Pricing

Beginning in January 2027, recruiting participants and hosting studies on Children Helping Science (CHS) will require a paid lab license, with options available for both individual studies and multi-study memberships.

For over six years, Children Helping Science has operated as a completely free resource to the developmental research community. However, costs to run the platform have increased as the community has grown, and at the same time, the current grant funding which has made it possible to operate CHS as a free resource is coming to an end. CHS needs to find a sustainable way to continue to support the research community.

Our standard pricing will range from $1,604 for a single external study ad to $10,206 per year for an active lab hosting multiple studies on the platform. This page provides detailed information about the new prices, how to write them into your grant proposals, and what these changes mean for your lab. We will add to this FAQ as we receive more questions from the research community!

If you are concerned about your lab’s ability to pay for a license, please get in touch with Melissa Kline Struhl (CHS Executive Director) at melissa@childrenhelpingscience.org.

About the Children Helping Science organization

How does CHS currently operate?

For the past six years, CHS has been run by members of Laura Schulz’s lab at MIT: a research scientist serving as the executive director (Melissa Kline Struhl, since 2022), Laura as scientific director, one or more software engineers (currently Becky Gilbert), and part-time additional support from Laura’s lab managers (Sienna Radifera and Isaiah Dela Cruz) and from Mark Sheskin, a professor at Minerva University who runs our study approval process.

During that time, Melissa, Laura, and other members of the academic community have applied for and received grant funds and philanthropic donations that cover the underlying costs of running CHS. These costs include people’s salaries (only Laura’s salary is covered by MIT) as well as the hosting and other operating expenses like a bi-annual security audit.

How and why is this changing?

As a step toward launching an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, CHS now has a fiscal sponsor. The fiscal sponsor is itself a nonprofit, with a mission of helping projects like ours transition from university labs to independent organizations. We expect to remain with our fiscal sponsor for around two years before moving out.

This change is happening for two reasons. First, CHS is continuing to grow rapidly as a platform, and we are increasingly diverging from MIT’s ideas about the kinds of activities that happen in a research lab. Second, the core NSF funding for the CHS platform will be expiring soon. While we continue to pursue follow-up funding and other opportunities, working within the MIT system is more expensive and less flexible than we need to sustain the platform in both the short and long term.

Rather than face hibernation, we’re working toward a sustainable nonprofit model for CHS, and we need the research community to at least partially fund the infrastructure we depend on. We are making this change in a formal partnership with MIT, which will continue to be CHS’s scientific home and institutional partner for storing sensitive data. Most staffing and program operations will be moving to the nonprofit, with Melissa as Executive Director.

What will happen to my existing studies and study data?

You should see no change in your access to existing studies or data with this change. In 2027 and going forward, even without a paid license you will be able to do almost everything on CHS except for (1) submitting studies for admin review and (2) collecting new data. You will still be able to create new studies, add lab members, process consents, contact participants with questions about their sessions, and download study & demographic data.

As of today, there are no changes to the CHS website infrastructure, but you will begin seeing the changes we make over time to operate the website from outside of MIT, track licenses, studies, and points, and update the documentation. Critically, only administrative data (e.g. account information) will be moving away from MIT; all of your research data, including all video, is remaining at MIT as a project running from Laura Schulz’s lab, as is currently the case today.

Do I need a new access agreement?

We can’t advise on the specifics of what your institution requires, but we expect the answer to be no in almost all cases.

The existing access agreement your institution signed broadly covers two things. The first covers how research data is created, stored, and shared through CHS systems, and this is not changing: All the infrastructure related to data storage and management will be staying at MIT both now and in the long term. The second covers a commitment from researchers to follow the website terms of service, which is also enforced when you create your researcher account on the CHS website, so this is also not changing.

The fee to use CHS starting in January 2027 will take the form of an additional license, this one purchased from the nonprofit. Your institution might have policies around software purchasing and reviewing of licenses/TOS - one of the reasons we are reaching out now is so that we can do any necessary work to register as a vendor with your institution to avoid delays later on!

Do I need an IRB amendment?

We can’t advise on the specifics of what your institution requires, but we expect the answer to be no in almost all cases.

It might be worth double checking this now if your institution (a) has the IRB (rather than an IT department) sign off on data collection software or (b) asked for amendments to the agreement when it was initially signed. We are happy to help out if you have questions!

Memberships and Paid Licenses

How are you making decisions about license pricing?

The whole purpose of Children Helping Science is to provide data collection infrastructure for research labs, so it is our goal to keep these costs as low as possible for you. This (among other reasons) is why we are forming a nonprofit rather than a for-profit business!

Over the past several months, we have been speaking with PIs from a number of different kinds of institutions, who use CHS in a variety of different ways. There is no perfect system, but the goal of this pricing model is to equitably reflect your usage as a proportion of site’s total activity and costs. In other words, if every lab paid sticker price, we would be able to sustainably fund the whole CHS project. We are aware that these prices won’t be possible for all labs, but the number of labs that pay for their own usage of CHS will determine the size of the gap we need to fill in order to keep CHS running.

We heard clearly from researchers that there’s an important difference between recruiting a child through CHS (for an external study) and running a session on CHS (internal study.) We also heard that on the one hand, people who recruit fewer participants don’t want to pay as much, but on the other, scientific research with children is unpredictable enough that the number of participants you need to run to reach your analytic N can be hard to plan for. One of the chief advantages of CHS is being able to appropriately power our studies to detect effects, so licenses for academic users will include a free usage quota based on the actual size of studies run on CHS over the last two years.

What are the license options?

Putting this together, licenses on CHS are based on studies and points:

• One study will continue to be defined in the same way as it is now - a single study listing on CHS.

• One point corresponds to EITHER one participant successfully matched into a study, OR one session hosted on CHS.

Thus, in most cases an internal study session would be worth two points, while an external study session would be worth one point. But notably, if you recruit a new participant to CHS, you will not be charged for either the “match” or the session[1]. And if you match a CHS participant into a study and then test them over multiple sessions of that study, you will only pay 1 point for the subsequent session.

Labs that run lots of studies on CHS are eligible for a discount in the form of a membership that includes unlimited studies and a bank of points shared across all studies. In most cases, these memberships make sense if your lab will run more than three studies in a year:

Plan	Cost	Studies	Points included	Additional points
Unlimited Membership	$10,207/year (or $1,021/month)	Unlimited (any type)	1200 (600 internal sessions)	$6.39
External-only Membership	$5,832/year (or $583/month)	Unlimited (external)	600	$6.39
Single internal study license	$2,807	1 (any type)	200 (100 internal sessions)	$11.04
Single external study license	$1,604	1 (external)	100	$11.04

We will also offer a free intro package (1 study, 20 points), which is designed to allow a new research group to determine whether CHS will work for their project before committing to a study license.

[1] In fact, you will receive bonus points credited to your lab balance! Please see the related questions below for details, especially if you are interested in lowering your costs for using CHS.

Who is eligible for these academic licenses?

Researchers in labs at universities and other nonprofit institutions conducting studies for publication in scientific journals. If you are interested in conducting another type of research with children & adolescents, please reach out to melissa@childrenhelpingscience.org to discuss pricing options.

There are several labs at my university, can we get a site license or group discount?

We’d love to work with you on this! Please reach out to melissa@childrenhelpingscience.org

How will licenses and points actually start working, and what happens with existing studies?

Right now, if you go to your lab page (e.g. Demo Lab) you’ll see that you are listed as having a ‘free license’ for CHS good through 12/31/2026, and a report on the internal and external sessions your lab has run using CHS. Alongside these free licenses, paid licenses will be available for purchase soon from the CHS nonprofit, and will go into effect in January 2027. By that time, you will be expected to have either purchased one of the licenses, or received one from us with a fee waiver or reduction.

If you have purchased a membership, your studies will continue without any interruption. Starting on 1/1/2027, points will be deducted from your lab’s point bank every time a session takes place, and the start point of existing studies will be set to 1/1/2027.

If you purchase a study license for each active study before January 2027, those studies will also continue collecting data without interruption. The start date of all active studies will be set to 1/1/2027. If you purchase fewer licenses than you have studies, we will pause all of your studies so that you can decide which ones you want to reactivate.

If you haven’t purchased a license and haven’t discussed/received a fee waiver, then on 1/1/2027 your studies will be paused, and you will not have the ability to re-start them or submit new studies for review. However, you will retain all of your existing study data, and you will be able to do everything else on the CHS website for free (e.g. creating new accounts, modifying existing studies, processing consent forms, communicating with participants.)

What about sessions that I shouldn’t be charged for?

In developmental psychology, it is a basic reality that we have to compensate participants who participated in good faith, but whose data we can’t use for analysis for a variety of reasons. Because CHS doesn’t control your final analysis criteria, your points for participant matches and sessions will similarly reflect the data you collect, not necessarily the data you will analyze.

However, not every session recorded on the CHS platform is one you should be charged for. To reflect this, instead of the total number of session instances (which can include someone clicking into a study and then immediately leaving), we tally up the number of “real” sessions in the ways our systems can automatically detect.

The same tallying system is used to automatically pause your studies if you set a session cap, which you can read more about here. In other words, the decisions you make about how long to continue data collection will also be used to determine which sessions spend points from your labs point bank.

Our system will also attempt to keep a correct tally of your sessions (for instance, removing a count if you mark a consent video as invalid or a participant is determined to be a spammer). But if an individual session has been incorrectly categorized, you will also have the ability to override the status. Here are two examples of when this might happen:

Internal studies: By default, we only tally sessions that are marked “complete”, i.e. the family got all the way to the end of the study. You might actually want to count some responses that missed only the final trial of the study, if these are sessions that you will compensate participants for and/or include in your overall total.

External studies: It is still the case that an external “session” is created every time a participant clicks on your link. Right now, you can reduce the number of sessions that are tallied for your study manually by comparing the CHS sessions against the session and child IDs captured by your scheduling software (or more fuzzily by comparing the timestamps.) In the future, we will aim to give you the ability to set up a webhook that will let CHS automatically tally participants only when they actually make an appointment at your link.

I need some examples!

Here are some case studies to help illustrate how you might decide which kind of license to purchase for your lab. We’ve also made an informal calculator you can use to estimate costs. If you have further questions, please feel free to reach out and we can help you with projections!

Lab A runs around two external studies per year with a total of about 160 participants. Their cheapest option is to purchase two individual external study licenses, for a total of $3208.

Lab B will run three external studies (360 participants total) and one internal study (120 participants). They are considering whether to purchase an unlimited membership to cover all studies, or an external-only membership and then purchase a single internal study license. The first option would cost $10,207 all inclusive. The second option would cost $5832 for the membership plus $2807 for the internal study, totalling $8,639, so they decide not to upgrade to the Unlimited membership.

Lab C plans to run a single large longitudinal study on CHS, with each of 100 participants completing 4 timepoints. From experience, they know that they need to recruit 166 participants at Session 1 to yield around 100 participants at Session 4. Session 1 data collection takes a total of 332 points (two points per session to cover both the match into the study and hosting the session itself.) Sessions 2, 3, and 4 see 120, 110, and 100 participants returning, but each only costs a single point, since the match has already been made for this study. In total, Lab C needs 662 points, but only one study, for their work on CHS this year. Their cheapest option is to purchase a single internal study (200 points included) and 462 additional points at the non-member rate, for a total of $7,907.

What if I can’t afford these prices?

Please get in touch with us so we can help make a plan for you to keep using CHS! It is important for us to know as early as possible how many labs need this help so that we can fundraise and make a plan for an equitable process for fee waivers.

In addition to simple waivers for the licenses described above, labs can earn extra points on CHS by recruiting new participants to the platform. Our participant pool is the result of all researchers pitching in to build a single database, so we have always asked researchers to give back to the site by continuing to bring in new families. External recruiting (from your own databases, public events, etc.) from outside CHS also lets you finish your own samples more quickly, while making more families available to hear about other studies in the future (including your own.)

Everyone benefits when researchers help to recruit for their own studies: CHS doesn’t waste money advertising to the wrong groups of potential participants, and more families have a study available right away when they first come to CHS, which makes it much more attractive to join!

We will keep this in place by not charging you for sessions that you are responsible for recruiting. In addition, we will award bonus points that you can use for additional sessions in the same or future studies. We’ll do this by providing every lab with an affiliate link to use when you share CHS with families. When a family signs up with your link and participates in a study, you will be given double points, covering that family plus one more.

It will even be possible to earn CHS points for your lab by volunteering to recruit participants for someone else’s study. If the participant you recruited winds up taking a different study rather than yours, you will still get the same bonus points toward two free sessions.

If your lab is low on funds but has a lot of person-power available for recruiting (or a database of kids that you don’t use after they age out of your range), please get in touch so we can talk about how we can work together!