The startup offers free home cleaning – if it can write everything in the robot’s training

Although the Shift app website says there is “no catch” to the free cleaning, the FAQ states that booking an appointment requires payment information and warns that customers may be charged if they cancel an appointment with less than 24 hours’ notice or if they are not available to allow the cleaners to come in at that time. Shift program word of mouth the document also seeks to release the platform from liability for property damage, theft, or personal injury that may result from cleaning.

Because of the promotion

So why would a tech startup offer free cleaning? First-person cleaning data is critical to the company’s ability to “offer free cleaning services for short periods of time” at the expense of professional cleaners, according to the Shift app’s website. Shift’s privacy policy describes the “core of microagi’s business” as “collecting data for training robotics.”

Temporary cleaning offers for New York City homes can serve as a marketing hook The main purpose of the Shift app—recruiting people to wear a “recorder” to “record short videos of daily chores or professional tasks” in exchange for what they claim will be $20 an hour plus bonuses.

The great work of the Shift program is briefly shown in a promotional video about free house cleaning, which features a US general manager. Harry Kilberg stating that the platform already pays “thousands of people” across 15 countries to post daily jobs and household chores.

The main page for the Shift program, designed to register contributors, shows that more than 10,000 “employees” were collectively paid more than $5 million in the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year.

This makes MicroAGI one of the most popular startups that hires and pays ordinary people to record their daily activities to provide data for training robots. Other such companies include Encord and Micro1, with the latter hiring thousands of workers in 50 countries such as India, Nigeria, and Argentina, according to MIT Technology Review.

The Shift app website shows that MicroAGI is launching a crowdfunding campaign. blog posts associated with NYC university and college students, teachers, restaurant and delivery workers, and residents of a particular community.

Meanwhile, the company has spread Craigslist posts targeting residents of certain US cities such as Boston—is the founder of MicroAGI and CEO Bercan Kilic he laughed at the prospect about the Shift program that has recently been launched in other cities such as London, Munich, and Zurich.