Stop Guessing on Survey Budgets

Here's a scenario that plays out every week at market research firms: client asks "how much will this study cost?" and the account manager says "let me get back to you." Then they email three sample vendors, wait 24-48 hours for bids, reconcile the numbers, add their markup, and send a proposal. The whole cycle takes two to five business days.

For a $200K enterprise client, that's fine. For a quick-turn project or a prospect who needs a ballpark to decide if they're even going to fund the research? Two days is too slow.

What the estimator does

Input your methodology (online, phone, in-person), audience type (consumer, B2B, healthcare), sample size, survey length in minutes, and estimated incidence rate. The tool returns a complete project budget broken into line items: sample/CPI costs, programming, incentives, project management, and data processing.

The CPI benchmarks are vendor-neutral. I built them from 20 years of seeing actual bids come back from every major sample provider. They're not perfect, and I'm clear about that in the tool. But they're accurate enough to give a client a same-day ballpark within 15-20% of what the final bid will come in at.

For an account manager trying to close a deal, having a credible number in 30 seconds instead of 48 hours changes the conversation entirely.

Tech stack

React 18.2 + Babel CDN. The CPI database is a lookup table indexed by methodology, audience type, LOI range, and incidence rate band. Line item cost formulas are based on industry standard project economics. All client-side, no data sent anywhere.