Where the money comes from when Heka pays you just to work

An app sits in your menu bar, you do your normal work, and money shows up. That sounds like a scam, so let’s follow the money instead of the marketing: who pays, what they’re buying, and why the thing they’re buying is your completely ordinary workday.

Who pays

The companies building AI — the ones behind ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest. Their next product is an AI that can use a computer for you: open the apps, click the buttons, fill the spreadsheet, send the email. The industry calls these computer-use agents, and every major AI company is racing to build one.

There is exactly one way to teach an AI to use a computer: show it recordings of real people using computers. Lots of them. And that is the thing these companies cannot make themselves — you can’t fake a real workday.

Why that’s worth real money

Because there is almost none of it for sale. All the public recordings of real computer work in the world add up to less than 25 hours. Not 25 thousand — 25. Meanwhile the AI needs thousands of hours, including the boring parts: the typo you fixed, the dialog that surprised you, the three wrong menus you opened before the right one. AI trained only on perfect, staged demos falls apart the moment something unexpected happens on screen — and on a real computer, something unexpected happens every few minutes. On tests where experts compare AI work against human work, AI still loses more than half the time. The gap between the demo and your Tuesday is the product. You produce it eight hours a day without thinking about it.

And this market already pays people, publicly, at scale. Mercor, one of the biggest platforms connecting people with AI-training work, advertises $4M+ in daily payouts. That is the going market for humans helping train AI — Heka just plugs you into it without making you apply for a second job.

The deal, in one paragraph

Heka records your screen while you work, scrubs it on your Mac — names, emails, passwords replaced before anything uploads, messaging apps never recorded at all — and sells the anonymized result to AI companies as training material. They get the recording of a workday, never youridentity. You get a cut of every sale, cash out any time past $10. That’s the whole business. No ads, no selling your contacts, no crypto.

“But other platforms pay more per hour”

They do — for extra hours. Mercor, Outlier, and similar platforms pay you to do additional work: assigned tasks, evaluations, training exercises. That means an application, a ~20-minute AI interview, assessments, often a 4–6 hour trial, and 1–3 weeks before your first project. It is a real second job, and for regular (non-expert) work it pays roughly $12–25/hr of your free time.

If you are a doctor or a senior engineer with free evenings, those platforms’ expert rates are genuinely good — and nothing stops you from doing both. But Heka is the only one paying you for hours that cost you nothing.

What it sees — and what it never sees

Everything sensitive is stripped on your Mac before upload: names, emails, keys, and other personal data are replaced on-device. Messaging apps are never captured, so your chats stay yours. You can pause from the menu bar with one click, block any app permanently, and delete anything you have already uploaded.

The bottom line

AI companies desperately need recordings of ordinary people doing ordinary work, there is almost nowhere to buy them, and you generate exactly that every single day. Until now it left your Mac for free. Heka’s only trick is making sure that this time, you’re the one getting paid for it.