Business Terms

1. About these terms

These Business Terms apply when you create a StudyScout for business account and run studies on the StudyScout panel. They sit alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. If these terms and the Terms of Service disagree about business studies, these terms apply.

By creating an account you agree to them on behalf of the company or team you name, and you confirm you may do so.

2. What we do

StudyScout runs your study on its own panel of adults in the US who have signed up to take part in paid research. We show your study to eligible members, pay them for accepted responses, check response quality, and give you the results.

We don’t promise how many responses a study will get or how fast. You’re charged only for accepted responses, and anything not used comes back to your balance.

3. Participants stay anonymous

You receive each participant’s answers with a random response ID, their age, age band, gender, US state and region, and the time they took. You never receive a name, email address, phone number, street address, IP address or account ID.

Your studies must not collect personal identifiers. Don’t ask for names, email or street addresses, phone numbers, usernames or social media handles, account or ID numbers, payment details or exact dates of birth, and don’t ask participants to share them in any other way (for example, in a text answer or through a link).

You agree not to try to identify any participant, alone or by combining our data with other information, and to require the same of anyone you share the results with.

4. No contact outside StudyScout

You may not contact, recruit, or ask to contact any participant outside StudyScout: no invitations to follow-up calls, mailing lists, communities, or your own panels, and no links that collect contact details. If you want to hear from people again, run another study.

5. Adults only

Studies are for adults 18 and over. Don’t design a study for minors, ask participants about children in a way that collects information about a specific child, or ask a participant to hand the study to someone else.

6. What you may not run

You’re responsible for your study and its content. You may not run a study that:

• is deceptive: misstates who it’s for or what it’s used for, or poses as research while it sells something;
• is harmful, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, or encourages self-harm or violence;
• is illegal, or helps someone break the law or another person’s rights, including intellectual property and privacy rights;
• asks for reviews, ratings, upvotes or social media posts about any product, place or person (paid reviews break the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews);
• collects sensitive information: health or medical conditions, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or sex life, immigration or citizenship status, precise location, genetic data, or biometric data other than the recordings of a recording study (section 9);
• sends participants to an outside site, download or app, unless it is the survey link the study is built on; or asks participants to install anything;
• is a political campaign or fundraising message presented as a survey.

7. We review every study

A person at StudyScout reviews every study before it goes to the panel. We may ask for changes, reject a study, or stop a live study at any time if we believe it breaks these terms or could harm participants or StudyScout. When we do, we tell you why, and what’s left of its hold returns to your balance. Responses already accepted stay with you and remain charged.

8. Using answers to train or evaluate AI

If you will use answers or recordings to train, fine-tune or evaluate AI models, you must say so on the study. Participants are told before they start. You may not use the results for any purpose you didn’t state.

9. Recording studies

In a recording study, participants record video or audio, and you receive each accepted recording with a written transcript of it. A video shows a participant’s face and every recording carries their voice, which can identify them, so recording studies have these rules on top of the rest of these terms:

• State on the study how you’ll use the recordings, in plain words. Participants see that use, word for word, before they agree to record.
• Use the recordings and their transcripts only for that stated use.
• Don’t sell recordings or their transcripts, and don’t pass them on to anyone beyond what the stated use needs.
• Don’t make AI-made or synthetic copies of a participant’s voice or face (for example, a cloned voice or a deepfake), or let anyone else make them from your recordings.
• Don’t try to identify a participant from their face or voice (for example, with face or voice recognition), and don’t extract voiceprints, face geometry or other biometric identifiers from recordings unless the study’s stated use says so.
• When we ask you to delete a recording, for example because the participant asked us to, delete it and its transcript, along with any copies you passed on, and tell us when it’s done.

10. Balance, holds and charges

• You add funds to your balance in advance by card through Stripe. Prices are the ones shown in the study builder when you submit a study; a study keeps its price once submitted.
• When you submit a study, we hold its full price (price per response times the number of responses you asked for) from your balance.
• You’re charged only for accepted responses: each accepted response moves its price from the hold to a charge. Responses screened out by our quality checks are not charged.
• When a study ends, because it reached its goal, you ended it, or we stopped it, or when you withdraw it from review, anything left of its hold returns to your balance.
• Unused balance is refunded on request. Email support@joinstudyscout.com from your account’s email address.

11. Quality checks

We screen responses that are faster than a real person could answer, and responses that fail an attention check when the study has one. Screened-out responses don’t count toward your study and aren’t charged. We flag (but keep and charge) responses that give the same answer on every scale question; the flag shows on your dashboard and in your export. Quality checks reduce, but can’t remove, low-effort answers.

12. Your content and results

You keep the rights to your questions and your results. Recordings and their transcripts are licensed to you only for the use stated on the study (section 9). You give StudyScout permission to host your study, show it to participants and process the answers and recordings to run the service. We don’t show your study or its results to other businesses.

13. Your account

You sign in with a code sent to your email address. Keep access to that address secure: anyone who can read it can sign in. We may suspend an account that breaks these terms; if we close it, we refund its unused balance unless the funds are tied to fraud or a chargeback.

14. Disclaimers and liability

The service and results are provided as is. Results reflect what participants answered and may not represent any wider population. To the fullest extent the law allows, StudyScout isn’t liable for indirect or consequential losses, and our total liability for any claim about the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim.

15. Changes and contact

We may update these terms. We’ll tell you about material changes before they apply to your account; studies already submitted keep the terms and prices in place when you submitted them.

Questions? Email support@joinstudyscout.com.