Where it is
Recruit → Recruit with Prolific. The panel shows a status badge: Draft until you publish.
Before you publish
Get these right first, because participants arrive as soon as you publish:
- Questions are final and validated.
- Welcome and consent text is written — Welcome.
- Screening is configured if you need it, and you have decided whether to pay screen-outs.
- Redirect URL is set on the Details page, so finishers are returned to Prolific and credited.
- You have taken the interview yourself with Try Interview.
Configuring the study
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Study title | Shown to participants on Prolific; defaults to your study name |
| Sample type | Standard sample, or a representative sample: UK, UK regional, UK by age and political affiliation, US, US regional, US by age and political affiliation, and US with ethnicity |
| Description | Shown to participants before they accept |
| Participants | How many places to buy |
| Estimated minutes | Your estimate of length; drives the hourly rate calculation |
| Reward per participant (USD) | Deutero shows Prolific's recommended and minimum hourly rates, e.g. "Recommended: $12.00/hr (min $8.00/hr)" |
| Submission approval | Approve automatically on completion, or review before paying |
| Devices | Desktop, tablet, mobile |
| Pay screened-out participants | Required when you use screening questions; sets a screen-out reward and a number of screen-out slots |
| Audience filters | Search Prolific's filter catalogue (age, language, country, employment and many more) and add the ones you want |
As you fill in participants and reward, a live quote appears:
Total study cost: $17.15
Participant rewards: $10.00 · Platform & panel fees: $7.15
Saving and publishing
- Save draft stores the configuration without spending anything. You can come back to it.
- Pay & publish charges you and puts the study live on Prolific.
Once live, the panel shows Places filled and three controls:
- Pause — stop new participants entering
- Resume — let them in again
- Stop study — end recruitment
Submissions
A Submissions table lists each participant, their status, when they entered, how long they took, and a link to the interview. With Review before paying you approve them yourself:
- Approve selected — pays those participants
- Reject submission — needs a reason and a message of at least 100 characters
Unreviewed submissions are approved and paid automatically by Prolific after 21 days.
Deutero is explicit about rejections, and it is worth repeating: rejections penalize participants on Prolific and too many can remove them from the platform. Reject only clear quality failures — a short answer is not fraud. An interview that ended early because of a platform error is never the participant's fault.
Costs
You pay the participant rewards plus platform and panel fees, shown in the quote before you commit. The quote is recalculated as you change participants, reward or length. Interview credits are separate: running the interviews themselves consumes Deutero credits from your plan — see How Credits Work.
With MCP
There are no Prolific tools. An agent can prepare everything else (study, questions, screening, quota, redirect URL) and should hand the Prolific panel to a person, since publishing spends money.
The useful preparation call is:
update_recruitment {"study_id": "…", "max_responses": 50,
"redirect_url": "https://app.prolific.com/submissions/complete?cc=…"}
Last updated: September 2026