Prolific

1. Platform fee usually 42.8% corporate, 33.3% academic or non-profit; minimum pay £6.00/$8.00 per hour, £9.00/$12.00 recommended; no contract or subscription, pay as you go by adding funds to a wallet; managed services by SoW/custom quote; 300,000+ active participants; 40+ countries with strongest representation in US, UK and Europe; responses within hours www.prolific.com
2. REST API, CLI and webhooks for agents; 'Self-serve studies typically launch in minutes and return first responses in hours'; idempotency keys on study creation (marketing claim) www.prolific.com
3. First-party MCP server page linking github.com/prolific-oss/prolific-mcp www.prolific.com
4. prolific-mcp: local stdio server (uvx prolific-mcp), PROLIFIC_TOKEN sent as Authorization: Token, tool list, publish_study spends real money with no sandbox, Apache-2.0; README claims an MCP Registry listing github.com
5. MCP Registry search: no Prolific server returned for 'prolific' (only an unrelated server by user ajprolific), nor for 'prolific-mcp' or 'prolific-oss' registry.modelcontextprotocol.io
6. Docs index: API sections, AI Task Builder Collections endpoints, webhooks; documentation MCP server at docs.prolific.com/_mcp/server docs.prolific.com
7. API token created on the API Tokens page; 'Authorization: Token <token>'; tokens never expire and are scoped to the researcher account; error codes including 429 docs.prolific.com
8. Rate limits: 10 requests/second per authenticated account, 30 requests/day per IP unauthenticated, POST /invitations/ 100/hour docs.prolific.com
9. 429s also come from wallet contention on concurrent payment operations docs.prolific.com
10. Balance can only be checked in the web app; publishing requires an available balance docs.prolific.com
11. Collections: participants submit their own content (images, files, text); file_upload with accepted_file_types and size/count limits; account needs Collections enabled; project needed to bill workspace funds; ~40% service fee on workspace-billed studies; export ZIP with responses.jsonl (created_at) and files/, presigned URL valid 1 hour; submission statuses docs.prolific.com
12. POST /api/v1/data-collection/collections: name, workspace_id, task_details, collection_items docs.prolific.com
13. POST /api/v1/data-collection/collections/{collection_id}/export docs.prolific.com
14. GET /api/v1/data-collection/collections/{collection_id}/export/{export_id} docs.prolific.com
15. POST /api/v1/studies/ creates a draft study; fields including data_collection_method AI_TASK_BUILDER_COLLECTION and data_collection_id docs.prolific.com
16. POST /api/v1/studies/{id}/transition/ with PUBLISH, SCHEDULE_PUBLISH, CANCEL_PUBLISH, PAUSE, START, STOP docs.prolific.com
17. GET /api/v1/studies/{id}/ docs.prolific.com
18. GET /api/v1/studies/{id}/submissions/ with ordering docs.prolific.com
19. POST /api/v1/study-cost-calculator/ returns total_cost including VAT and fees docs.prolific.com
20. GET /api/v1/studies/{id}/cost/ with is_projected docs.prolific.com
21. Prolific CLI repository github.com
22. Researcher Terms full version (14 Aug 2026): section B bans bots except documented integrations, bans selling, distributing or copying Submissions unless expressly permitted, and bans posting for third parties without approval; section D requires media to be flagged; section M: Prolific claims no rights in Submissions and participants waive or assign rights to the Researcher; data-protection limits on media and re-identification prolific.notion.site
23. Researcher Terms: summary (studies funded upfront by card or bank transfer; platform fees non-refundable), AI Task Builder Terms (submissions held by Prolific as processor; 'We will not use Study data or Submissions for our own purposes' but may review them for compliance, safeguarding, troubleshooting and improving the platform; authenticity checks; no direct identifiers or special category data; deletion 6 months after completion), Research Consultancy Terms ('we do not claim any intellectual property rights in relation to your Studies'), API Supplement (licence to use the API to create, list and launch studies, including for your own customers; payments and adding funds not available via the API; must identify customers on request) prolific.notion.site
24. Studies involving in-person activities are prohibited, including asking participants to visit specific locations; no under-18s; PII collection unlikely to be supported; time-sensitive studies not fully supported researcher-help.prolific.com
25. Supported countries (49) and small participant populations (13 more); participants must live in a supported country researcher-help.prolific.com
26. Participant-side country list (adds Egypt, India, Indonesia); over-18 and verified account required participant-help.prolific.com
27. Pool page: 300k+ active participants, 43 represented countries, 86 languages www.prolific.com
28. Recruitment speed depends on time of day, filters and pool; most studies start quickly, contact if not within two hours; time-sensitive studies not supported researcher-help.prolific.com
29. Protocol: 110+ checks; waitlist; live video selfie + government ID via Entrust (<0.1% fraud, 0.01% false acceptance); phone, email, IP dedup; surprise re-checks; bi-monthly audits; authenticity checks 98.7% precision, 78.9% recall in testing; fast-submission flags researcher-help.prolific.com
30. Bot/AI detection overview: 110+ onboarding steps, also '50+ onboarding checks'; VPN detection; periodic ID re-checks www.prolific.com
31. Duplicate-account prevention: IP detection, email/phone verification, Onfido face scan, continuous integrity monitoring researcher-help.prolific.com
32. Data-integrity layers: IP validation 'confirms ... unique participants in your target locations', quality scores, specialist screeners researcher-help.prolific.com
33. LLM and bot authenticity checks; both on by default in AI Task Builder; not available for Taskflow researcher-help.prolific.com
34. 100% Human Guarantee: double credit for bot-flagged submissions in eligible Qualtrics studies researcher-help.prolific.com
35. AI Task Builder collects images, video and audio (egocentric video, image datasets, speech samples); via CLI and API www.prolific.com
36. Ways to add money: card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Maestro; Braintree; instant) or bank transfer (Lloyds or Wise); no cheques; studies funded upfront researcher-help.prolific.com
37. Card top-up details; minimum top-up £0.51 / $0.51; Discover also accepted researcher-help.prolific.com
38. Bank transfer: up to 7 days; invoices valid 45 days researcher-help.prolific.com
39. Invoices: generated for top-ups or requested before paying; split rewards from platform fees researcher-help.prolific.com
40. Quotes are estimates; final cost can be higher (underpaying adjustments, extra approvals, bonuses) researcher-help.prolific.com
41. Account approval: institutional emails auto-approved if institution known; others reviewed manually with institution, study types and aims; email verification before funding researcher-help.prolific.com
42. Prolific not listed on the C2PA conforming products list raw.githubusercontent.com
43. Live video selfie and government ID check (Entrust); surprise identity re-checks researcher-help.prolific.com

About. Online platform that recruits ID-verified adult participants in about 50 countries for paid studies and human-data collection, run through a web app, REST API, CLI or a first-party MCP server. Its AI Task Builder Collections let participants upload their own photos, recordings and files. Prolific prohibits in-person studies, including asking participants to visit specific locations, so it cannot send anyone to a place, and it does not verify where or when an uploaded file was captured.

Price. The pricing page states a platform fee of usually 42.8% for corporate customers and 33.3% for academic or non-profit customers. The minimum reward is £6.00 / $8.00 per hour, with £9.00 / $12.00 recommended. No subscription or contract is needed for the platform; managed services use a Statement of Work. A submission's price depends on its estimated time, so no price per capture is published, and from_usd is 0. POST /study-cost-calculator/ returns a study's total including VAT and fees. Final cost can exceed a quote (underpaying adjustments, extra approvals, bonuses). Minimum top-up £0.51 / $0.51.

Coverage. Country means where a participant lives, filtered by screener; it says nothing about where a capture is made. Prolific describes particularly strong representation in the US, UK and Europe. Pool size: 300,000+ active participants (pricing page; 'our participant pool in numbers' page says 300k+ and 43 represented countries, 86 languages). The participant help page lists Egypt, India and Indonesia as supported, while the researcher page lists them as small populations. No city-level availability is published, and in-person tasks are prohibited, so coverage of a specific place is not offered.

Timing. Prolific: 'Self-serve studies typically launch in minutes and return first responses in hours.'

Licence. Researcher Terms (full version, last updated 14 Aug 2026), section M: Prolific claims no rights in Studies or Submissions, and the Participant Terms ask participants to waive proprietary rights in a Submission to the Researcher and, where needed, assign them 'for their sole use'. Section B forbids researchers to 'sell, distribute, publish, sublicense, loan or copy any of the Submissions if not expressly permitted by the Terms', and the terms grant no such permission. The researcher is data controller and must give participants a privacy notice. Media (audio, video, images) must be flagged in the study description, must not include direct identifiers, and must not be used to re-identify anyone. The terms do not mention AI or machine-learning training by the buyer. For AI Task Builder studies Prolific holds Submissions as processor and says it 'will not use Study data or Submissions for our own purposes', but it may review them for compliance, safeguarding, troubleshooting and improving the platform. It also runs authenticity checks and deletes Submissions 6 months after the study completes. The terms do not mention model training by Prolific.