Mechanical Turk is a general-purpose marketplace for small tasks. 50heads does one thing: asks fifty verified people one short question and brings back the answer in about ten minutes. If most of your HITs are really a single judgment, here's how they compare.
| Amazon Mechanical Turk | 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) | 22.9¢ an answer at Tier 1, all in |
| Who answers | Workers, filtered by qualifications | Heads with a verified phone (Tier 1) or ID (Tier 2) |
| Bot protection | Your own attention checks | Every answer signed by the phone's secure hardware |
| Review | You approve or reject each assignment | Nothing to review; bad answers are removed and refunded |
| Typical time for 50 | Varies, from minutes to hours | About ten minutes |
| Results | Raw data to analyze | Split, winner and a confidence line |
| From an agent | Via the MTurk API | MCP server with OAuth and spend caps, or a REST API |
MTurk figures are from Amazon's published pricing (mturk.com/pricing), checked 1 September 2026.
When MTurk is the better choice
Transcription, data labeling, long surveys, multi-step work and academic studies with their own consent flows all need a general marketplace or a research panel. 50heads is deliberately narrow.
When 50heads is the better choice
When the task is really "which of these?": names, headlines, thumbnails, packaging, a line of copy. You get verified people, no data cleaning and an answer you can read in a sentence.
Moving over
Our guide, moving from MTurk to 50heads, walks through mapping HITs to questions and swapping the API call.