Amazon Mechanical Turk has closed. Amazon's site says it closed on 30 September 2026, and AWS lists it as reaching end of support on 29 September. The figures below are how it worked while it ran, from Amazon's published pricing, checked again on 7 October 2026.
Mechanical Turk was a general-purpose marketplace for small tasks. 50heads does one thing: asks verified people one short question and typically brings back the answers in about ten minutes. If most of your HITs were really a single judgment, here is how the two compared.
| Amazon Mechanical Turk (closed) | 50heads | |
|---|---|---|
| What you post | A HIT you design, with instructions | One question with 2–8 options, or an A or B pair |
| Price | Your reward, plus a 20% fee (40% for 10+ assignments) | $0.25 an answer at Tier 1, all in |
| Who answers | Workers, filtered by qualifications | Heads with a verified phone (Tier 1) or ID (Tier 2) |
| Answer quality checks | Qualifications, and any checks you build into your HIT | The app asks Apple or Google for an integrity check and we reject answers from devices or app builds that fail it, plus known-answer and timing checks |
| Review | You approve or reject each assignment | No approving: 50heads runs its own answer checks, and rejected answers are not charged or are refunded under our refund policy |
| Typical time for 50 | Varies, from minutes to hours | Typically about ten minutes for 50, not guaranteed |
| Results | Raw data to analyze | The split, the leading option and how strongly the answers favor it |
| From an agent | Via the MTurk API, which no longer works | MCP server with OAuth and spend caps, or a REST API |
Sources: Amazon Mechanical Turk pricing page (mturk.com/pricing), checked 7 October 2026; mturk.com and the AWS service availability notice for the closure, checked 7 October 2026; 50heads figures from our own pricing and verification pages. Amazon's own worker qualifications and quality tools are not covered in detail here, so see Amazon's documentation for the full picture.
Jobs 50heads does not do
Transcription, data labeling, long surveys, multi-step work and academic studies with their own consent flows need a different tool, such as a general crowdsourcing service or a research panel. 50heads is deliberately narrow.
Jobs 50heads is built for
When the task is really "which of these?": names, headlines, thumbnails, packaging, a line of copy. You get verified people, our own answer checks and a result you can read in a sentence.
Moving over
Our guide, moving from MTurk to 50heads, shows how to rewrite a HIT as a question and swap the API call.