50heads does one narrower thing. You ask one short question with a few options, and fifty verified people answer it on their phones in about ten minutes. If that is most of what you used MTurk for, this guide is for you.

What maps to what

The price, side by side

On MTurk you set the reward and Amazon adds its commission: 20%, rising to 40% on HITs with ten or more assignments. A fifty-assignment HIT at $0.10 a response costs $7.00 before you have thrown anything away.

On 50heads a Tier 1 answer is €0.24, and fifty of them cost €11.80. 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, and if fewer heads answer than you asked for, the rest goes straight back to your balance.

What you stop doing

Screening for bots. Every answer on 50heads is signed by the secure hardware in the phone that gave it. Emulators and modified apps can't answer at all. Tier 1 heads have one real phone number each; Tier 2 heads have passed an ID and live-face check. You don't need attention checks, and you shouldn't add them: they make the question longer, and longer questions cost more.

Approving and rejecting. We run known-answer questions and timing checks on our side. If an answer is thrown out after it counted, you get the credit back automatically.

Writing reward math. The price is worked out from the tier, how long the question is to read and the kind of answer. The estimate is free and never spends anything.

What you need to change

Most MTurk HITs that fit 50heads are one of four shapes:

1. Pick one of several. Names, headlines, thumbnails. This is the default question type.
2. A or B with images. Two pictures, one tap.
3. A 1–5 rating. Use sparingly; a choice usually tells you more.
4. A short free-text reason. Available from Tier 2, up to 200 characters.

Longer tasks (transcription, tagging hundreds of items, multi-page surveys) don't fit. Keep MTurk or a research panel for those.

Keep questions short. Heads answer in about five seconds, on a phone, between other things. If your HIT has a paragraph of instructions, the question isn't ready yet. Our guide to writing questions that get clear answers covers the rules we use ourselves.

Doing it 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. Run it through the estimator to see the price and the time.
3. Ask it to fifty Tier 1 heads and compare the result with your last MTurk batch.
4. If you call MTurk from code, swap the call for the 50heads API or add the MCP server to your agent. There is a quick start with 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}}'

When MTurk is still the better tool

If you need someone to do work rather than give a judgment, or you need hundreds of steps from the same person, or you are running an academic study with its own consent flow, a general-purpose marketplace or a research panel will serve you better. We would rather tell you that now than have you find out halfway through.

For everything that is really one question with an answer you'll act on this afternoon, fifty heads are better than one.

The problem we are solving

Paying strangers for opinions attracts three kinds of cheating. Scripts that answer at machine speed. Farms of phones run by one person. And people who are real but not paying attention. Each one needs a different check, and the checks only work if they are hard to fake cheaply.

Check one: the phone is a real phone

Every modern iPhone and Android phone has a small sealed chip that can sign a message in a way software can't imitate. When a head answers, the 50heads app asks that chip to vouch for three things:

• this is a real, physical device, not an emulator;
• it hasn't been rooted, jailbroken or tampered with;
• the app sending the answer is the one we published, unmodified.

Apple or Google checks the signature and tells us whether to believe it. If it doesn't check out, the answer never reaches you and the head isn't paid. This is why a script on a server can't answer 50heads questions at all, however clever it is.

Each answer in your results carries an attestation reference. It proves the answer came from a checked device without saying whose.

Check two: one real phone number per head

To be paid, a head verifies a phone number with a code by text or WhatsApp. Virtual numbers and VoIP numbers are refused. A number can belong to one account only.

Numbers are cheap in some places, so we don't stop there. Every month, a Tier 1 head who earned in that month confirms the same number again. It takes ten seconds for someone who still has their phone; it is expensive for a farm that rotates SIM cards.

Check three: a real identity, at Tier 2

Heads who want the higher-paying Tier 2 questions pass an ID and live-face check, once. It is run by a specialist provider, not by us. The provider checks the document, checks that the face in front of the camera matches it and is live, and checks the face against every other account so one person can't hold two.

We receive a yes or a no. The ID and face photos are deleted by the provider after its decision, within 30 days. We never see them. Tier 2 heads also get a three-second face check at random afterwards, so an account can't be verified once and then handed on.

Check four: attention

A verified person can still click without reading. So a few questions each day have answers we already know. Heads who get too many of them wrong stop seeing paid questions. We also hold back answers that arrive faster than the question could have been read, or in lockstep with other accounts, and review them.

What happens when we get it wrong

Automated checks make mistakes, and the people on the other end of them deserve a way out. Any head can appeal once a month, a person reads every appeal, and we publish how many we receive and uphold each quarter in our transparency note.

If we remove an answer after it has counted towards your result, you get the credit back and the result is recalculated.

What we keep

We keep as little as the checks need, for as long as they need it:

The full detail is in our privacy notice and on how we verify.

Why publish it

Because "trust us" is not a verification method. If you can read how the checks work, you can decide whether they are good enough for your question, and you can hold us to them.

The short version

• A Tier 1 answer pays €0.14. A Tier 2 answer pays €0.30, about 2.1 times as much. Tier 3 pays €0.57.
• Heads get 60% of every answer's price. The rest pays for verification, the platform and the company.
• You see what a question pays before you answer it.
• New earnings clear in up to 7 days (3 at Tier 3). After that you can withdraw from €6, or let us pay you automatically at the end of the month.

Where the money goes

A requester pays €0.24 for a Tier 1 answer. Of that, €0.14 goes to the head who gave it. The remainder covers the device and phone checks on every answer, the ID provider for Tier 2, payment fees, the servers, support, and the people who build and run 50heads.

We picked a fixed share because it is easy to check: if a requester pays more for a question (a longer one, or one with images, or a rush), the head gets more too, in proportion.

Pay is the same everywhere

We pay the same rate in every country we pay, before currency conversion. We looked hard at adjusting pay by country and decided against it. The work is the same, and a five-second answer from Manila is worth as much to a requester as one from Manchester. The pay rates by country page shows the rates in local currency, the payout methods in each country and the smallest withdrawal.

Getting paid

Heads can withdraw to PayPal, a UK bank account or Wise, depending on the country. The first withdrawal each month is free. The Withdraw screen shows exactly what will arrive, after any fees and currency conversion, before you confirm.

Why the holding period? Because some checks can only run after the fact: known-answer questions, timing patterns across many answers, and requester disputes. Holding new earnings for up to a week lets us catch fraud without clawing money back from people who did nothing wrong.

The honest line

Answering questions on 50heads is not a full-time income, and we won't pretend it is. It is five-second questions in spare minutes: on the bus, in a queue, while the kettle boils. How much you earn depends mostly on how many questions there are in your language at the time, and we tell you when there's nothing waiting rather than filling the gap with unpaid busywork.

What we can promise is that every accepted answer pays what it said it would, that the rates are public, and that you can always see what is pending and what is ready to withdraw.

What we publish, and when

Our fair pay statement sets out the floor we won't go below and how we'll tell heads before any rate changes. Our transparency note reports appeals received and upheld each quarter.

If you think a rate is wrong, or a payout didn't arrive, tell us. A person will reply.