Every list of side gigs prints an hourly rate. We wanted to know where those rates come from.
So we went to 19 platforms and programs and looked at their own websites. Not review sites. Not forums. The company’s own pages, on one day: September 2, 2026.
We looked for one thing. Does this platform say what the work pays?
Twelve said nothing
These 12 published no pay figure on their own site that we could find:
- Amazon Flex
- Instacart
- DoorDash
- Uber Eats
- Shipt
- Rover
- UserTesting
- Clickworker
- Fancy Hands
- LiveOps
- Scribie
- TranscribeMe
Some of them describe pay at length. DoorDash explains that base pay reflects a minimum guaranteed hourly rate, then never says what that rate is. Amazon Flex tells you that you see earnings before you accept a block. That is true, and it tells you nothing before you sign up.
That is not an accident. A range on a public page is a promise. A number inside an app, shown one offer at a time, is not.
Seven said something
Seven published a figure. They are not equally useful.
Two publish a real rate. Rev publishes $0.40-1.10 per audio minute. Prolific publishes an $8 an hour floor that researchers must meet.
One publishes a wage basis, not a wage. The Department of Labor says SCSEP pays the highest applicable minimum wage. That is a rule, and it is more useful than most numbers, because you can check it.
One publishes only where the law makes it. Grubhub prints rates for Seattle, New York City and California. Those three places set minimum pay by law. Everywhere else, Grubhub prints nothing.
One publishes a price, not pay. Outschool suggests charging $18-21 per learner per hour and keeps 30%. What you earn depends on how many children join.
One publishes numbers that fight each other. GoTranscript headlines up to $1.75 a minute. The rate data on that same page prices English at $0.65, and prices no language at $1.75.
One is set by your own county. Poll work pay is published by election offices. We found $75 in South Carolina and $300 in New Jersey for the same long day.
Why this matters to you
When a platform does not publish pay, every hourly figure you read about it came from somewhere else. A survey. A review site. One person’s week. An estimate.
Those can be useful. They are not the platform’s rate, and no site should print them as if they were.
It also explains something you may have noticed. Two articles about the same gig often give completely different numbers, and neither says where the number came from.
What to do instead
Ask what the unit is. Per hour, per task, per audio minute, per delivery. Rev pays per minute of audio, not per minute of your time. That single word changes the pay by a factor of four or five.
Find the floor, not the average. A floor is checkable. An average is somebody’s arithmetic on somebody’s sample.
Subtract your costs before you compare. Fuel, insurance and wear are yours in delivery work. An hourly figure that ignores them is not your pay.
Time your first five jobs. Your own rate is total pay divided by total hours, and it is the only number that describes you.
What we do about it
Every pay figure on this site names its source and the date we checked it. When a platform publishes nothing, we say so on the page instead of borrowing a number from somewhere else.
That makes some of our pages less satisfying than the listicles. It also makes them true.
You can see every gig we have checked, or read how we work.