by juvan
If there are some world events where you really want to have a better guarantee of knowing where things are at you may consider looking at the various pay per collect services where regular people sign up and get paid $3-100 for each task which even operate in unstable regions of the world, some of the ones out there:
Warning summary of options from AI follows, I have not verified all of these, but am familiar with some of them.
Apps/Services That Pay Individuals to Collect Local Photos & Data
Gigwalk — pays users $3–$100 per task, typically retail shelf audits, price checks, and product display photos. Tasks appear on a map based on your GPS location and pay out via PayPal. iScriptsLow Income Relief
Field Agent — similar model to Gigwalk, paying $3–$20 per task for photo audits, mystery shops, product reviews, and display verification at local stores. Available in the US, Canada, UK, and several other countries. Low Income ReliefFinancial Panther
EasyShift — focuses on grocery and convenience store photo tasks, generally requiring more photos per task than competitors. Pays per completed shift. Financial Panther
Premise — a data and analytics platform backed by GV and Andreessen Horowitz. Pays contributors to collect food prices, photo-document local infrastructure, verify points of interest, and gather ground-truth observations. Active in 30+ countries including challenging markets in Africa and South America. CrunchbaseISBIS Blog Corner
IVueit — pays $7–$75 per “Vue” for quick photo inspections of properties, facilities, and retail locations. Payouts via PayPal. The Work at Home Woman
Observa — pays cash for completing photo audits in physical stores, typically photographing and answering questions about specific products. All Good Points
FotoPay and Mobee — additional store/brand auditing apps that pay in cash or gift cards for completing photo-based missions. All Good Points
Roamler — a Netherlands-based platform paying contributors across Europe to perform retail monitoring tasks like checking shelf displays and in-store conditions. Crowdsourcing Week
WeGoLook — focuses on insurance-adjacent tasks: photographing cars, intersections, and property exteriors for claims verification. Pays per completed “look.” Financial Panther
Mapillary (Meta) — crowdsources street-level geotagged imagery. Originally community-driven, it was acquired by Facebook/Meta in 2020 and made free for commercial use. Contributors capture imagery rather than receiving direct pay, but the data feeds into Meta’s mapping infrastructure. Wikipedia
Google Crowdsource / Local Guides — Google’s Crowdsource app asks users to capture local photos, verify image labels, and validate translations. Compensation is via perks and recognition rather than cash. Google Play
B2B Platforms That Resell/Aggregate This Data
Premise (premise.com) — on the B2B side, Premise sells real-time, granular local intelligence to organizations like the World Bank, governments, and CPG companies. Their platform blends machine learning with their contributor network to deliver same-day data with global coverage. Premise
BeMyEye — a European crowdsourced Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) provider operating in 21 countries. Sells retail execution monitoring data (share of shelf, planogram compliance, stock levels, promotional compliance) to CPG brands. Deploys 1.5M+ on-demand data gatherers and acquired Streetbee for image recognition capabilities. CrunchbaseTechCrunch
Trax Retail (Singapore) — provides computer-vision-based retail shelf analytics. Uses a combination of crowdsourced and automated imagery to deliver shelf intelligence to CPG companies. Crowdsourcing Week
Roamler — also operates on the B2B side through its Retail Monitors division, selling crowdsourced audit data to brands across Europe. Crowdsourcing Week
Field Agent — in addition to its consumer app, sells the aggregated audit, pricing, and display compliance data to CPG brands as a B2B service across 7+ countries. Crowdsourcing Week
iVueit — on the enterprise side, offers on-demand crowdsourced property and facility inspection data to facility management companies and CPG brands, with a network of 375K+ “Vuers” across the US and Canada. Typical turnaround is under 24 hours. iVueit
LXT (Germany) — offers paid crowdsourcing services including retail audits, AI data collection, and data annotation across multiple industries. AIMultiple
Mapillary (Meta) — provides a free API for accessing street-level imagery and computer-vision-derived map features (traffic signs, road markings, etc.) globally. Government agencies and developers use it to build applications on top of crowdsourced street imagery. WikipediaThe Mapillary Blog
Clickworker — a general crowdsourcing platform based in Germany that also offers retail audit and local data collection services to enterprise clients.