Basic CloudResearch Software Fees
We charge 20% of each participants’ compensation to use our Mechanical Turk Toolkit. Thus, if you pay each participant $1.00, the CloudResearch fee is 20 cents per participant.
Panel and Demographic Features
The cost of targeting your study toward participants who meet certain demographic criteria, known as a panel, is based on the incidence rate of the panel you choose (i.e., how easy or hard it is to find people who meet your criteria). As an example, it costs more to sample older adults than younger adults because there are fewer older adults within online platforms like Mechanical Turk.
To see how much demographic targeting adds to the cost of a study, you can use our feasibility calculator. Panel costs for the MTurk Toolkit range from $0.13 to $0.67 cents per participant.
Mechanical Turk Fees
The cost to use our MTurk Toolkit are separate from the fees Amazon assesses for using their MTurk platform. MTurk charges 40% of each participants’ compensation for HITs that exceed 9 participants. Using our Microbatching and Hyperbatching features reduces this fee to 20% by ensuring all of your HITs have less than 10 participants.
Mechanical Turk fees are deducted from your MTurk account while CloudResearch fees are deducted from your CloudResearch lab balance.
Managed Research Services
Our Managed Research service allows teams and organizations to outsource their research needs. This time-saving way to conduct research is an excellent solution for people looking to gain insight into a topic or demographic but who lack the time or internal resources to do so themselves. It also allows researchers who are unable to create or link an MTurk requester account because of MTurk’s international restrictions to access high-quality participants on MTurk.
The costs for this service include:
- Participant compensation (set by the researcher)
- MTurk fees: 20% of participant compensation
- CloudResearch fees: 20% Software Fee, 6% payment fee, and a 5% panel fee when requesting a custom panel.
- A management fee that varies depending on the scope and nature of the project.
To request a quote, please see our Managed Research Page.
Additional Notes
- Fees for bonus payments: MTurk charges 20% for bonus payments to participants. There are no CloudResearch fees for issuing bonuses.
- Rounding fractions of pennies: The fees we assess for using the MTurk Toolkit are rounded up to the nearest penny and calculated per participant. This fact sometimes leads to small discrepancies between what people calculate they should be charged and what we actually charge.
To illustrate, if you collect data from 100 participants and pay each person $0.13, the fee would be $0.026 per participant. We would round this number up to $0.03. Without rounding you might expect to pay $2.60 ($0.026 * 100), yet with rounding the total fee actually comes to $3 ($0.03 * 100).