Mechanical Turk has closed. Where to move quick human judgments

Amazon Mechanical Turk has closed. If you used it to get a quick human judgment, you can move those jobs to 50heads in an afternoon. Jobs that are really work, such as transcription or labeling, need a different tool.

Amazon's own site says Mechanical Turk closed on 30 September 2026. AWS's service availability notice lists it as reaching end of support on 29 September. Either way, new HITs can no longer be posted. A HIT is MTurk's word for one task.

For anything about your balance, results or data on MTurk, follow Amazon's notices. We can't tell you what Amazon will do.

Which jobs move to 50heads

50heads does one narrow thing. You ask one short question with a few options. Real people on verified phones answer it, typically in about ten minutes. You see how the answers split.

Your MTurk job moves across if it was really one of these:

1. Pick one of several. Names, headlines, thumbnails.
2. A or B with images. Two pictures, one tap.
3. A 1–5 rating. A choice usually tells you more.
4. A short reason in writing. Up to 200 characters, from Tier 2.

Tiers show how strongly each person answering has been verified. Tier 1 is a verified phone. Tier 2 adds an ID and live-face check.

Which jobs do not move

These don't fit 50heads, and we would rather say so now:

• transcription;
• labeling or tagging many items;
• multi-page surveys;
• anything needing hundreds of steps from the same person;
• academic studies with their own consent flow.

For those, look at a general crowdsourcing service or a research panel. If the only thing you ever asked was "which of these?", read on.

What maps to what

What it costs

While MTurk ran, you set the reward and Amazon added its commission: 20%, or 40% on HITs with ten or more assignments. Those figures come from Amazon's published pricing page, which was still online when we checked it on 7 October 2026. At those rates, fifty assignments at $0.10 each cost $7.00.

On 50heads a Tier 1 answer is €0.25. Fifty of them cost €12, about ten minutes, with no separate fee. The price covers verification, the head's pay and our margin. Heads get 60% of it.

You see the total and the time before you post. If fewer heads answer than you asked for, the rest goes back to your balance.

What you stop doing

Screening for bots. For every answer, the 50heads app asks Apple or Google for an integrity check. We reject answers from devices or app builds that fail it. Tier 1 heads have one verified phone number each. Tier 2 heads have passed an ID and live-face check. We also run known-answer questions and timing checks.

These checks reduce fraud. They don't remove it. If your research design needs its own validity checks, keep them. Adding them makes the question longer, which costs more.

Approving and rejecting. We remove answers that fail our checks. If we remove an answer after it counted, you get the credit back and the result is recalculated, as set out in our refund policy.

Working out the reward. The price depends on the tier, how long the question is to read and the kind of answer. The estimate is free and never spends anything. The time shown is an estimate, not a guarantee.

How to rewrite a HIT as a question

Keep questions short. Heads answer in about five seconds, on a phone, between other things. If your HIT had a paragraph of instructions, the question isn't ready yet.

Our guide to writing questions that get clear answers has the rules we use ourselves. In short:

• ask one thing;
• give two to eight options;
• describe, don't sell.

Moving over in an afternoon

1. Sign in and add credits. Packs start at €24.
2. Take your most common HIT and rewrite it as one question with two to eight options. Check the price and time in the estimator.
3. Ask it to fifty Tier 1 heads and compare the result with your last MTurk batch. The result says how strongly the answers favor the leading option for a sample of that size.
4. If your code used to call MTurk, those calls no longer work. Swap them for the 50heads API, or connect an AI assistant with the MCP server. The quick start has curl, TypeScript and Python.

curl https://api.50heads.com/v1/billing/estimate \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"draft":{"type":"single_choice","text":"Which name would you trust with your savings?","options":[{"label":"Northway"},{"label":"Keel"}],"n":50,"tier":1}}'

How the two compared

If you want the side-by-side table, see 50heads and Amazon Mechanical Turk. To compare 50heads with other fast-feedback tools, read PickFu alternatives.

Next step

Work out what your first question would cost. See pricing and try the estimator. It takes a minute and charges nothing.