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      Insufficient Funds

      MTurk insufficient balance

      You may see a message about insufficient funds in your MTurk balance for the following reasons:

      1. Not enough funds: there are not enough funds in your MTurk account to launch or resume a study.
      2. MTurk holds some money to determine if participants need to be paid: when you pause (stop) a project, it only prevents workers from entering the study after the pause. It does not terminate workers who already accepted the HIT. Because workers who have already started the study are allowed to finish it, MTurk holds some money to wait and see if these participants need to be paid or not. After the max time allowed to take the HIT passes, the funds should re-calibrate and you will be able to resume the study.

      Please contact us if you still receive the "insufficient funds" message after the max time passes.

      CloudResearch insufficient balance

      You may see a message about insufficient funds in your CloudResearch lab account when there is not enough money in your lab account to run your study. Money from your CloudResearch lab account is used to pay for any demographic panels you selected or any Pro or Premium Features you selected while setting up your study.

      Negative Lab Balance

      A negative CloudResearch lab balance is most likely to occur when you launch multiple studies at the same time without enough funding in your account to cover the cost of all studies. Because CloudResearch only deducts money from your lab balance as participants complete and are approved for your study, it is possible to launch multiple individual studies for which there is enough money in your account to cover the CloudResearch fees for each study, but when summed together there is not enough money to cover the cost of all studies.

      CloudResearch doesn't stop live studies or prevent you from launching new studies when an issue of insufficient funding like the one described above comes up. Rather, in order to not hold up your research, we post a negative lab balance that will need to be paid before you can launch new studies in the future.