Some links may be affiliate links. We may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more
Pre-screened human participants for surveys and experiments. You set the reward, subject to a £6/$8 per hour floor, and Prolific adds a platform fee - 42.8% for corporate users, 33.3% for academic and non-profit.
Editor's take: “The quality premium is real; the pricing is widely misread” — Sohail Akhtar
How we checked: read directly from the vendor's own pricing page — source
A category error in the page title. Prolific's £6.00 / $8.00 figure is an hourly floor on participant pay, and our listing published it as a flat per-participant price across the name, metaTitle, metaDescription, shortDescription, pricing field and two tags. An FAQ then multiplied that misreading by the platform fee and presented the result as a per-participant total. Separately, the platform fee was published as 33%, which is the discounted academic rate; corporate customers pay 42.8%.
| What | What we found | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Participant pay floor | Verbatim: "Typically, we recommend you pay participants at least £9.00 / $12.00 per hour, while the minimum pay allowed is £6.00 / $8.00 per hour." These are hourly rates. Confirmed on two independent reads of the same page before publishing, because it drives the page title. | Changed since last check |
| Platform fee | Verbatim: "For pay-as-you-go pricing, our platform fee is usually 42.8% for corporate customers, and a discounted 33.3% for academic or non-profit customers." Our listing published 33% as the fee. | Changed since last check |
| Charging model | Verbatim: "Platform: You pay a participant reward that you set, plus a platform fee." There is no per-participant price list. | Confirmed |
| "99% data quality guarantee" | Removed. Prolific publishes no such figure on its homepage or pricing page. It was present in features, longDescription and seo.metaDescription. What the vendor does publish is Protocol, which it describes as running "40+ checks to verify identity during onboarding and analyze behavioral data" — a capability, not a percentage, and not a guarantee. | Changed since last check |
| FAQ "99% vs 60%" against MTurk | Removed. Neither figure is published by Prolific or by Amazon Mechanical Turk as far as we could read. A fabricated comparative statistic about a named competitor is the most damaging kind of error on a directory page. | Changed since last check |
| FAQ "£7.98 total per participant" | Removed. Derived arithmetic (£6 x 1.33) built entirely on the hourly-rate misreading. | Changed since last check |
| FAQ "Oxford/Harvard/Yale standard gold research platform" | Removed. An institutional endorsement claim with no source. | Changed since last check |
| ratingReason | Was "AI art generation with creative output capabilities" — a string copy-pasted across 17 listings, describing an image generator rather than a participant recruitment platform. | Changed since last check |
Editor verification notes
Checked by the TheToolsVerse Verification Desk — by reading the vendor's own published pages, not by testing the product in an account. Prolific can change prices at any time without notice. The date above is the last time we looked; if it looks old, treat every figure here as unconfirmed and check Prolific directly before paying.
How we verify →Reviewed by Sohail Akhtar
Lead Editor & Founder
What we like
Limitations
| Plan | Details |
|---|---|
| Paid | Two components. (1) The participant reward, which you set, with an enforced minimum of £6.00 / $8.00 per hour and a recommended rate of at least £9.00 / $12.00 per hour - so a 10-minute study at the recommended rate is roughly £1.50 per participant, and an hour-long study at least £9. (2) The platform fee on top: usually 42.8% for corporate customers, 33.3% for academic or non-profit. Pay-as-you-go with no subscription. |
No per-participant price list. You set the participant reward yourself, subject to an enforced hourly floor of £6.00 / $8.00 per hour (Prolific recommends at least £9.00 / $12.00 per hour), so cost per participant depends on study length. Prolific then adds a platform fee on top: usually 42.8% for corporate customers, and a discounted 33.3% for academic or non-profit customers. Pay-as-you-go, no subscription. Read from prolific.com/pricing on 2026-09-06.
Associated Tags
prolific research participants 2026, academic survey participants uk, high quality research data, prolific hourly rate minimum, prolific platform fee 42.8%, psychology study participants, market research prolific quality, behavioral experiment participants
Who should use Prolific?
Discover practical workflows and real-world scenarios where Prolific delivers key solutions.
Academic psychology and social-science researchers running surveys and behavioral experiments
UX and product teams recruiting screened participants for usability studies and concept tests
Running longitudinal studies that re-contact the same participants over time
Collecting high-quality survey data where bot and low-effort responses must be minimized
Recruiting demographically targeted samples for market or academic research
Microsoft Bing integrates ChatGPT delivering precise AI answers, real-time web data, image generation, conversational search across all devices.
An AI companion that learns your personality and remembers details about you. Free basic chat, with a paid Pro tier that adds voice calls, an AR avatar and romantic modes.
Upload selfies and get professional LinkedIn and CV headshots in multiple styles. Sold in coin packs from $9.99; we could not find a free tier on supawork.ai.
