The short answer
The reason we are on a different page from them is not price and not quality. It is that Prolific has no interview product at all. It is a participant marketplace: it finds people and pays them, and you bring your own instrument — a Qualtrics survey, an experiment on your own server, a task on your own platform. There is no interview interface, no moderator, and nothing that turns a Japanese conversation into an English finding. For a study built around a survey, that is exactly right. For a study built around a conversation, you would be assembling the other 80% of the job yourself.
How the money works
| torima.in Global | Prolific | |
|---|---|---|
| Fee model | Flat $49 per completed session | 42.8% of the participant reward (corporate); 33.3% academic or non-profit |
| Participant pay | You choose $14, $21, $34 per session (¥2,000–¥5,000 to the participant) | You set it. Minimum £6 / $8 per hour; recommended at least £9 / $12 per hour |
| 30-minute study, per participant | $49 + $21 = $70 | Reward $6 + fee $2.57 = ≈ $8.57 |
| 100 participants | Not possible — we cap a study at 50 sessions | ≈ $857 |
| What you get | A conducted interview, translated, summarised, and a report across all sessions | Completed responses to your own instrument |
| Contract | None; card, pay per study | None; wallet, pay as you go |
| Countries | Japan only | 40+, "particularly strong representation in the US, the UK, and Europe" |
| Interview product | The whole product | None |
| AI moderation | Yes, in Japanese | No |
Prolific is roughly eight times cheaper per participant, and that comparison is fair as far as it goes. It is also comparing a survey response with a thirty-minute conversation, a translated transcript, a written summary and a cross-study analysis. Both numbers are correct; they are prices for different things.
One thing to watch if you use Prolific in Japan
Prolific's pay guidance is a global hourly floor: minimum £6/$8 an hour, recommended £9/$12. At the recommended rate, a 30-minute task pays a participant $6.
The Japanese norm for a 30-minute online research interview is ¥2,000–¥3,500, or roughly $13–$22. For a survey, $6 for half an hour is defensible and in line with international practice. For anything that asks a participant to think hard and write at length, it sits below what the Japanese market pays, and low incentives in Japan show up as low completion rather than as complaints. If you are running something demanding, budget above the platform's recommendation rather than at it. Our recruiting guide has the full benchmark table by format and length.
Who is in a Prolific panel in Japan?
The same question we ask of every international platform, including ourselves.
Prolific lists Japan among 40-plus countries, and describes its representation as particularly strong in the US, the UK and Europe. It does not publish a participant count for Japan, so we cannot tell you how many people are there, and we are not going to estimate.
What is observable is that Prolific recruits, screens and pays participants in English. Set against EF's 2025 English Proficiency Index, which places Japan 96th of 123 countries and regions in the "very low proficiency" band after eleven consecutive years of decline, a panel assembled entirely in English in Japan is selecting for something.
For a lot of Prolific's core use cases that does not matter much. A perceptual experiment, a reaction-time task, an annotation job — none of these are especially sensitive to whether the participant also speaks English. For a study about how ordinary Japanese consumers experience a product, it matters a great deal.
torima.in's panel is recruited, screened, interviewed and paid entirely in Japanese, through the domestic marketplace we have operated since 2020. That is the only difference this page is really arguing for.
Where each one is right
Use Prolific when
- You need statistical power — 100, 500, 1,000 responses
- You have your own instrument: a survey, an experiment, a task
- You are doing academic research (the 33.3% academic rate is a genuinely good deal)
- Your task does not depend on nuanced Japanese-language expression
- You need data annotation or model evaluation work
- Budget is the binding constraint
Use torima.in when
- You need to understand why, not measure how many
- The answer will come out of an open-ended conversation, in Japanese
- Nobody on your team can conduct or read that conversation
- You want the analysis done, not the raw data delivered
- Ten deep responses would tell you more than a thousand shallow ones
Use both when
You are doing what most good research teams do — a Prolific survey to size the thing, then a handful of interviews to understand it. These are complements far more often than they are alternatives, and running both would still cost less than one agency engagement.
What we cannot do that Prolific can
- Scale. We cap a study at 50 sessions. Prolific will find you a thousand people.
- Price. Not close. Eight times, on the numbers above.
- Your own instrument. We run our interview format. You cannot upload a survey, an experiment or a task.
- Other countries. They have 40+. We have one.
- Academic pricing. They discount for academic and non-profit work. We do not, currently. If you are an academic researcher studying Japan, that is worth weighing, and it is worth writing to us about — we would rather hear the case than have you assume the answer.
- A track record. Prolific has years of published methodological research behind it. torima.in Global Research launched in 2026 with none.
The other comparisons
- torima.in vs Respondent — their own documentation disagrees with itself about Japan.
- torima.in vs User Interviews — the same headline price, buying two different things.