Hi HN! We're really excited to share Scale with all of you. Our goal is to make it really easy for startups to integrate human tasks and BPO into their companies. Give us a try (your first 10 requests are free)! And contact us if you think you might have a use case we don't cover yet.

So how is this different from mturk?

MTurk has a huge quality problem (around 40% is spam) due to being crowdsourced, and it has a pretty high barrier to entry to get something working well. We hire our own members who we screen for quality for particular tasks, meaning they're fast and high quality. Our API is also much simpler than MTurk's, and we do most of the heavy lifting for you.

There are also lots of types of tasks that MTurk basically can't solve for you (for example, calling a business), that we're working on building high quality solutions to.

Mturk requesters must be in the US. Or have a US billing address. This doesn't appear to have such a restriction.

Maybe I'm skimming too fast, but what tasks are possible? If anything is possible, how do I determine the level of detail required in my request?

For now we support categorization, transcription, and phone calls (which are each pretty broad categories and can be used for a wide variety of tasks). You can see our docs here: http://docs.scaleapi.com/

We're intentionally releasing endpoint by endpoint in a way that we can ensure our members can perform the tasks efficiently while also providing a ton of flexibility to the developer. Our end goal, of course, is to allow developers to do basically anything.

How does it work with pricing being $0.50/request but requests can take wildly different amounts of time? e.g. making a phone call

One of our goals is to be able to provide flat, predictable pricing to developers so it's extremely easy for them to integrate.

For now, the $.50 flat pricing has been working well, because most phone calls are pretty limited in length/scope. If we notice a larger variance in the time of our phone calls, though, we might slightly change the pricing scheme.

Love the concept. How about web snooping? Like "verify whether or not this person worked at this job on this date"?

That seems feasible as long as you give very explicit instructions to the person performing the task. I'm not sure if I could do that without instructions!