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testcritic

Respondent vs User Interviews

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

From $40 per B2C session at pay-as-you-go, plus the incentive you set

Paid

From $49 per session (pay-as-you-go; $41 and $36 on annual commitments)

Paid

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Session fees are $40 B2C and $80 B2B at pay-as-you-go, falling about 30% on a large annual commitment, with a further discount for unmoderated studies. You are only charged for completed sessions — no-shows and screen-outs are free. Incentives are separate and you fund them: $100-$400 per professional B2B participant is normal, on top of the session fee.

Per-participant recruiting fee plus the incentive you choose. Specialist B2B professionals cost considerably more.

Free tier

No subscription required; pay per completed session.

Free to manage your own participants; recruitment is pay-per-participant.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
Codeless

Platforms

Web
Web

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Established

Respondent · since 2016

Widely used

User Interviews · since 2015

Strengths

  • Reaches professional segments that general panels simply do not contain.
  • Verification meaningfully reduces participants misrepresenting their role.
  • No subscription commitment.
  • Solves recruiting, which is the actual bottleneck in most research programmes.
  • Handles incentive payment and scheduling logistics, saving substantial coordinator time.
  • Works with whatever session tooling you already use.

Limitations

  • Expensive per participant once incentives are included.
  • Recruitment only, no research tooling.
  • Some fraudulent participation persists despite verification.
  • No testing or analysis features — it is recruitment only.
  • Panel is strongest in North America.
  • Costs mount quickly for specialist B2B roles.

Best for

B2B product teams that need to talk to specific professional roles.

Teams whose research is blocked on finding and paying the right participants.

All of these integrate with: Zoom, Google Calendar, Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.