From signing up to getting paid

Most panels describe this in three cheerful sentences. The useful version is longer, because the parts people actually get stuck on are the parts nobody writes down: why an invitation vanished, what a redirect did, and why a payment took a day.

1. Create an account. An email address and a password. We send a verification link, but you do not have to click it before you start answering — verification gates withdrawals, not participation. Requiring it upfront costs a lot of honest signups and stops nobody determined.
2. Answer two or three questions about yourself. Country, year of birth, and one more. That is enough to match you to something today. The rest of your profile fills in over the following weeks, one or two questions after each study you finish.
3. Get matched. Studies appear on your dashboard when your profile fits what a client is paying for. Each one shows the reward, the expected length, and what that works out to per hour. Nothing auto-starts, and nothing expires without warning.
4. Take the study. Starting a study sends you to the client's survey platform, not ours. We pass a respondent id and nothing else — not your name, not your email address, not your device.
5. The study ends one of four ways. Complete, screen-out, quota full, or a quality hold. All four return you to your dashboard with the outcome named. None of them leaves you on a blank page wondering, which is the usual failure mode elsewhere.
6. The balance moves. A complete credits the full reward. A screen-out or a full quota credits the fixed amount. A quality hold credits nothing and tells you which check fired, on which study, with a link to dispute it.

Complete means you reached the end and the client accepted the response. Screen-out means the screening questions found you were not the audience being paid for — common, expected, and compensated. Quota full means people like you had already filled that cell before you got there; it is a timing accident and pays the same as a screen-out.

Quality hold is the one worth understanding. It fires when a response shows a pattern the client or our own checks flagged: finishing far faster than everyone else did, or answering a grid straight down one column. A hold is not an accusation of fraud. It is far more often somebody who was tired, distracted, or halfway through something else, and it is reversible on appeal.

Every account carries a quality score, visible only to you, starting at 80. Finishing studies and passing attention checks move it up a point or two at a time. Speeding, straight-lining and contradicting your own profile move it down by more. Each change is logged with a date, a reason and the study it came from — you can read the whole history, and a change with no stated reason is a bug on our side, not a rule.

The score matters in one place: it is one of the three conditions on a first withdrawal. It does not secretly throttle your invitations, and no amount of it unlocks a better tier of study.

Withdrawals open at $5. The first one has three conditions: a verified email address, an account older than 72 hours, and a quality score at or above 60. Every one after that needs only the balance.

A request moves through review to approved and then paid. If it is rejected you are told the specific reason and can dispute it in front of a person. We are not going to write "violated the terms" at you — that phrase exists so a company does not have to explain itself, and a panel that uses it has already decided your side of the story does not matter.

The rewards page has the full set of rules on holds and appeals. The support page answers what people ask most before joining.