Terms of service

These terms are an agreement between you and ALPHAKHOJ LLP (Hyderabad, Telangana, India), which operates VibeMyExpt. By creating an account you accept them.

You must be 18 or over to hold an account, give accurate details, and keep your credentials to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think it has been compromised.

If you run studies here, you are responsible for them. That means:

• Obtaining ethics or IRB approval where your institution requires it, before you collect data.
• Writing a consent form that accurately describes what you collect, why, how long you keep it, and who to contact. If your consent form promises participants they can withdraw, honour it.
• Collecting only the personal data your research question actually needs. As controller this is your legal duty, not just our preference, and a field you cannot justify should not be there.
• Following our acceptable use policy, in particular the rules on what you may ask participants for.
• Acting as data controller for what your study collects. We are your processor — see the data processing agreement, which forms part of these terms where data protection law applies to you.
• Treating participants fairly: paying promised rewards, not deceiving them beyond what your ethics approval permits, and debriefing where required.

Participation is voluntary and you can stop at any time by closing the tab. Give honest answers and do not use automated tools to complete studies — a researcher may withhold payment for submissions that are clearly not genuine, and repeated abuse can cost you your account.

Where a study offers payment, the researcher owes the reward for approved submissions. Publishing a study is the researcher's offer to contract with participants on the study's terms; by taking part and submitting, you accept that offer. We conclude and administer that agreement as the researcher's payment agent: we collect the reward funds from the researcher and pay you when the submission is approved. You do not need to invoice the researcher or us — the payout is made through the platform.

Submissions are normally approved on their own once the study's review window passes. The one exception is a session where no responses reached us at all: there is nothing recorded to pay for, so instead of approving on a timer we ask the researcher to decide. That is not a refusal, and it is not automatic rejection — they can approve it, which is what should happen when the cause was a study that was not saving answers or an upload that failed rather than anything you did. You can ask us about a reward that is waiting at any time.

We may also hold a withdrawal while we check it, and tell you when we do. That can happen on your first withdrawal, where the payout details you gave are also being used by another account, or where the pattern of requests suggests one person is running several accounts. A held withdrawal is released or refused by a person, not by a rule, and holding it does not remove the money from your balance.

You keep ownership of the experiments, stimuli and data you bring or create. You grant us only the licence we need to host and process them so the service works. We do not use your experiment code or your participants' responses to train AI models.

If you publish an experiment to the public template gallery, you are choosing to let others copy and adapt it.

AI-generated experiment code and analysis are suggestions, not verified work. You are responsible for reviewing them before they reach participants or a paper. Check that a generated experiment does what you intend, and that a generated analysis is statistically sound. What the AI features send to our providers is set out in the privacy policy.

AI transparency (EU AI Act Article 50). The experiment builder and the analysis assistant are AI systems, and are labelled as such wherever they appear — you are always told when you are interacting with a model rather than a person. Any code, text or analysis they produce is machine-generated output and should be treated as a draft you review, not a finished result. We build on general-purpose models supplied by the providers named in the privacy policy; we do not train our own models on your work or on your participants' responses.

Participants never interact with an AI system while taking a study. What they see is the experiment the researcher published.

AI usage is a supply from us to you and is subject to applicable GST.

For paid studies, you fund a participant-reward budget in your workspace balance. Publishing a study is your offer to contract with each participant who completes it on that study's terms. You authorise us to conclude and administer those agreements and to pay participants their rewards at the value you set, without markup. We are the principal in that supply, not a marketplace passing your money through: what you pay to fund a study, participant rewards and our platform service fee alike, is consideration for our service to you, and GST applies to the full amount.

When you add funds you receive an itemized tax invoice showing participant rewards, the platform service fee, and GST on both. Per-study receipts show how those funds were reserved for a given study (title, project ID, and optional IRB / PO / grant references). The platform fee and its GST are non-refundable once charged. Unused reward funds stay in your workspace for other studies when you cancel or unpublish a study; we do not offer an automatic refund to your original payment method. Documents are retained as long as the law requires.

We show you data-quality signals alongside each submission — response patterns, timing, how long the session ran. They are information, not decisions: they never reject a participant and never withhold a reward, and Approve and Reject remain yours alone. The one thing we do change is that a session which recorded no responses at all does not approve on a timer; it waits for you, and its reward funds stay reserved for your study meanwhile. Separately, we may hold a participant's withdrawal of rewards already earned where we suspect the same person is being paid through several accounts.

We work to keep the service running but do not promise uninterrupted availability, and we may occasionally need to take it down for maintenance. If you are running a time-sensitive study, plan for that. Keep your own copy of data you cannot afford to lose — you can export at any time.

You can delete your account at any time from account settings. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms or the acceptable use policy, or where continuing would put participants at risk. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you first and give you a chance to export your data.

The service is provided as-is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost data where you had the ability to export it, or the research conclusions you draw. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where liability is capped, it is capped at what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

We may update these terms; material changes will be notified by email or in the product, and the date above will change. These terms are governed by the laws of India, with the courts of Hyderabad, Telangana having jurisdiction — without affecting any mandatory consumer or data protection rights you have where you live.

Questions: [email protected].