Minds costs 0.12 euros or 0.12 dollars per response on Pay as You Go, 199 euros per named user per month on Pro, or from 15,000 euros per year on Enterprise. Compared to traditional research that requires participant recruitment, incentives, and agency minimums, Minds eliminates recruitment overhead while delivering directional synthetic research outputs.
Below is an analytical cost breakdown for budget holders, finance directors, and research teams evaluating the commercial economics of Minds.
This pricing analysis is built for research leaders, chief marketing officers, and finance directors who manage annual research budgets across agencies, panel providers, and internal tooling. Traditional research pricing is fundamentally tied to human logistics: field recruitment, demographic screening, honorariums, agency hours, and platform access fees for distinct point solutions. Minds replaces these variable human field logistics with commercial synthetic research powered by Minds PRISM. Understanding how response-based synthetic pricing maps to your existing research spend enables your organization to increase testing cadence while keeping unit costs predictable across every stage of concept and audience exploration.
Traditional qualitative and quantitative research budgets are predominantly consumed by sample acquisition and project administration. When an insights team commissions a multi-concept screener, a messaging prioritization test, or an exploratory focus group, the core budget line items are:
- Participant recruitment fees and screener dropouts.
- Participant incentive payments and honorariums.
- Agency project management, moderator, and data processing hours.
- Per-seat software licenses for specialized quantitative tools, interview repositories, and survey hosting platforms.
In standard commercial market research, running a quantitative concept test across 400 targeted respondents routinely costs between 3,000 and 10,000 euros through full-service agencies or panel aggregators, with lead times ranging from several days to multiple weeks. If that test yields ambiguous findings or reveals flawed messaging, iterating requires commissioning an entirely new study with fresh recruitment fees.
Minds transforms these economics by running simulated Studies directly against synthetic Minds within configured Audiences. Because Minds operates through Minds PRISM, our proprietary reasoning, inference, and source-modeling engine, there are zero recruitment fees, screener waste costs, or participant incentive expenses.
Consider a practical example: an innovation team testing four value propositions, two visual packaging routes, and a MaxDiff feature prioritization across three distinct consumer profiles.
In a traditional research setting, this requires designing a complex survey, paying for panel sample across three quota cells, paying participant honorariums, and waiting for field completion. Running the same commercial synthetic workflow in Minds consumes standard responses at 0.12 euros or 0.12 dollars per response on Pay as You Go. A comprehensive Study simulating 150 Minds across two distinct Audiences answering a sequence of qualitative open-ended prompts, custom rating scales, and a MaxDiff exercise consumes prepaid responses from your shared pool without per-persona charges or method surcharges.
Because workspace users and viewers are unlimited on Pay as You Go, your entire product, marketing, and insights team can review the directional findings, iterate on the packaging design or copy, and rerun the Study within the same working session. You only pay for the responses consumed.
When structuring an annual research budget, teams generally evaluate four primary approaches:
| Research Model | Cost Structure | Core Cost Drivers | Key Trade-offs |
|---|
| Full-Service Research Agency | High project-based minimums (typically 5,000 to 50,000 euros per study) | Senior researcher hours, field recruitment, moderation, comprehensive manual reporting | High contextual depth and recruited-human observation; high cost and multi-week turnaround times that restrict rapid iteration |
| Self-Serve Human Panels | Moderate per-respondent fees (typically 3.00 to 25.00 euros per completed screener and response) | Sample size, incidence rate, demographic targeting difficulty, incentive payments | Direct human responses; variable sample costs that scale rapidly when testing multiple early-stage variations |
| Specialized Point Software | Per-seat SaaS licenses (typically 1,000 to 10,000 euros annually per user) plus sample costs | User seats, add-on feature modules, separate survey and video repository costs | Strong focus on single workflows like UX usability or survey hosting; fragmented data across disconnected tools |
| Minds Synthetic Platform | Response-based consumption (0.12 euros or dollars per response, or Pro at 199 euros per month, Enterprise from 15,000 euros per year) | Response volume and shared prepaid allowances; zero recruitment fees | Connected qualitative and quantitative workflow in one platform; outputs are directional synthetic research rather than recruited physical panels |
Minds unifies open-ended exploration, single choice, multiselect, rating scales, and structured quantitative methods like MaxDiff into a single connected environment. It integrates stimulus materials such as Figma prototypes where enabled, app flows, packaging imagery, video, and copy directly into the research workflow. Rather than maintaining separate subscriptions for qualitative chat tools, survey platforms, and UX testing utilities, teams use Minds as an end-to-end synthetic research infrastructure.
Minds delivers maximum commercial value when deployed at high-velocity decision points across marketing, product, and innovation lifecycles. It is specifically designed for:
- Early-stage concept and packaging screening before committing expensive budgets to physical field production.
- Rapid iteration on marketing claims, positioning pillars, and copy variants across different Audiences.
- Feature prioritization and trade-off analysis using MaxDiff and rating scales.
- Exploring UX app flows, websites, and Figma prototypes where enabled to identify friction points prior to engineering sprints.
- Preparing robust hypotheses and refined stimulus material before investing in high-stakes, final recruited-human validation studies.
Minds is not intended for:
- Clinical or regulatory validation trials that require physical human biological data.
- Physical or sensory testing such as food tasting or tactile material evaluation.
- Statistically representative political polling.
- Definitive macro-economic price-point elasticity modeling that requires binding purchase commitments.
Where mandatory regulatory proof or physical human observation is legally or operationally required, recruited human panels remain necessary. In commercial workflows, teams use Minds to run dozens of iterative synthetic Studies upstream, eliminating weak ideas early and entering physical validation with thoroughly refined concepts.
Minds offers transparent, predictable pricing models tailored to different organizational operating models:
Pay as You Go
Pay as You Go is built for teams that require complete agility without recurring monthly commitments:
- 0.12 euros or 0.12 dollars per response.
- Tax handling follows the billing entity: German account EUR and USD prices include applicable tax; US account USD prices exclude applicable sales tax.
- Unlimited workspace users and free viewers.
- Shared prepaid responses with carryover across billing periods.
- Up to 10 saved Audiences per workspace and up to 200 Minds per Audience.
- Full access to all supported question formats, MaxDiff, API, MCP integrations, deterministic calculations, and standard exports.
- Pay as You Go has no included monthly allowance; validation runs consume prepaid responses. Single sign-on is excluded.
Pro Subscription
Pro is built for active insight and design teams conducting continuous weekly research:
- 199 euros per named user per month, or 1,990 euros per year including VAT.
- Includes 5,000 shared responses per user per month.
- Up to 25 saved Audiences per user.
- Comprehensive qualitative, quantitative, UX, and stimulus testing workflows.
Enterprise Plan
Enterprise is structured for cross-functional enterprises and global research organizations:
- Starts at 15,000 euros per year excluding VAT.
- Tailored response volumes and contractual deployment terms.
- Single sign-on and dedicated workspace administration.
- Custom customer data handling and deployment assessments tailored to your workspace requirements.
To start testing your concepts, messaging, and product flows against synthetic Audiences, create an account on Minds. Registration is free and allows you to configure your workspace, build custom Audiences from research notes or profiles, and set up Studies before purchasing your response pool.
