like detect watermarks, tag images for inside&#x2F;outside. Label images. Do data transcription for one website to a strict scheme and we validate thousands of URLs to categorize them based on set questions that we provide.<p>Being able to have everything returned in a fixed CSV is so useful. We have have dozens&#x2F;hundreds of workers handle our HITs simulatenously...<p>But now Mechanical Turk is impossible to use if you don&#x27;t have a social security number. This is because you need to sign up to Amazon Payments to use Mechanical Turk.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;requester.mturk.com&#x2F;mturk&#x2F;amazonpaymentsacctreqmts<p>There are no alternatives that exist from what I can gather. You have sites like CloudSource, CloudFlower, ClickWorker etc but all of these are just wrappers around Mechanical Turk and require a budget in the thousands.<p>The simplicity of MTurk meant that I could create a HIT with 70k HITs and have it completed over the weekend in the format I need.<p>If I hire someone on Freelancers or oDesk.. it would take weeks to do this!!<p>What solutions exist to overcome this huge gap! We really need to use MTurk.. and I don&#x27;t believe that any true alternatives exist.<p>Edit: Dont&#x27; CloudFlower have a minimum spend of $2,500 per month? That&#x27;s like 5 times our current monthly costs. There is no way we would ever be able to pay this. Plus, I want to handle the creation of the HITs myself. I don&#x27;t need someone to do it all for me. I typically managed to create HITs that would only cost a $400 at most!
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vitovito
You only need a social security number if you're doing it as a personal
account.

If your startup is doing it, it should be a business payments account, which
take an EIN, an employer identification number, which the IRS will issue to a
foreign entity: [http://smallbusiness.chron.com/obtain-tax-id-number-
foreign-...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/obtain-tax-id-number-foreign-
entity-58171.html)

The other alternative would be to integrate payments into an existing
distributed work platform like Bossa or PyBossa, and recruit your own audience
of participants through advertising.

~~~
Havoc
That seems to solve OP's problem nicely. :)

>>employer identification number, which the IRS will issue to a foreign entity

oh god I hope this doesn't catch on & become a trend. I'm OK with the tax
authority in my home country...but dealing with them for every country I
digitally interact with is not OK. :/

~~~
klodolph
Well, to be fair, MTurk is an interface to paid human labor.

~~~
Havoc
>> MTurk is an interface to paid human labor.

Indeed. My point is that this goes both ways. US citizens might not feel the
IRS asking for info is a big deal, but how about if SARS ask for you info?
Haven't heard of SARS?...to bad...you wandered onto their turf in your digital
adventures. Good luck figuring out which country you're dealing with. Oh and
they totally require you to pay the relevant fees in person in cash on site
once you figure out who they are.

See why I'm less than delighted with this "register with local tax authority
of the relevant site" story?

------
lukas
Chris - I'm the CEO of CrowdFlower. We're focused on large scale data
enrichment tasks which sounds a lot like what you're doing. We have no
geographic restriction and lots of european customers.

Unlike mTurk we have a platform usage fee to make our business sustainable and
to try to break a downward cycle in our marketplace (ie people posting broken
or poorly thought out jobs and making contributors frustrated leading to poor
quality work). If you are early stage enough (and it sounds like you are) we
will waive the fee. Shoot me an email if you're interested and I'll help you
get set up.

~~~
mbesto
Lukas, I might be interested in some of this stuff for a client. What's your
email address?

~~~
lukas
lukas at crowdflower.com

------
petercooper
I'm not sure they've changed policies on who's allowed in. For years they've
required requesters to have a US-based bank account and a US billing address,
and if you're a personal user, a US drivers' license number. It seems the real
change has been the mandatory move to Amazon Payments which requires either an
SSN for a personal account or an EIN for a business.

But.. if you were a business, you must already have the US bank account and
address, and getting an EIN is not too hard from overseas (you have to call
the IRS, Google for guides on it, I've done it before). If you had a personal
account, you should have had to provide a US drivers license and don't they
require an SSN?

Perhaps you had an account through a loophole/lack of checking though, but I
believe the long term policy has been to keep non-US entities out of the
system overall, most likely for tax reasons.

------
deviantbits
Hi Chris,

I'm David, the CEO of WorkHub. We're a Europe-based cloud working platform
offering an alternative to Mechanical Turk. Just sign up at
[https://www.workhub.com](https://www.workhub.com) and a project manager will
help you get started.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards, David

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cik
Sadly, there are no real alternatives to Mturk - at least nothing with near
the reach. If you have a friend in the US who might help you, it's by far the
easiest way to go. That being the case, here are some alternatives:

[https://microworkers.com/](https://microworkers.com/)
[http://www.clickworker.com/](http://www.clickworker.com/)
[http://www.shorttask.com/](http://www.shorttask.com/)

~~~
mrgordon
This doesn't make any sense (no offense). CrowdFlower uses almost a hundred
different "channels", of which Mechanical Turk was only one until we removed
it a while ago. It was not our largest channel at that point and it represents
a small fraction of the workers available on our platform. There is no sense
in which Turk has more contributors than CrowdFlower. On the contrary, we have
access to a much greater variety of people including specific groups from
countries like Japan that Turk has no access to.

------
jorgecurio
Canadian here.

This is a huge pain.

Crowdflower is expensive and lot of workers complain that they complete a
whole bunch of work and not get paid, it's been marked by people on reddit.

Amazon HITs are really the only way to go. Unfortunately, its very difficult
now to get on Amazon.

~~~
lukas
Jorge - I'm super biased as the CrowdFlower CEO but we work really hard to
make sure everyone gets paid and all disputes are resolved. We have a team of
four full time people that do nothing but handle community support tickets and
we've paid out many millions of dollars mostly without issues. We moved off of
Mechanical Turk a few years ago because it was hard to give workers a
consistently good experience there. You can see the twitter stream from our
contributors and most of the comments are positive
[https://twitter.com/search?q=cfcomm&src=typd](https://twitter.com/search?q=cfcomm&src=typd)

We are definitely more expensive than turk, although we have big discounts for
small startups that makes us comparable.

~~~
jorgecurio
Lukas, I'm sorry I reacted so negatively, seems I was not fair and let me know
if it's possible to use CrowdFlower, like start with a low non monthly
commitment cost and go from there.

For your information, I am basically doing photo tagging, wondering what my
costs will be, how fast jobs will be completed etc.

Thank you.

~~~
alogray
Hey Jorge,

Looks like Lukas might have missed your response but I can jump in. We
definitely love to work with the little guys, too. Nothing is more interesting
than the use cases that academics and startups come up with. You should reach
out to Lukas via e-mail (he shared it elsewhere in this thread) or our sales
team ([http://www.crowdflower.com/platform-
plans](http://www.crowdflower.com/platform-plans)) to talk specifics.

We've also got a trial that will let you process 5,000 rows of data without
having to worry about a paid plan. It's not time limited, either, so you can
take as long as you need to go through those first 5,000 photos of yours.

You might want to check out a recent blog post up about a photo keyword gen
job run by one of the guys at CF: [http://www.crowdflower.com/blog/how-i-got-
the-crowd-to-gener...](http://www.crowdflower.com/blog/how-i-got-the-crowd-to-
generate-metadata-for-my-travel-photos)

------
labd5507
Honestly, I'd get an EIN from the IRS [http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-
Businesses-&-Self-Employ...](http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-
Businesses-&-Self-Employed/How-to-Apply-for-an-EIN) For international
businesses, it requires a phone call but supposedly it's not terribly
difficult. Get a mail forwarding serving so you have a US address for Amazon
payments, and from there it's just a matter of sorting out a bank account or
US credit card. That might be a bit more difficult, but the easiest thing to
do (if a little bit of a grey area) would be to get someone in the States to
get a prepaid card like Serve AmEx, Bluebird AmEx, or prepaid Paypal
mastercard. All of those cards are prepaid, but they have a routing and
account number that could be set up as a bank account on Amazon Payments. The
Paypal one would probably be especially handy since it could be funded from a
foreign bank account or a PayPal account.

------
quentinms
Pybossa ([http://pybossa.com/](http://pybossa.com/)) is a great (IMO) and FOSS
alternative. NASA and CERN (amongst others) are using it. See some application
examples here: [http://crowdcrafting.org/](http://crowdcrafting.org/)

~~~
raphman
> "Based on volunteers not micro-payments"

It seems that this does not really help the original poster. Very interesting,
nevertheless.

------
crowdcurious
For the people using Crowdflower and MTurk, how are people dealing with low-
quality work? I've tried using both in the past, but ran into issues with
getting good results.

~~~
lilsunnybee
On MTurk are you adding any qualifications to your tasks? If not you are much
more likely to get bad results.

~~~
crowdcurious
I did add qualifications, although I forget which ones, and results were
shaky. What have your experiences been with qualifications, and which ones did
you use?

~~~
labd5507
Not who you were replying to, but on mTurk 10,000 approved HITs with a 99%
approval rating or higher will probably be your best bet. If you are going to
put up a lot of HITs, especially if your HITs require special skills, you
might want to put up some tasks and assign a special qual to the top, say 10
or 20% of the workers. Then you'd have a more limited group of workers, but
ones that you know will do well. (Usually qualification tasks require workers
to complete 10-20 of the HITs to get a good idea of the quality of work.) You
might sacrifice a little bit of speed, but you'll get better work. Plus, if
your work pays decently by mTurk standards, anyone who has the qualification
will be on the lookout for your tasks.

------
callmeed
Interesting. I used Crowdflower just a few months ago with fairly acceptable
results. Wasn't aware they raised their prices.

I've been using some local college students now to tag wedding images. Much
better results. Id be interested in talking to you more about this if you
don't mind. I might be able to fork my tagging system so you could use it.

------
PanMan
I used to use Mturk via CrowdFlower, which did (does) some nice filtering on
top of the Mturk data. Unfortunately a few months ago they switched from a
pay-what-you use model to packages, with the smallest $2500/month. I'm also
interested in other interfaces/layers on top of MTurk.

~~~
jorgecurio
This. Used to be minimum $100, now minimum is $2500 /month....who the
fuck...how can an dev like me fork up 2500 grand a month

~~~
noir_lord
2500 grand would be 2.5 million dollars, a grand is slang for a thousand.

~~~
jorgecurio
but imagine if you paid 2.5 million dollars instead of $2500, you would lose
at life.

------
isaacn
If you want a simple wrapper around Mechanical Turk without the hefty fees,
check out GridForce: [http://gridforceapp.com/](http://gridforceapp.com/)

It is a Microsoft Excel 2013 Application that allows you to crowdsource your
spreadsheet right from Excel.

Disclosure: I built GridForce.

------
das_alexander
If anybody would be interested in a simple API that works as a wrapper for
Mturk and mimics how Mturk's API works, charging a flat 5% fee for each HIT;
email me at mturk.wrapper@gmail.com

------
mailarchis
You should definitely check out crowdflower.com we had been using them for
image tagging tasks with great results. Plus they gave advanced features that
help with quality control.

~~~
gmisra
Seconded. [http://www.crowdflower.com/](http://www.crowdflower.com/)

------
Mankhool
AFAIK it has never been available in Canada so I have appreciated reading the
suggestions here because I really want to use it.

------
kelukelugames
Did Amazon ever say why they are requiring Amazon Payments accounts?

~~~
jonathanberger
Not that I'm aware of. I'm guessing it's for fraud reasons. But I'm pretty
frustrated by the lack of messaging/explanation around this change.

If you're going to change this for the worse, at least communicate to us about
why the change was needed.

------
goodJobWalrus
but why are they doing this?

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trhway
i guess IRS is afraid that MTurk will be laundering money, each and every $1
bill, manually...

