Toloka Review 2026: The Tolokers Brand Is Gone

By Mufy Pachorawala, founder of getAIwork · Last updated: September 17, 2026

What is Toloka in 2026?

Toloka is an AI data company that sells training, evaluation and annotation data to model builders, and staffs that work through a crowd of freelance contributors. The part that has changed is the front door. The consumer brand “Tolokers”, which is what almost every article about Toloka is describing, has been retired and folded into a separate brand called Mindrift.

This matters practically, not just cosmetically. If you follow an old guide to toloka.yandex.com you get a connection reset, because that host no longer answers. If you follow a newer one to toloka.ai/tolokers you get bounced to mindrift.ai/welcome, carrying a query string the company wrote itself: utm_source=migration. That tag is Toloka telling its own analytics that you arrived from the old brand. We have a separate piece on the destination, our Mindrift review, and the two should be read together.

One oddity: Toloka never announced the migration. Its newsroom’s most recent item is dated November 18, 2025, roughly ten months before this article. A full replacement of the consumer brand went out with no post at all.

Who owns Toloka now, and is it still a Yandex company?

Not in the sense that matters. Toloka’s former parent, Yandex N.V., renamed itself Nebius Group N.V. on August 16, 2024, which the SEC records as the same registrant under one filer number. Nebius then lost control of Toloka. Its FY2025 Form 20-F, filed April 30, 2026, says the company “ceased to have control over Toloka” effective May 2, 2025, that its “voting interest was reduced to 49%”, and that Toloka “was deconsolidated in the second quarter of 2025” and reported as a discontinued operation.

What replaced that control is a US holding company. A Form D filed with the SEC on May 16, 2025 registers Toloka Group, Inc., a Delaware corporation incorporated in 2025 with a principal address in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The same filing lists a $90,000,000 offering with $72,000,000 sold, a first sale date of May 2, 2025, and names Arkady Volozh and Mikhail Parakhin among the directors, with Nebius Group N.V. listed as a promoter. Toloka’s own job postings describe the round as “led by Bezos Expeditions and Nebius Group”, with Parakhin as chairman of the board.

The contracting entity on the worker side is different again: Toloka AI BV, a Dutch company at Claude Debussylaan 7 in Amsterdam, KVK number 82041350, named in the Mindrift terms published July 1, 2026. So the group is a Delaware holding company, a Dutch operating company and a consumer brand, and you sign with the Dutch one.

Where do you actually sign up for Toloka?

At mindrift.ai, not at toloka.ai. The Toloka site keeps an “experts” page whose only call to action links across to Mindrift. There are two tiers once you are in. All-access tasks need no application: the vendor says “no application process, no waiting”. Specialized projects need a CV, assessments and identity verification.

Desktop only, and the vendor is blunt about it: tasks “are designed for web browsers on desktop or laptop computers, not mobile browsers”, and Mindrift “is not responsible for errors caused by completing tasks on mobile browsers”. If a phone is your only machine, this is not the platform for you, and the same is true of most of the work we screen. See AI training jobs with no experience for what the device floor actually looks like.

How much does Toloka pay?

Two published figures, both from the vendor’s own pages, and both quoted here only as listed. Specialized projects are advertised at “$15 to $100+ per hour”. A video recording project is advertised at “$5-$15/hour”. Everything else is set per project, and the vendor says each task carries “a clearly defined, fixed reward that is visible before work begins”, which is genuinely better than platforms that show you the rate only after you qualify.

One new wrinkle for anyone in the EU. A help article created on August 28, 2026 sets out the DAC7 reporting position: Toloka AI B.V. reports to the Dutch tax authority, and EU residents must supply a full postal address and place of birth before they can withdraw. That is a withdrawal blocker that did not exist a month ago, and it is the sort of thing that turns a first payout into a two-week detour if you find out about it on payday.

Which countries can work on Toloka?

Toloka publishes an actual list, which is more than most of its competitors manage. Its eligibility page, last updated May 27, 2026, bars 17 jurisdictions outright: Afghanistan, Belarus, Central African Republic, China including Hong Kong and Macau, Cuba, Iran, Kosovo, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Palestine, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, plus Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Sevastopol, Zaporizhzhia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

A second, separate list of “unsupported locations” is the surprising one. It includes Switzerland, Taiwan, Kenya and DR Congo. Kenya being unsupported sits awkwardly next to the “over 100 countries” language in Toloka’s own recruiting copy, and Switzerland is stranger still, because Toloka’s about page claims a Swiss office. There is a third small contradiction: the experts page lists Russian among the languages it recruits for, while Russia is on the restricted list.

VPNs are explicitly banned. The terms forbid “VPNs, proxies, or any other method to obscure or misrepresent your location”, and identity plus residency verification is required. Do not try to route around the list.

What are Toloka assessments like, and are they paid?

For all-access tasks there is no assessment at all. For specialized projects you submit a CV, pass qualifications and verify your identity, and the vendor says you “can pass qualifications to unlock higher-paid Specialized projects” as you go.

Toloka is one of very few platforms in this category that states, in writing, that some training is compensated. For sensitive-content work, “all freelancers undergo paid, multi-step training” including quizzes, practical tasks and direct feedback. That work carries its own guardrails: a minimum age of 21, a cap of “a maximum of 2 hours of work per UTC day”, and an opt-out honoured within one business day.

What the vendor does not say is whether ordinary, non-sensitive assessments are paid, how long they take, or how quickly they are reviewed. We looked; it is not published. Treat unpaid qualification time as the default assumption and cap how much of it you are willing to spend, which is the same advice we give for every platform in our hiring-now roundup.

One clause worth reading before you sign: Toloka may terminate an account for inactivity of “at least twelve (12) consecutive months”. Log in occasionally.

Is Toloka still actively maintained?

Mostly yes, with visible fraying at the edges. On the healthy side, Toloka’s Greenhouse board carries 18 open postings, five of them created in the six weeks to mid-September 2026, and nearly all of them touched on September 16. A separate Workable account, whose slug is toloka-ai but whose display name is Mindrift, carries 120 more freelance postings. That is a company that is hiring.

Is Toloka worth it?

As always, do not concentrate your hopes in one platform, and do not treat any listed rate as a forecast of what you will actually be offered. Our Outlier alternatives piece covers the rest of this category, and the board statistics show how big the platform-programme slice of the market currently is.

Mufy Pachorawala · Founder, getAIwork

My AI scans thousands of AI-job posts (42,827 screened so far) and I personally approve every listing before it reaches the board. I write these articles by the same rules: pay quoted only as listed, and no income promises. Read our editorial rules.

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