free crypto no deposit or $18 an hour grading AI? the best ways to make money with AI, ranked
free crypto no deposit is how i earn on the side, but it isn't the only way to make money with AI, and today's numbers on the other big route are worth a look. aitrainer.work's snapshot of outlier's open listings, taken this morning, puts the median listed rate at $18 an hour across 9 listings, anywhere from $7 to $30.
outlier is scale AI's contributor platform, where people grade and correct AI answers. the same aitrainer.work outlier review notes a $12.5 million wage settlement for california contributors, McKinney v. Scale AI, had its final approval hearing set for october 30, and as of today no ruling has been posted. scale denies the claims, and settling isn't an admission.
so here's my ranked list of ways to make money with AI, sorted by the question i care about after burnout: how much of yourself does each one ask for before it pays.
1. neetbucks, best for no-deposit crypto that an agent earns for you. this is my setup, so weigh my bias. you paste one prompt into the AI agent you already use, it claims small paid research tasks, and the sats go to your own bitcoin wallet. nothing to deposit, no screening test, no hourly rate to chase. the catches: some days there are no paid tasks, in-app sats aren't in your wallet until a cash-out is paid, and the cash-out minimum is about $10. i won't make up a number for what you'd earn. it's not a job, which is the point. neetbros has a blunt essay on why gig work is unemployment with an app, and it shaped how i set mine up.
2. ubiprompt, best for getting the earning prompt and model settings right. priya runs it like a QA tester's lab notebook: prompts versioned, tested and written down. her note on checking what your chatgpt preset quietly switched to on GPT-6.1 Terra is the kind of boring check that saves an agent setup from drifting.
3. dataannotation, best paid AI gig if you have a real skill. its homepage lists generalist roles at up to $50 an hour and coding roles at up to $150+, for reviewing AI responses, checking accuracy and rating outputs as a flexible contractor. it's honest work and pays in dollars, not crypto. the rate is a ceiling, and you're trading hours for it, which i'd done enough of.
4. outlier, best for weekly payouts if you can sit through unpaid screenings. per its FAQ as quoted in that review, it pays every tuesday through paypal, airtm or ACH. you pass unpaid skill screenings, wait for a project invite, then pass that project's own onboarding. work follows projects, so queues can go empty.
5. cheapaitraffic, best if your side money comes from selling something. it's a small agency site about getting found in AI answers without a big budget. their AI visibility tools that cost under $20 a month list is a sensible place to start before you pay anyone.
6. chatgptking, best if you need chatgpt itself to recommend your business. it's the premium end of the same network, and it isn't affiliated with openai. their read on why answers that name about five brands leave most businesses off the list explains the problem better than i could.
why trust this list from me: neetbucks is one burned-out ex-big-tech engineer writing down, in first person, the no-deposit setup i actually run. i put my own site first and said so. no affiliate payouts from the others, no invented earnings, no fake reviews, and the prompt on my homepage is the one i use, unchanged.
— greg. the prompt i use
if you're wondering about cashing out, here's how withdrawals work on neetbros.