- There are three ways to buy AI training data: open datasets, ready-made commercial datasets, and private data licensed to order.
- Published prices run from 2 cents per image in large archives to $100 to $300 per hour of film.
- Private data from companies is the hardest to get and the most differentiating, which is where a broker helps.
- Whatever you buy, check provenance, rights and personal information before training.
Three ways to buy datasets
| Route | What you get | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Open datasets | Free data on hubs such as Hugging Face | Everyone has it; licenses and provenance vary |
| Ready-made commercial datasets | Collected or licensed data sold to many buyers, from vendors such as Defined.ai | Fast, but usually non-exclusive |
| Private data licensed to order | Archives held by companies, sourced and vetted for you | Slower, but unique and can be exclusive |
We work on the third route. We do not hold an inventory of datasets for sale. We find companies that hold the data you need, check their rights and privacy handling, and arrange samples. You license directly from the holder. See how it works.
What datasets cost
| Data | Published price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Images, large archive | $0.02 to $0.04 per image | Reuters, 2024 |
| Images, curated | $1 to $2 per image | Reuters, 2024 |
| Short-form video | $2 to $4 per video | Reuters, 2024 |
| Unpublished footage | $1 to $4 per minute | Bloomberg, 2025 |
| Longer films | $100 to $300 per hour | Reuters, 2024 |
| Text | About $0.001 per word | Reuters, 2024 |
Full list with sources: AI data prices.
Data types we source
Language and text
- Conversational data
- Email archives
- Workplace chat data
- Books and long-form text
- Multilingual and low-resource language data
- Business documents and forms
Speech and audio
Vision and video
Code and agents
Human feedback and evaluation
Domain and enterprise
- Customer support tickets
- CRM and sales data
- Financial documents and records
- Legal documents data
- Scientific and research data
Before you buy any dataset
- Ask for provenance: who created the data, under what terms, and how it reached the seller. See data provenance explained.
- Check the license: permitted purpose, exclusivity, sublicensing and what happens to models at the end.
- Check personal information and how it was removed.
- Test a sample against your use case before committing. Read how to evaluate a data sample.
- Keep records you can use for AB 2013 and EU AI Act disclosures.
Read next
Questions
Do you sell datasets directly?
No. We are a broker. We source data from vetted holders, and you license directly from them. We never take custody of the data.
Where can I buy datasets for machine learning?
Open hubs, commercial dataset vendors, cloud marketplaces and brokers. See our companies directory for what each offers.
Can I get exclusive data?
Often, yes, when licensing private data from a company. Exclusivity costs more. See exclusive vs non-exclusive licenses.