Plans & billing

Note: billing ships with the platform build. Keep this article in step with the live pricing, quotas, and Stripe flows as they're implemented.

Plans

The Free plan is a genuine way to run a real study and see the results. It's there to try the product. Annual billing is 2 months free (Individual $490/yr, Team $990/yr). Enterprise is custom-priced; contact us.

Roles (Team and above)

A workspace with more than one seat gives each person a role:

• Admin can do everything, plus manage members, invites, workspace settings and billing.
• Editor can create, edit, launch and delete studies, buy audiences and write reports, but cannot manage members or billing.
• Viewer is read-only. A viewer sees every study and all of its analysis, can read a report somebody has already written and download it, and can slice the results the same way anyone else can. A viewer cannot create a study, change one, delete one, take one live, buy an audience, or start a new Graham report. The editing tabs are not shown to them at all, so a study opens on its Results tab.

Read-only means read-only at the database, not just in the interface, so there is nothing a viewer can do by going around the screens.

Two different charges: your plan vs. buying responses

There are two separate things you might pay for, and it helps to keep them apart:

1. Your subscription plan (Free / Individual / Team / Enterprise), a recurring fee for using SortedResearch, covered in the rest of this article.
2. Buying responses for a study, a one-off charge when you have Sorted Research find and recruit participants for you. This is priced and paid per study, separately from your plan.

You can be on any paid plan and never buy responses (if you recruit your own participants), or buy responses on top of your plan whenever you need a sample.

Paying for responses (buying a sample)

When you buy responses from Sorted Research, you pay for that sample up front, before the study goes live:

• A clean price per response, from $5. You see a single price per response (e.g. "$10.00 per response"), chosen automatically from the audience you picked; the cheapest audiences start at $5 on standard pricing, and a harder one costs more because it costs us more. There is no minimum order and no contract: buy one response or a thousand. Your total is simply that price × the number of responses you want. A very large or very specialised audience may show "request a quote" instead of an instant price, click it and we'll get you a custom price by email.
• Buying a lot? The price can come down. Accounts that buy responses in real volume can be moved onto better pricing, which lowers the price per response across the board and can put prices below the standard $5 floor within reach. It is not automatic and there is no threshold to hit or tier to sign up for: we watch how much an account is buying and get in touch. If you are planning a lot of work and want to talk about it sooner, email support@sortedresearch.com and we will look at your account. Whatever pricing you are on, you always see the exact price per response before you pay, and it never changes an order you have already paid for.
• Pay before launch. On the Launch step you place the order (this spends nothing), pay via a secure Stripe checkout, and only then can you Go live. Nothing recruits until you've paid.
• You only pay for responses that pass. Every bought response goes through our quality checks: six on a card sort, five on a pairwise or Best-Worst study, and eleven on Findability. Anyone who rushes it, taps the same spot every time, commits without ever looking, or answers with no signal in it is sent back to the panel and replaced, and you are not charged for them. They are counted in your funnel so you can see the rate, but they never reach your findings.
• Automatic refund if it under-fills. If your order delivers fewer responses than you paid for, you're automatically refunded the difference when you close the order, you only ever pay for the responses you actually got. The refund goes back to your card with nothing to claim.
• Re-priced if you change it. Change the size or the audience after paying and we re-check the price and ask for any difference before it can go live, so you're never launched on an out-of-date price.

Buying responses is available on every plan, including Free, you pay per order, and each order is paid for before it goes live. (Bought responses don't count against the Free plan's 10-response study cap; that cap only applies to responses you collect through your own link.) The full walkthrough is in Sharing & launching.

Upgrading

Upgrade any time from your account; your new limits apply immediately. Annual billing unlocks once you've completed your first study on a monthly plan, and it gives you 2 months free vs. paying monthly.

Switching from monthly to annual

Open Manage billing and choose the annual plan. The time you've already paid for on monthly is credited automatically against the annual price, so you only pay the difference (Stripe prorates it for you). Your billing date resets to the day you switch.

Cancellation

Cancel any time from your account billing page (self-serve).

• Monthly: you keep access until the end of the current period; no partial refund.
• Annual: cancel any time to stop the next renewal. There are no mid-term refunds for the rest of a paid annual term.

Downgrades

If you drop to a lower plan and you're over its limits, nothing is deleted. Studies and data above the limit become read-only until you're back within the limit or upgrade again.

Pictures if you downgrade

Pictures on pairwise comparisons are a paid feature, so a Free workspace cannot ADD one. Pictures already on a study keep working: they still show to participants, in your results and in your report. Taking a picture away from a study that is already collecting responses would change what people were shown halfway through, which would spoil the data you have already paid to gather.

Failed payments

If a payment fails, we retry and email you before any change to your plan, so a temporary card issue won't cost you access.

Graham on each plan

Graham, help and support, is included with every paid plan. On the Free plan he's a trial: you get his full help until 3 days after your first response comes in, then he steps back, any monthly plan brings him back. Everything you've built (studies, results, reports) stays yours and stays visible either way. If you ever reach an unusually high volume of chats in a single day, he'll offer to email support for you right there in the app (no need to open your email), so you're never left waiting.

Agreeing to the terms

Before any paid plan starts, you confirm you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Paid plans renew automatically until you cancel, and you can cancel anytime from Manage billing.