The interesting number Shift is not disclosing is the implicit price per hour of egocentric household data. A NYC deep clean runs roughly $150 to $250 for two to three hours; if Shift is willing to eat that cost in exchange for ego-view footage in dirty, cluttered, real homes, that puts a floor on what household manipulation data is worth right now to whoever is buying. For reference, Scale and Surge pay $20 to $40 per hour for staged kitchen demonstrations. Shift is paying roughly 3 to 5x that for unstaged environments, which tells you where the bottleneck actually is for humanoid and home-robot training: not annotation, but distribution into private homes.
The structural play is the recruiting funnel. Shift already pays "tens of thousands" of contributors across 15 countries through its app, and the cleaning offer is a customer acquisition channel for households, not cleaners. Operators building home robots (1X, Figure, Weave, Physical Intelligence) need exactly this kind of long-tail residential data and have no clean way to source it themselves without consent headaches. Watch whether Shift signs an exclusive with a humanoid OEM or stays horizontal like Scale did. The plumbing, cooking, and construction expansion telegraphs the latter.