Short answer: User Interviews charges $49 per completed session on Pay As You Go for its Recruit product, dropping to $41 on Essential (60-session annual minimum) and $36 on Professional. Research Hub costs roughly double: $98 / $82 / $72. But that rate is the recruiting fee only — participant incentives are billed separately from a prepaid balance with a 3% processing fee, and advanced B2B targeting adds $35–$49 per session. A realistic B2B study costs about $225 per participant all-in, not $49. Negotiated contract data across 32 purchases shows a median annual spend of $7,500.
User Interviews deserves genuine credit here. In a category where dscout and UserTesting hide every number behind a sales call, User Interviews publishes its full rate card — tiers, minimums, add-ons, and all. The catch is not that the pricing is hidden. It is that the published number covers one line item out of three.
The published rate card
Recruit (you source participants, they run the logistics):
| Plan | Per session | Annual minimum | Discount vs PAYG |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay As You Go | $49 | None | — |
| Essential | $41 | 60 sessions | 17% |
| Professional | $36 | Higher volume | 27% |
| Custom | Negotiated | From 250 sessions | Best rate |
Research Hub (recruiting plus a participant CRM, panel management, and workflow automation) runs at roughly double the per-session rate: $98 Pay As You Go, $82 Essential with a 150-session minimum, and $72 Professional.
Every tier includes unlimited seats, access to a participant pool the company puts at 7.5 million, targeting, scheduling automation, incentive distribution, quota tracking, and integrations. Essential adds quota automation, participant re-invites, and customer success support. Professional adds deeper discounts on surveys and unmoderated tasks. Custom starts at 250 sessions with negotiable terms and a security review.
Separately, Research Hub is sold in two shapes: a Workflow plan starting at 3 seats, and a CRM plan starting at 1,000 contacts with panel management, dynamic segments, opt-in forms, nurture campaigns, and PII masking.
The three costs that stack
Here is where the $49 stops being the whole story.
1. The recruiting fee. $49 per completed session on PAYG. This is the number everyone quotes.
2. Advanced B2B targeting. If you need participants by job title, seniority, company size, or industry — which is to say, if you are doing B2B research at all — the add-on costs $45–$49 per session on Pay As You Go, or $35–$41 on subscription tiers. For B2B work this roughly doubles the platform fee.
3. Incentives. These are not included at any tier. You fund a prepaid balance, and automatic distribution carries a 3% processing fee. Incentives are paid by you, to participants, on top of everything above. What they cost depends entirely on who you are recruiting — our guide to research participant incentives breaks down realistic rates, but B2B professionals and specialists command far more than general consumers.
What a real study actually costs
Consumer study, 15 participants, 30-minute sessions, PAYG:
| Line item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Recruiting — 15 × $49 | $735 |
| Incentives — 15 × $50 | $750 |
| Incentive processing (3%) | $23 |
| Total | $1,508 |
| Per participant | $100 |
B2B study, 15 participants, senior decision-makers, PAYG:
| Line item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Recruiting — 15 × $49 | $735 |
| B2B targeting add-on — 15 × $47 | $705 |
| Incentives — 15 × $125 | $1,875 |
| Incentive processing (3%) | $56 |
| Total | $3,371 |
| Per participant | $225 |
The published $49 is about 22% of the true per-participant cost of a B2B study. That is not a criticism of User Interviews' honesty — every one of those line items is disclosed on their pricing page. It is a criticism of how research budgets get built, because most teams budget the recruiting fee and get surprised by a bill three times larger.
The subscription break-even trap
The annual tiers look like straightforward savings — 17% off on Essential, 27% on Professional. The trap is the minimum.
Essential requires a 60-session annual commitment at $41, which is $2,460 locked in. Run all 60 sessions and you pay $2,460 versus $2,940 on PAYG — a genuine $480 saving. But run only 40 sessions against that commitment and your effective rate becomes $61.50 per session, meaningfully worse than the $49 you would have paid with no commitment at all.
The break-even is not a discount curve. It is a cliff at the minimum:
| Sessions actually run | PAYG cost | Essential cost | Better choice |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | $1,470 | $2,460 | PAYG |
| 50 | $2,450 | $2,460 | PAYG (basically tied) |
| 60 | $2,940 | $2,460 | Essential |
| 100 | $4,900 | $4,100 | Essential |
Research Hub's Essential tier raises the stakes considerably: 150 sessions at $82 is a $12,300 annual commitment. Notably, that is well above the $7,500 median annual contract seen across 32 negotiated User Interviews purchases (range: $4,200 to $21,750) — which suggests most buyers land on Recruit rather than the full Research Hub, or negotiate their way below the published minimums.
Before you commit: count the sessions your team ran last year, not the sessions you plan to run. Research volume forecasts are optimistic almost by definition, and the tier minimum is the one number in this entire post that punishes optimism.
What you are actually buying
Be clear about the product boundary. User Interviews is a recruiting marketplace. It finds people, screens them, schedules them, and pays them. It does not conduct your interview, and it does not analyse it.
That means the $225-per-participant B2B figure above buys you a calendar full of scheduled calls. You still need a researcher to run each one, take notes, transcribe, tag, synthesise, and write the report. At a loaded cost of $75–$100 an hour for a researcher — see our UX researcher salary benchmarks — a 15-participant study consumes roughly 30–45 hours of moderation and analysis time. That labour frequently costs more than the recruiting and incentives combined.
Recruiting is only half the job, which is the same conclusion we reached comparing User Interviews vs Respondent and User Interviews vs Prolific.
There is also a sample-quality dimension. Marketplace panels attract repeat participants, and heavy repeat participation degrades the representativeness of your sample over time — the dynamic we covered in professional respondents and panel conditioning. Good screener questions mitigate it; nothing eliminates it.
The AI-native alternative
The reason recruiting costs what it does is that a human moderator can only be in one room at a time. Every scheduling constraint, every no-show, every incentive dollar exists to get a person and a researcher into the same slot.
Koji removes that constraint. Interviews are AI-moderated, so they run 24/7 and in parallel — no calendars, no moderator bench, no rescheduling. Pricing is published and credit-based:
- Insights — €29/month, 29 credits included
- Interviews — €79/month, 79 credits included
- Enterprise — custom
A text conversation costs 1 credit, a full AI-moderated voice interview costs 3, and a report refresh costs 5. The €79 plan therefore covers roughly 26 voice interviews a month. Compare that against $3,371 for 15 B2B sessions and the arithmetic speaks for itself — even after you add incentives, which you will still pay if you recruit externally.
Two structural advantages matter more than the price:
You can recruit from your own product. The cheapest participant is one who already uses your software. Koji studies can be triggered from inside your app, turning recruiting from a purchased line item into a distribution one — see in-product research recruiting and recruiting B2B participants.
Analysis is included, not additional. Every transcript is thematically analysed automatically, with one-click reports and quotes traced to source. The 30–45 hours of synthesis labour that User Interviews' fee does not cover simply does not appear.
You also get six structured question types — open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, and yes_no — mixed directly into conversations. That means NPS distributions, ranked feature preferences, and the qualitative reasoning behind them in a single study, instead of fielding a survey and a round of interviews separately. And because every participant meets the same neutral interviewer, there is no moderator bias drifting across a study the way it does across a bench of contractors.
Koji does not replace a recruiting marketplace when you need strangers who have never heard of you. It replaces the far more common case: you have customers, you need to understand them, and you are paying $225 a head plus 40 hours of labour to find that out.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does User Interviews cost per participant? The platform fee is $49 per completed session on Pay As You Go, $41 on Essential, and $36 on Professional. Research Hub is roughly double at $98 / $82 / $72. All-in, including incentives and B2B targeting, a realistic B2B study costs around $225 per participant and a consumer study around $100.
Does User Interviews include participant incentives in its pricing? No. Incentives are funded separately through a prepaid balance and carry a 3% processing fee for automatic distribution. The per-session rate covers recruiting, screening, and scheduling only.
What is the minimum commitment for User Interviews? Pay As You Go has no minimum or contract. Essential requires 60 sessions annually for Recruit ($2,460) or 150 sessions for Research Hub ($12,300). Custom plans start at 250 sessions.
Is the User Interviews subscription worth it? Only if you reliably exceed the tier minimum. At 60+ sessions a year Essential saves about $480 versus Pay As You Go. Below roughly 50 sessions, the commitment makes your effective per-session rate higher than Pay As You Go — count last year's actual sessions, not this year's plan.
How much does B2B targeting cost on User Interviews? Advanced B2B targeting adds $45–$49 per session on Pay As You Go and $35–$41 per session on subscription tiers, roughly doubling the platform fee for B2B research.
What do companies actually pay for User Interviews annually? Negotiated contract data across 32 purchases shows a median of $7,500 per year, with a range of $4,200 to $21,750.
Stop paying per calendar slot
If your research budget is going to recruiting fees, incentives, B2B add-ons, and then 40 hours of someone's week transcribing what got said, the constraint you are paying to work around is the human moderator.
Koji runs AI-moderated voice interviews in parallel, analyses them automatically, and hands you a report — from question to insight in hours, not weeks, with no research expertise required. Published pricing from €29/month, no minimums, no session commitments.
