Data procurement

Your client asks where the data came from.From now on you can show them, instead of assuring them.

You post what is needed: arm, task, volume and what an hour pays. Publishing reserves the whole budget. Whoever joins records at their own place and keeps their own dataset. Billing is by the hour recorded, payout after you accept.

10 %
Platform share, out of the hourly rate, no other fee
After acceptance
is when payout happens, not before
Per contribution
an account, a server timestamp, an authorship declaration
anonymous
neither your name nor your client's appears anywhere
Example collectionExample
SO-100

Pick a part out of the bin and place it in the fixture

Episodes collected
412
Hours collected
20.6
Missing until the pot is full
388
Per hour
Budget
Exclusive
Yes
Client
anonymous
Who this page is for

You are not buying the data for yourself.

For people whose work is only finished once somebody else is satisfied.

A lab says: we are missing data. You say: I have to explain where it came from and what it cost. Consultancy, integrator, research service, procurement - what connects them is the position, not the industry: you price the work before anyone knows how hard the recording will be.

Which of these is you?

You defend every figure in a deck for a requirement you did not write.

Your client always asks the same three questions, and none of them is about volume. Volume can be bought; traceability and predictability cannot.

Walk through the process first
The thing itself

A Collection is a public request with a funded pot behind it.

Not a contract with one supplier, but a public task several people can work on at the same time.

You name two things: which robot arm the recordings must show, and the task in your own words. Volume, hourly pay and the credit behind it turn that into a job. Publishing reserves the whole budget - not spendable twice - and without cover the Collection does not appear.

Whoever collects keeps their own dataset; the datasets are linked to the Collection, not merged. A different arm has different joints and value ranges, so merging on upload would produce a dataset that reads fine and is wrong all the same. Assembly happens on download: every contribution on its own, plus one archive of everything you accepted.

  • Two mandatory entries: robot arm and task description
  • Attachments are optional: images, videos, documents
One request, several setups, several datasets, one CollectionOne request, three independent setups, three datasets that stay with their collectors, and one archive assembled on download.One requestSeveral setupsown setup, own environmentSeveral datasetsstays with the collectorOne CollectionOne archiveassembled and checked on download

This is the sheet you put in front of your client

Set the three numbers you work with anyway and walk through it. Left your money, right what arrived.

Example
1003,000
EUR / hour

The rate is yours; this page publishes no range. The field starts on what the platform stores for a new operator.

Not the length of the recording: the time for one usable episode, discarded attempts included.

Price per episode
0.75 EUR
Actual cost per hour
15.00 EUR
Rate you set
15.00 EUR

The form takes 1.00 EUR to 1000.00 EUR per hour - a brake against a typo, not a recommendation.

The amount sits in your account and does not expire. As long as no Collection runs, nothing happens.

Your money

Credit
600.00 EUR
Of that reserved
0.00 EUR
Spent
0.00 EUR
Refunded
0.00 EUR
Locked for the collector0.00 EUR
Payable for the collector0.00 EUR

Budget for this Collection600.00 EUR

Your Collection

Progress

0 of 800 episodes

0 hours collected

What you can tell your client now

Cost
Nothing. Money lying ready carries no fee.
Origin
None yet, there is no contribution.

The paragraph you put in your quote

800 episodes, around 40 hours of recorded material. Budget 600.00 EUR, reserved in full the moment the request goes public. Of that, 536.00 EUR reaches the collectors and 64.00 EUR is the platform share of 10 percent, taken out of the hourly rate, not added on top. Each contribution is charged on arrival and paid out only after we accept it; a rejected one falls back into the budget. Whatever is left comes back when the request is closed.

Written from the three numbers above, with the same functions that do the billing. It stays in your browser.

The price per episode is rounded to whole cents, so the actual hour sits a few cents off the rate you set. Both stand above.

Posting costs nothing, and a small pot is a cheap trial: if nobody collects, the budget comes back.

See open collections
How the money moves

At any point your money sits in exactly one pot.

Free, reserved, charged, paid out. Whoever keeps those four apart answers every question about money without looking anything up.

Where is your money right now?

Collection published
Contribution arrived
accepted by you

What it is

Yours, in your account, tied to nothing, and it does not expire. No minimum volume, no setup fee, no remaining term.

What moves it out

Publishing a Collection binds it. Without cover the Collection does not appear at all.

The platform share of 10 percent on paid contract work comes out of the hourly rate instead of on top. A dataset sold in the marketplace carries 10 percent.

What you may promise, and what you may not

Six sentences of the kind you would write into a quote. Tap one to see whether the platform covers it.

Recorded on submission with the timestamp, the account, the version of the declaration text and the sender address. Part of the process, not a tick box.

Anonymity

You see everything. Nobody sees you.

The client behind a Collection is never named. For a service provider that is not a detail; it is what protects the relationship with their customer.

On the tile, in the detail view and in the public interface there is no name, no account, no country and no logo - not even as a field the page merely hides. If the client were visible, every collector could approach them directly. Anonymity here is the condition under which you can use the tool at all.

Two places are yours to watch: the description box is your text, so no company name in it - yours or your client's. Attachment metadata is cleaned on upload, but a letterhead in an image stays a letterhead.

Look at the tile as:

Task, attachments, progress, rate per hour
yes
Your name or account
only yourself
The individual contributions
all of them
What the collectors earn
the amounts you pay
Who else is collecting
the number

Whether collectors are visible to each other by name is not decided yet. Until it is, the careful reading applies: they are not.

Before you start

We are a tool for you and a competitor to you. Both are true.

Two things that do not read well for us. They stand here and not in the small print.

Our page for labs says that commissioning a data vendor means a quote, a contract, prepayment and waiting. What is meant there is the procedure, not the profession: somebody pays before a single recording exists, and provenance cannot be checked after delivery. We are not against the trade. We are against the old procedure.

Whoever procures data and passes it on sits in that same procedure one step further up: it costs a lab waiting time and it costs you margin. Posting turns the order around - budget fixed beforehand, provenance per contribution, ordering more means topping up credit. A vendor, too, can use it.

On the same platform where you post, we sell finished datasets and offer managed data packages of our own. For some enquiries that is an offer standing next to yours, and your client can open the marketplace themselves. There is no partner programme and no assurance that we will not take an enquiry ourselves.

What protects your customer relationship is not a promise: there is no field for who you are procuring for, and the collectors do not see you. And buying was never your service. Yours is turning a vague description into a task somebody can record, judging whether a recording is good, and handing the result over.

Every question your client asks has two answers

Pick what they ask. Left the usual route through a single supplier, right what posting here answers.

Through a single supplier

An assurance in the contract, which you pass on unchecked.

Posting a collection here

Per contribution an account, a server timestamp and an authorship declaration.

And these hold regardless of the question

Billing unit
Hours of recorded material, measured from the file
Format
LeRobot v2.1, cameras given by role
Exclusivity
A tick box, fixed from the first contribution

The left column describes a procedure, not a company and not a profession.

Frequently asked questions

Only if you tell them. The Collection names no client, and the accepted contributions sit in your account. The entries per contribution are complete enough to pass on.

The next enquiry comes with the same question.

A Collection you post today collects while you work on something else. When your client asks where the data came from, you open a breakdown.