Would you license your old/dead codebase as AI training data for $10k?

Hansel_hud_gtm_guy — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:01:30 +0000

Quick disclosure up front: I work with HUD AI (YC W25). We license private (high-quality) codebases as training data for Frontier AI labs, and I'm trying to figure out how builders/founders actually feel about this.

TL;DR — if you've got a private, closed-source codebase with real history (multiple contributors, a lot of commits, built over months or years — a dead or pivoted startup/SaaS is the classic case) it can be worth real money as training data. Frontier AI labs pay up to $10k for a qualifying one. It's a license, not a sale — you keep ownership — and the same codebase can be licensed to more than one buyer, each a separate one-off payment if it's rare.

How the process works today (feedback welcome):

You go to vendor.hud.ai/codebases and get the private repos you want checked for estimated value (at this stage no rights are transferred to HUD or its partners at all; any data is only retained for up to 30 days).
HUD's algorithms automatically qualify or disqualify codebases; vendors with qualifying ones get reached out to and onboarded properly with NDAs etc. (via the email from the check and/or the email on your GitHub).
As a vendor you list the repos you want to license to labs. When lab requests come in, your repos get matched; if you accept, the license is made and you're paid within 7–14 days.
Sometimes labs need mild processing (e.g. stripping PII) to package the code — HUD gives you tools on the platform to prep and package it easily.

In the last month alone HUD has facilitated a couple million in transactions, so we know there's real demand from the people we've introduced it to.

What I'm actually curious about (from a cold-intro perspective):

Would you ever do this with code from a startup that's no longer live? Why / why not?
What would make you hesitate — IP, privacy, "feels like a scam", something else?
Does "license, you keep ownership, revoke anytime" change the answer?
What makes you interested or not interested?

If you want to just try the check it's at vendor.hud.ai/codebases — but I'm as interested in the objections as the leads. Happy to answer anything in the comments or by DM,. Happy to hop on a quick call too if you have feedback or questions you'd rather not type out. Thanks!

DEV Community: Hansel_hud_gtm_guy

Would you license your old/dead codebase as AI training data for $10k?