User Interviews vs Prolific

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

From $8 per participant/hour minimum incentive, plus platform fee

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

You set the incentive subject to a fair-pay floor of $8/hour ($12 recommended), then Prolific adds a platform fee — around 42.8% for commercial customers, 33.3% for academic and non-profit. Budget the fee: it is a large fraction, not a rounding error. Still far cheaper than moderated-research platforms.

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

No subscription; pay per participant.

Widely used

User Interviews · since 2015

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

• 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.

• Notably better data quality than generic survey panels.
• Fine-grained prescreening across hundreds of demographic attributes.
• No subscription — pay only for what you run.

• No testing or analysis features — it is recruitment only.
• Panel is strongest in North America.
• Costs mount quickly for specialist B2B roles.

• Recruitment only; you supply the study and the tooling.
• Skewed towards students and younger, online-native participants.
• Not suited to recruiting senior enterprise decision-makers.

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

Survey-based and quantitative studies where data quality matters and budget is limited.