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Ask HN: MTurk is no longer available to non-US companies. How are you coping?

89 points by chrisacky ↗ HN
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't a US resident.

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's early stage launch (I plan on doing a Show HN next week) has used it for about a hundred thousand HITs already.

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/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.

Being able to have everything returned in a fixed CSV is so useful. We have have dozens/hundreds of workers handle our HITs simulatenously...

But now Mechanical Turk is impossible to use if you don't have a social security number. This is because you need to sign up to Amazon Payments to use Mechanical Turk.

https://requester.mturk.com/mturk/amazonpaymentsacctreqmts

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.

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.

If I hire someone on Freelancers or oDesk.. it would take weeks to do this!!

What solutions exist to overcome this huge gap! We really need to use MTurk.. and I don't believe that any true alternatives exist.

Edit: Dont' CloudFlower have a minimum spend of $2,500 per month? That'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't need someone to do it all for me. I typically managed to create HITs that would only cost a $400 at most!

61 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread
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-...

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.

squidbot
For individuals, if you are ineligible for an SSN you can get an ITIN in its place, but as the parent notes, your business should probably get an EIN: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Taxpa...
AshFurrow
It took me six months and four attempts to get an ITIN, which included a trip to my US embassy. Not an easy task.
foobarqux
Can you describe in detail how to do it? I tried pretty hard, including a visit to the embassy, and failed.
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unreal37
For me, it was painless to get one. I used an agency.
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.
timmclean
Couldn't you say that about any company selling services?
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?

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trhway
>You only need a social security number if you're doing it as a personal account.

The EIN still requires SSN(ITIN or another EIN) :

http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...

"All EIN applications (mail, fax, electronic) must disclose the name and Taxpayer Identification Number (SSN, ITIN, or EIN) of the true principal officer, general partner, grantor, owner or trustor. "

EDIT: my bad with foreign rules, thanks vitovito below

vitovito
Except if you're a foreign entity. Quoting from the domestic instructions probably won't help the original poster.

"IF the applicant...

Is a foreign person needing an EIN to comply with IRS withholding regulations

THEN...

Complete lines 1–5b, 7a–b (SSN or ITIN optional), 8a, 8b–c (if applicable), 9a, 9b (if applicable), 10, and 18."

Note "SSN or ITIN optional." That's per the SS-4 form. Per a sibling post, the IRS will also issue foreign entities an ITIN if necessary.

jorgecurio
Say you are a Canadian, you have a company incorporated in Canada.

How do I get on Amazon Turk? What are the exact steps I need to take?

vitovito
I have no idea, as I've never been a Canadian with a Canadian company who has to get on Amazon MTurk after next week.

But this is part of your core competency as an entrepreneur. You're supposed to be able to figure this stuff out. All the pieces are in this thread: get an EIN, maybe get an ITIN, maybe that means you have to petition at your local US Embassy, maybe get an address in the US, maybe that means a UPS Store box, maybe that means a registered agent.

And then when you do figure it out, write a long blog post about it that details the "exact steps I need to take" so people in your position in the future can learn how to do it. Do it on your company blog so future clients can see that if you're going to be this diligent about figuring out how to take care of your own business, maybe you'll be that diligent in taking care of theirs.

Sorting this stuff out is your job, all the programming stuff is ancillary.

jorgecurio
that was very inspirational. You are absolutely right this is something an entrepreneur must figure out on his own. This is why entrepreneurship is great.
gamblor956
If Amazon is no longer letting foreign companies use Mechanical Turk, the obvious solution is to incorporate a US company (or a US branch of your foreign company) and then sign up for MT.

Seriously, it's not rocket science. Incorporation can take as little as a 5 minutes using a service like LegalZoom, and acquiring an EIN (which is part of the incorporation process) can be done online in a minute or two. Then you open up a US bank account, which may require you to physically show up at a US bank. Once you have the EIN and bank account, you sign up for Mechanical Turk.

logn
And FYI, EINs are surprisingly easy to get. Maybe 5-10 minutes. I guess the IRS doesn't want to make you jump through hoops for you to pay them taxes.
sjf
Depends on who answers the phone apparently. Instructions here, http://catherineryanhoward.com/2012/02/24/non-us-self-publis...

I gave up my Amazon seller account because they started asking for EIN/ITINs, I am too paranoid to let the US have anything to do with my taxes unless absolutely necessary.

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dbuxton
Unfortunately the payments sign up also requires proof of a US billing address.

It is easily possible to get an EIN however as a non-US company with no US presence; you have to call a nice IRS person in Indiana if memory serves.

seeingfurther
You can get a US based billing address by leasing a UPS store mail box.
cylinder
Not even that. Just sign up for a registered agent service.
jorgecurio 

    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.
You can't access Disneyland, go create your own.

If only it were that easy. I have btw, asked questions about how to create my own crowd source. There isn't much on logistics.

cylinder
Pay attention. You can get an EIN easily. This is trivial.
arihant
For people looking to get EIN, we just did this last week - They do not issue them on phone starting January 2014. You need to fax the application to a Cincinnati number, and if you put down your fax number on the application, they fax you back your EIN in 3-4 business days, not counting the day you faxed on. If you do not get a fax back or you did not put your fax number on the application, you can call them in 3-4 days and then they will give you on phone, if your application was processed.

Moreover, for an Amazon payments account, you also need a US bank account. And that task is not easy for non-US entities.

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/ http://www.clickworker.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.
quentinms
Pybossa (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/
raphman
> "Based on volunteers not micro-payments"

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

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.

jccooper
Dunno, but I'll bet the internal reasoning is somewhere between "we need to drive adoption of Payments" and "we'll save an extra percent or two that otherwise goes to a 3rd party".
trhway
i guess IRS is afraid that MTurk will be laundering money, each and every $1 bill, manually...
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.

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.
jorgecurio
Minimum is $2500 /month now. Fuck crowdflower.
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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.
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

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) 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...

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
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.

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 and a project manager will help you get started.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards, David

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

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

Disclosure: I built GridForce.

labd5507
Honestly, I'd get an EIN from the IRS http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ... 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.
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
Mankhool
AFAIK it has never been available in Canada so I have appreciated reading the suggestions here because I really want to use it.