Minds
Message and concept testing against AI-simulated audiences, with pay-as-you-go pricing a small team can try without a sales call
Minds builds reusable AI personas from your own uploads, links and public data, then runs interviews, group questioning and structured questionnaires against them, returning both aggregate distributions and individual responses. Message, concept and ad pretesting is a first-class function rather than a repurposed user-research feature, covering taglines, positioning, objections and creative across nine languages. It is the only tool in this category a two-person comms team can buy on a card without a sales call. Read the evidence caveats below before you rely on it for anything consequential: this is a category where the marketing is well ahead of the proof, and Minds is among the more careful vendors in it rather than an exception to it.
For comms teams: pressure-testing your own thinking before you go to real people.
Best for
- • Pressure-testing your own thinking before you go to real people
- • Generating hypotheses and objections you had not considered
- • Small teams with no research budget who need something better than guessing
Pricing
No free tier. Pay as you go: $0.12 per synthetic response (€0.12 including VAT), bought as prepaid packs from a minimum of $60 for 500 responses, shared across the workspace, with unused responses carried forward. Pro: $199 or €199 per seat a month (€1,990 a year), with 5,000 responses and 25 saved audiences per seat, pooled across the workspace; monthly responses reset. Enterprise: custom annual contracts that the vendor says start at €15,000 a year excluding VAT, adding SSO, calibration and validation work. API and MCP access are listed on the pay-as-you-go and Pro plans. US prices exclude sales tax; euro prices include VAT.
Verified 26 October 2026 against the vendor's own pricing and FAQ pages. The earlier Free, Individual ($39) and Team ($79 a seat) plans are no longer offered, and there is no trial. Cost per response has risen: pay as you go at $0.12 compares with about $0.08 on the old Individual plan, and Pro works out at about $0.04 a response if the 5,000 allowance is used. The enterprise tier with calibration and validation is a materially different proposition to the self-serve plans.
Pricing last verified Sep 2026 – check vendor site for current rates.
What works well
- + Self-serve on a card with pay-as-you-go pricing and no sales call, which nothing else in this category offers
- + Message and ad pretesting is a designed function, not a borrowed one
- + The vendor publishes a limits page and describes its own output as directional
Watch out for
- - No peer-reviewed independent validation exists for this or any commercial synthetic-audience platform
- - Independent research finds synthetic panels get the headline average roughly right while getting variance, subgroups and qualitative depth wrong
- - Simulated respondents are systematically agreeable, so they are biased against telling you a message will fail
- - Results shift with prompt wording and with model updates, so there is no version-locked instrument
- - Vendor accuracy benchmarks replicate published surveys the model may already have been trained on
When to choose this
Choose Minds to generate hypotheses, surface objections and pressure-test a message cheaply before you take it to real people, never as the evidence that a message is safe to publish.
Who should look elsewhere
If the decision matters, use real people. Listen Labs runs AI-moderated interviews with a real human panel and is the more defensible purchase for anything consequential. If you need enterprise-scale simulation with calibration behind it, Aaru and Evidenza operate at that end, at prices to match. And if you simply want a second opinion on a draft, a general assistant costs less and makes fewer claims about what audiences think.
Key features
- • Reusable AI personas built from your own documents, links and public data
- • Interviews, group questioning and structured questionnaires
- • Message, concept and advertising pretesting across nine languages
- • Aggregate distributions plus individual simulated responses
- • Published limits-of-simulation guidance, which is rare in this category
Governance & data
Governance information is based on publicly available vendor documentation. Verify with your vendor before procurement decisions.
Integrations
Available on
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