What should a verified response actually cost?
PolitiMind prices fieldwork on respondent time: how many qualified responses you need, and how long each verified participant spends answering. Everything else is an explicit, explained adjustment. Model your own poll below — the figures on this page come from the same engine that prices a live deployment.
Want a faster read? Get an indicative range in three questions or use the simple calculator.
Responses × questionnaire minutes is the entire base charge. Question count only matters through the time it takes a participant to answer.
Verified participants earn $0.40 per minute of answering. On the reference deployment that is 28% of the fieldwork estimate.
800 qualified responses · 7-minute questionnaire · statewide, standard demographic quotas, standard turnaround, before plan discount or research credits.
A stated commercial floor, not a formula artifact: below it, the fixed integrity, weighting and review work on a live poll is not covered.
Configure your poll, see the estimate
Fieldwork is priced on respondent time: how many qualified responses you need, and how long each participant spends answering. Everything else is an explicit, explained adjustment.
Start from a real scenario
Every value stays editable after you pick one.
Target qualified responses
Completed, verified responses — not invitations sent.
Solid topline precision with room for a few subgroup cuts.
Estimated completion time
Fieldwork is priced on respondent time. Set the minutes directly, or build the questionnaire and let us estimate.
Audience & geography
Who has to answer, and where they have to live.
- You are buying 500 qualified completed responses — not invitations sent. Price scales with how many you need.
- Each participant spends about 7 minutes answering, and respondent time is what fieldwork is priced on. More questions matter only because they take longer.
- Statewide geography with standard demographic quotas is harder to fill than a broad national audience, so reaching each qualified response costs more.
- Your Starter plan removes $248.33 from fieldwork, and research credits cover $250 of what is left.
- Audience pricing here uses published complexity bands, not a live inventory count. It is recalculated against measured supply before deployment.
500 qualified responses × 7 minutes × $1.10 per verified respondent-minute.
A narrower geography or a rarer segment means more invitations, more screening, and more work to reach each qualified response.
Starter subscribers pay a reduced fieldwork rate on every deployment.
Example only: shows Starter's standard $100 monthly research credit. Your actual balance appears once you have a workspace. Includes the one-time $150 first-launch credit, applied only to your first live poll. Credits never reduce the subscription fee and are never refundable or withdrawable.
Subscription billing starts when your first live poll deploys. Building and previewing are free.
Pricing model pricing_respondent_time_v1. This is an estimate, not a final quote. Launch pricing is recalculated against your actual questionnaire, live participant inventory, measured incidence, credit balance, and field timing.
The same poll on every plan
Fieldwork discount and research credits are the only differences applied here.
| Plan | Fieldwork | Credits | Due to launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| StarterSelected | $4,468.17 | $250 | $4,717.17 |
| Pro | $3,869.85 | $600 | $4,618.85 |
| Enterprise | $4,966.50 | Negotiated | Custom quote |
Pro saves an additional $598.32 on this poll compared with Starter.
At your projected research usage, Pro becomes less expensive than Starter at roughly 15 polls of this size per year (about $72,000 of annual fieldwork).
Enterprise is quoted by our research team. Volume economics, custom methodology, and contractual credits are negotiated rather than listed.
Fieldwork after plan discount and research credits, plus your first subscription charge if this is your first live poll.
Modelled from typical incidence for this audience. Confirmed against live inventory at deployment.
Availability here is an estimate based on typical incidence, not a live inventory count. Final feasibility is recalculated against the verified pool at deployment.
Public estimate — non-binding starting context. This is not your deployment price: your estimate is saved as non-binding provenance, PolitiMindAI carries the safely mappable inputs into a canonical draft, and the authoritative deployment quote is recomputed before any charge.
Equivalent to $24/hour based on a 7-minute estimated completion time. Participant pay is prorated directly from respondent time — it is never discounted to hit a price.
Cost per verified response, by audience difficulty
The same poll — 800 qualified responses · 7-minute questionnaire · statewide — priced against every audience band the engine supports. Harder audiences cost more because they take more invitations to fill, and the assumed incidence for each band is published alongside it.
Does volume help?
Per-response fieldwork is priced on respondent time, so it stays stable as sample size grows — no volume surcharge, and no discount that has to be negotiated. Small samples sit above the line only because the $500 minimum deployment charge applies. Plan discounts and research credits are modelled inside the calculator, not here.
Priced at a 7-minute questionnaire, statewide, standard demographic quotas, standard turnaround, before plan discount and credits.
Cost is not the only budget
Speed is a published premium, not a negotiation. Standard turnaround is included; faster windows concentrate invitations into a shorter field period, which costs more per response and requires enough verified participants to support it.
Where the fieldwork dollar goes
We publish the part of the split we can stand behind precisely: what the verified participant is paid for their time, and what remains to cover identity verification, fraud screening, weighting, delivery, and auditable result runs. Priced on the reference deployment — 800 qualified responses · 7-minute questionnaire · statewide.
Participant compensation
Estimated participant reward: $2.80 per qualified completion — equivalent to $24/hour based on a 7-minute estimated completion time. Fair pay is an integrity control: participants paid properly for their time answer carefully and come back for the next wave.
Verification, integrity & delivery
Identity verification, device and geography checks, anomaly review, quota management, weighting, dashboards, exports, and the auditable result run. We do not publish a finer breakdown of this share.
Assumptions & limits
- Estimate, not a final invoice. Every figure comes from pricing model pricing_respondent_time_v1. Launch pricing is recalculated from your actual questionnaire, live participant inventory, measured incidence, credit balance, and field timing before any charge.
- Unit of measure. Everything is per completed, verified, screened response — never per invitation, click, or partial.
- Audience bands are fallbacks. Until a deployment has a live feasibility signal, audience price uses the published incidence bands above. Once inventory is measured, the engine prices from that signal instead and the estimate can move.
- Reference deployment. Derived figures on this page are priced at 800 qualified responses · 7-minute questionnaire · statewide, standard quotas, standard turnaround, no methodology add-ons, and no plan economics.
- Custom review. Highly specialized populations, custom geographies, and self-service samples above 25,000 responses are quoted by our research team rather than priced automatically.
Want it scoped against live inventory?
Give us the audience and the questions. We come back with feasibility, timing, and a scoped cost priced against the verified population that actually exists.