# Publicly documented company data deals and price claims

By Matt Burns, Vaultfish. Published 9 Oct 2026. Updated 16 Oct 2026. Data through 10 Oct 2026. Page: https://vaultfish.com/research/what-company-data-sells-for

## The short answer

Public figures are few, and they are different kinds of evidence, so we keep them in separate groups. The one named completed sale, Cielo24, reportedly went for "hundreds of thousands of dollars". The largest figure a court has seen is Google's $10M winning bid for Spirit Airlines' archive. No sale order as of 10 Oct 2026. Most other figures are ranges companies publish about their own programs.

## Five findings

1. **One named completed sale.** Cielo24, a defunct company, reportedly sold 13 years of Slack, email and Jira history for "hundreds of thousands of dollars". The buyer is unnamed and the report is secondary ([Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/)).
2. **The biggest court figure is still a bid.** Google's $10M bid won the 14 Aug 2026 auction for Spirit Airlines' archive: about 100 million emails, 500 million Teams items and 30 million lines of code ([court docket](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71233134/spirit-aviation-holdings-inc/), [Time](https://time.com/article/2026/08/25/google-spirit-airlines-ai-data-RL/)). The hearing was moved from 14 Oct to 6 Nov 2026 ([Travel Weekly](https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Court-delays-hearing-on-Google-purchase-of-Spirit-data), 9 Oct 2026). No sale order as of 10 Oct 2026.
3. **Three offers, one archive.** Mercor was the $7.5M alternate bidder at that auction. micro1 made a late $12.5M offer after it closed ([Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/micro1-tries-to-beat-googles-bid-to-buy-bankrupt-spirit-airlines-data-for-12-5-million-highlighting-value-of-data-to-ai-companies/), 14 Sep 2026). We mark the three Spirit rows as related observations of one archive. Count them as one case.
4. **Published ranges are marketing claims.** SimpleClosure says it has done nearly 100 archive deals in about a year at $10,000 to $100,000 per company, by its own count ([Gizmodo](https://gizmodo.com/failed-companies-are-selling-old-slack-chats-and-email-archives-to-train-ai-2000747916)). Handshake AI's ceiling is "$4M+", which it labels an indicative estimate and not an offer ([Handshake AI](https://joinhandshake.com/ai/data-partnerships/)). No named company has confirmed a figure in this group.
5. **Two rows rest on a court record.** Both are Spirit bids. Every other row rests on a press report or on the company's own figures ([court docket](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71233134/spirit-aviation-holdings-inc/)).

Figure: scale, Spirit Airlines archive auction, 14 Aug 2026: Mercor, runner-up $7.5M, Google, winning bid $10M (emphasized). Google outbid Mercor for Spirit Airlines' archive. Source: Time and Fortune, from the court docket.

## What these examples cannot establish

- They are not a price list. A handful of public figures, mostly bids and published claims, cannot set a market rate.
- They do not estimate what any company would be paid. Your records, rights and terms will differ from every row here, and the guide to [how much company data is worth](https://vaultfish.com/guides/how-much-is-your-business-data-worth-to-ai) covers what moves the figure.
- Published ranges are self-reported marketing claims. Treat them as a company's pitch until a named company that took part confirms a figure.

## Method

Every row is a row in the deals tracker (https://vaultfish.com/deals), frozen on the date above.

**Where we searched.** Court dockets through the CourtListener RECAP archive (the Spirit Airlines case, No. 25-11897), national, business and trade press, and the pages AI data companies and marketplaces publish about their own programs.

**What gets a row.** A court filing or news report that records a price, bid or offer for company or user data sold or licensed for AI training, a price range an AI data company or marketplace publishes about itself (marked self-reported), or a named seller's sale plan that drew a lawsuit, even with no price (Photobucket).

**What stays out.** Whole-company acquisitions (they price the business, not the data), publisher and media licensing deals, private figures told to us, and any number we cannot trace to a filing or a report. Reddit's reported $60M a year license with Google stays in, in the context group, because it is the best-known price anchor. It is a content license and neither company confirmed the figure.

**How we group rows.** Each row sits in one group by its status: completed sales, bids and offers (none closed), published price ranges, or context. Rows that are offers for the same archive are marked related, so three Spirit bids read as one case.

**Prices stay as the source states them.** We never average a range, turn a phrase like "six figures" into a number, or work out a price per employee. The study has no totals, averages or medians, inside a group or across groups. Dates are event dates. micro1's tiers page carries no date, so its row uses the day we read it. Events run from 22 Feb 2024 to 6 Oct 2026.

**Known gaps.** Private deals under confidentiality terms never reach the public record, so this set undercounts them. Two rows rest partly on reports we could not open (Forbes and Fast Company for Cielo24, Reuters for Photobucket), and those rows say so in their notes. We read the Spirit docket through the RECAP mirror, which lags the court. The 9 Oct 2026 notice that moved the Spirit hearing was not on it when we looked, so that row cites Travel Weekly (https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Court-delays-hearing-on-Google-purchase-of-Spirit-data) for the move.

## The dataset, by group

11 rows in four groups, oldest first inside each. CSV with a category column, notes and every source: https://vaultfish.com/research/what-company-data-sells-for.csv

### Completed sales (1 row)

A press report, or the buyer itself, says a deal closed. No court or party has published the contract.

| Date | Buyer or program | Records from | Figure as stated | Status | Evidence | Records covered | Related | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Apr 2026 | Undisclosed AI buyer | Cielo24 (defunct, via SimpleClosure) | "Hundreds of thousands of dollars", as reported | Reported completed | Secondary source only | 13 years of Slack messages, Email, Jira tickets, Multi-terabyte Google Drive archive | None | [Forbes (we could not open it, details via search summaries)](https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/), [Fast Company (we could not open it)](https://www.fastcompany.com/91528808/shuttered-startups-are-selling-old-slack-chats-and-emails-to-ai-companies), [Strategic Signal deal tracker entry](https://strategicsignal.ai/ai-data-transactions/deals/ss-aidt-2026-0001/) |

### Bids and offers, none closed (4 rows)

Figures offered for data. None of these has closed. Rows that share an archive are related observations of one archive, not independent deals.

| Date | Buyer or program | Records from | Figure as stated | Status | Evidence | Records covered | Related | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Aug 2026 | Google | Spirit Aviation Holdings (Spirit Airlines, in Chapter 11) | $10M winning bid | Pending court approval | Court record plus press | About 100 million emails, About 500 million Teams items, About 30 million lines of code, Employee and payroll records | One of 3 related observations of the Spirit Airlines archive, not an independent deal. | [Time](https://time.com/article/2026/08/25/google-spirit-airlines-ai-data-RL/), [Bloomberg Law: ombudsman report](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/spirit-data-sale-to-google-passes-muster-privacy-ombudsman-says), [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/micro1-tries-to-beat-googles-bid-to-buy-bankrupt-spirit-airlines-data-for-12-5-million-highlighting-value-of-data-to-ai-companies/), [EPIC amicus brief announcement](https://epic.org/epic-files-amicus-brief-challenging-spirit-airlines-bankruptcy-sale-of-employee-data-to-google/), [Travel Weekly: hearing moved to 6 Nov 2026](https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Court-delays-hearing-on-Google-purchase-of-Spirit-data), [Court docket, In re Spirit Aviation Holdings, No. 25-11897 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y.)](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71233134/spirit-aviation-holdings-inc/) |
| 14 Aug 2026 | Mercor | Spirit Aviation Holdings (Spirit Airlines, in Chapter 11) | $7.5M alternate bid | Bid, not accepted | Court record plus press | Same Spirit archive as the Google bid | One of 3 related observations of the Spirit Airlines archive, not an independent deal. | [Time](https://time.com/article/2026/08/25/google-spirit-airlines-ai-data-RL/), [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/micro1-tries-to-beat-googles-bid-to-buy-bankrupt-spirit-airlines-data-for-12-5-million-highlighting-value-of-data-to-ai-companies/) |
| 17 Aug 2026 | Mercor | Shuttered and acquired startups (for example Warmly, per the report) | Offers of up to $300,000 reported | Offers reported | Press report | Slack logs, GitHub records, Asana files, Google Drive documents, Meeting transcripts and recordings | None | [BigGo editorial](https://finance.biggo.com/news/d34746c0-e437-4855-93c5-09c6e850550d) |
| 3 Sep 2026 | micro1 | Spirit Aviation Holdings (Spirit Airlines, in Chapter 11) | $12.5M reported offer | Bid, not accepted | Press report | Same Spirit archive as the Google bid | One of 3 related observations of the Spirit Airlines archive, not an independent deal. | [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/micro1-tries-to-beat-googles-bid-to-buy-bankrupt-spirit-airlines-data-for-12-5-million-highlighting-value-of-data-to-ai-companies/), [Time](https://time.com/article/2026/08/25/google-spirit-airlines-ai-data-RL/) |

### Published price ranges (4 rows)

Ranges that AI data companies and marketplaces publish about their own programs. They are self-reported marketing claims, and no named company has confirmed a figure.

| Date | Buyer or program | Records from | Figure as stated | Status | Evidence | Records covered | Related | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Apr 2026 | Undisclosed AI companies and labs | Shut-down startups, through SimpleClosure Asset Hub | $10,000 to $100,000 per company, nearly 100 deals in about a year | Self-reported range | Self-reported by the company | Slack, email and workspace data, Source code | None | [Gizmodo, citing Forbes](https://gizmodo.com/failed-companies-are-selling-old-slack-chats-and-email-archives-to-train-ai-2000747916), [SimpleClosure Asset Hub announcement](https://simpleclosure.com/blog/insights/simpleclosure-asset-hub/), [SimpleClosure CEO post](https://simpleclosure.com/blog/guides/how-real-are-those-million-dollar-data-offers/) |
| 11 Sep 2026 | Troveo's buyers (unnamed) | Companies licensing through Troveo | Typical full-company deals start at six figures. Example dataset: $850,000 across four sales. Single repository: about $5,000, an unnamed platform's baseline it cites. Startup archives: $10,000 to $100,000 | Self-reported range | Self-reported by the company | Business data from about 30 systems, Source code | None | [Troveo: how much is company data worth](https://www.troveo.ai/resources/how-much-is-company-data-worth), [Troveo business data](https://www.troveo.ai/business-data) |
| 2 Oct 2026 | Handshake AI | Not stated | $100K to $4M+. Calculator example: $383,083 to $896,969 for 100 employees and 10 years | Self-reported range | Self-reported by the company | Operational data from businesses (types not itemized) | None | [Handshake AI data partnerships page](https://joinhandshake.com/ai/data-partnerships/), [Handshake AI data partnerships criteria page](https://joinhandshake.com/ai/data-partnerships/referral) |
| Undated | micro1 | Not stated | Tiers of $100K+, $500K+ and $1M+. Enterprise Data Partnership listing: $100K-$2M+ for approved data packages | Self-reported range | Self-reported by the company | Slack, Email, CRM, Tickets, SOPs and knowledge bases | None | [micro1 data partnerships page](https://www.micro1.ai/data-partnerships), [micro1 Enterprise Data Partnership listing](https://www.micro1.ai/company-referral) |

### Context (2 rows)

Announced plans and unconfirmed reports. They show how the market behaves, and none is a confirmed company data sale.

| Date | Buyer or program | Records from | Figure as stated | Status | Evidence | Records covered | Related | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Feb 2024 | Google | Reddit | About $60M a year, reported | Reported, unconfirmed | Press report | User-generated posts and comments | None | [The Decoder, citing Reuters](https://the-decoder.com/reddit-signs-60-million-annual-training-data-deal-with-google/) |
| 8 Apr 2024 | Unnamed technology companies (talks reported) | Photobucket | Not disclosed in the sources we could open. Press coverage of the CEO's remarks cites 5 cents to $1 per photo, unverified | Announced, no price | Secondary source only | About 13 billion user photos and videos | None | [Class Action.org on Pierce v. Photobucket, filed 11 Dec 2024](https://www.classaction.org/news/photobucket-facing-lawsuit-over-plan-to-sell-13-billion-user-photos-to-third-parties) |

## Corrections

Newest first.

**11 Oct 2026**

- Retitled to "Publicly documented company data deals and price claims" (it was "Publicly documented company data deals and buyer price claims"). The group of self-published ranges is now "Published price ranges" (it was "Buyer marketing ranges") and the bids group is now "Bids and offers, none closed". The ranges group includes micro1's partnership tiers, and micro1 runs data partnerships in which companies keep ownership, so the old label described it wrongly.
- Renamed four CSV columns to match the table headings: "buyer" is now "buyer_or_program", "data_sold" is now "records_covered", "seller" is now "records_from" and "price_as_stated" is now "figure_as_stated". Some rows are programs, such as micro1's company-data partnerships, where the company keeps ownership of its data.

**10 Oct 2026**

- Retitled to "Publicly documented company data deals and buyer price claims". The old title claimed complete coverage, which a search like ours cannot promise. The address stays the same.
- Split the rows into separate groups: completed sales, bids and pending court sales, buyer marketing ranges, and context. The CSV gains category and related_to columns.
- The Spirit Airlines hearing was moved from 14 Oct to 6 Nov 2026 ([Travel Weekly](https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Court-delays-hearing-on-Google-purchase-of-Spirit-data), 9 Oct 2026). No sale order as of 10 Oct 2026.
- Removed the price-per-lost-job comparison for the Spirit bids from our guides and answers. This study never printed it. Also removed a chart here that set Google's bid against SimpleClosure's top self-reported price.
- Updated the micro1 wording to describe company-data partnerships in which companies keep ownership of their data.

## How to cite this study

Burns, M. (2026). Publicly documented company data deals and price claims. Vaultfish. Published 9 Oct 2026, data through 10 Oct 2026. https://vaultfish.com/research/what-company-data-sells-for

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Reuse freely and credit Vaultfish with a link to the study.

## For journalists

Matt Burns can walk you through any row and give a comment on the record. Press inquiries: https://vaultfish.com/contact?topic=press