Consultancy as support
PsychoPy is a set of open-source Python libraries and an application which is free to use. Online, the companion PsychoJS libraries are also open-source, and Pavlovia offers free server space on GitLab. Experiments experiments hosted on Pavlovia do, however, require an institutional licence (£1800 + VAT per year for unlimited users and responses) or cost credits (24p + VAT per session) to run, but this is considerably cheaper than comparable offerings. Gorilla charges 99p per session or between £4580 and £18600 for a departmental licence, depending on the number of users and respondents. My last Qualtrics renewal was £15855 for 600 users.
Why is Pavlovia so much cheaper? There are many reasons, but the one I’m going to focus on here is support. Open Science Tools does not have the revenue to have a customer support team or offer free email support to its users. I am a half-time Science Officer at OST and my job is to support consultancy clients and help test the releases. This forum is a community support forum and the support I give here is primarily as a PsychoPy superuser rather than as a Science Officer. I try to help as many people as I can, but we rely on our community to help each other. Users who have shown themselves to be particularly helpful can be identified by a blue pentagon “flair”. Be kind to them. It’s not their job to help you, to a large extent, it’s not mine either.
Those interested in the finances of Open Science Tools, can find more information here: Open Science Tools Ltd. Finances
If you can’t get the support you’re looking for from the community, there is another option. You can help support PsychoPy by engaging the consultancy services of the science team to build or debug your experiments. Science team costs are £70+VAT per hour for academic and charitable institutions, and you start with a free scoping chat – which is sometimes all that’s needed.
In addition to our basic licence, we now also offer two upgrades. For £2000 + VAT per you also get three one-hour virtual workshops and for £5000 + VAT per year (comparable with Gorilla’s cheapest departmental offering) the workshops are supplemented by 40 one-hour support clinics.