Where to sell source code today: AI labs license real code and git history. Sell a non-exclusive license, keep the code and get paid each time.
Free to join. No public listing. A real estimate in minutes once Git is connected.
License to AI labs
The one route paying for real source code at scale today. Non-exclusive, so the same repo can earn again.
Today the buyers paying for real source code at scale are AI labs, through licensing programs. You sell a non-exclusive license, keep the code and can be paid again when it is licensed again. Source pays $100 per million tokens, history $40.
The short answer is AI labs. The companies building coding models need large amounts of real source code to train and evaluate them, and they pay to license it. They buy through licensing programs that collect code from many owners, check it, and take it to labs in batches.
This is a different shape of deal from selling a product. A lab wants a copy of the code and the git history behind it, under a license that lets it train on that copy. Your app, users and brand stay with you, and nothing is handed over. You keep the code, keep using it and keep the right to license it again. Each license that closes pays you.
It is also the one route paying at scale for code that never succeeded commercially. Shelved products, dead startups, internal tools, abandoned side projects and legacy systems all qualify. The code does not need users, revenue or a working build. It needs to be real, and it needs to be yours.
Private code with a real history. Labs already have the public code on the internet, so what they lack is the software that companies and developers kept to themselves. That covers products, internal tools, services, scripts, mobile apps, games and the long tail of systems that ran a business for years. Any mainstream language counts, and older or less common ones can be in short supply. What lowers the value is code that is mostly generated, copied from tutorials or squashed into a few commits, because it says little about how real software is built. Code you do not own cannot be licensed at all.
Program figures · Illustrative, conservative · Verified 2026-10-10
Free to join. No public listing. A real estimate in minutes once Git is connected.
The best place is the one with clear terms. Licensing code is new to most owners, so it pays to know what good terms look like before you sign anything. These are the terms this site checks for, and the terms of the program it works with.
Be wary of anything that asks for a fee to list, for write access to your repos, or for exclusive rights. None of those are needed to license code for training.
Read the agreement in full before you connect anything. Check that the license is non-exclusive and that you keep ownership. Check what happens if you withdraw a codebase, how rates can change and how quickly you are paid after a buyer pays. Ask which repos the access covers, and confirm it is read-only. A good program answers all of this in writing, before you sign.
Pay is set per token. Source code pays $100 per million tokens and git history pays $40 per million. Most repos hold far more history than source, so history usually carries most of the value. A typical repo earns about $1,000 to $1,500 per license, a light one about $400 to $700 and a deep one about $2,500 to $4,000.
Across the program, owners earned $6M in the last 60 days from 11,069 licensed repos. Rates can change on 30 days’ notice, never retroactively, and you are paid within 15 days each time a license closes and the buyer pays. For the full working and the depth table, read how much is my code worth.
Income depends on demand. Some repos are licensed several times and some once, and the program cannot promise how often. What it can show is the published rate for each token and a real per-repo estimate before you commit to anything.
There is no fee to join and nothing upfront. The program is paid from the buyer’s side, and no fee is taken from your share. If you connect your repos and the estimate is not worth it to you, you can withdraw and walk away.
$100/M
per million tokens
$40/M
per million tokens
Value per license = source tokens × $100/M + history tokens × $40/M
Rates can change on 30 days' notice, never retroactively · Paid within 15 days of the buyer paying
Illustrative, conservative · Last verified 2026-10-10
Because real code is scarce. Labs can generate synthetic code, but it does not show how software is really built: the fixes, the rewrites, the tests added after an outage. Only real repos with real history do. Demand is rising as labs compete on coding models, and commercial success makes no difference to what a repo is worth to them. That is why code with no market of its own, from a failed product to an internal tool, now has buyers. For the full picture, read sell code for AI training, or see code licensing explained for how code licenses work in general.
Real production code is the one input labs cannot generate synthetically. They pay for the real thing.
Labs are licensing real-world codebases to train and evaluate coding models, and the appetite is growing.
Commits, fixes and the way a codebase matured carry signal. You are paid for git history as well as the final source.
What matters is that the code is real and that you hold the rights.
Shelved products, dead startups, internal tools, R&D and side projects all qualify.And it is yours, which is exactly what makes it licensable. You decide what is shared: only the repos you choose, only code you hold the rights to. Secrets, customer data and third-party code stay out. Within the repos you submit, secrets and personal data are stripped from the review copy before anything reaches a buyer.
Yes. You grant a non-exclusive license and keep ownership. You can keep using, changing and shipping it.
No. The same repo can be licensed more than once, and you are paid each time. How often depends on demand.
The token count of your source and of your git history, how deep and real that history is, tests, and buyer demand. History carries most of the value.
No. There is no listing. Buyers see a scrubbed review copy.
Request access. Connect Git. See a real per-repo estimate in minutes, then decide.
Free to join. Nothing upfront. You can withdraw a codebase at any time.