If you already have the people you want to hear from, invite them directly. It's the cheapest route by a wide margin, because you're supplying the audience.
What it costs
You pay for the platform, the screener, the recording and the analysis. You don't pay for recruitment, because you did it.
A survey costs 4 credits per response this way, against 50 for a professional audience we recruit. See Pricing and credits for the full table.
Incentives are separate, and you can choose to pay your own people directly rather than through us.
Two kinds of link
One link per person. Each participant gets their own link, used once. Use this when you know exactly who you're inviting and want to track who completed.
One open link for everyone. A single link you send to a list, post internally, or include in a newsletter. Use this when you're distributing more broadly and don't need to know precisely who responded.
You can set how many times an open link may be used, so a study can't overrun.
Sending invitations
Send the link yourself, through your own email, your community, or wherever your people are.
A short note explaining why you're asking and how long it takes will improve your response rate more than anything else. People respond to a person, not a platform.
While it runs
You can pause a link and resume it later. Pausing stops new people entering without affecting anyone already partway through.
You can see who has completed, and top up with recruited participants if your own list doesn't fill the study.
These studies stay private
Studies recruited this way are never listed publicly. They can only be reached through the link you send.
Worth knowing for two reasons:
Your study isn't discoverable by people you didn't invite.
If a participant loses the link they can't find the study by searching, so keep the original invitation somewhere you can resend it.
When to use your own audience
Best when you want to hear from your actual users, existing customers, people who churned, users of a specific feature, or your own community.
Less good when you need an outside view. Your own users already know your product, which makes them the wrong people to test whether something is understandable to a newcomer.