Estimating Costs, Getting Quotes

[Katherine Martin]

Hi all,

I've been following the videos, discussions, etc. with interest because I'm currently writing a grant application and I'm hoping to include as part of it a comparison of lab-based results and online-experiment results for some of the same tasks (I do second language literacy research and would love to access non-native speaker participants from a wide range of different first languages - not always feasible on my campus). 

However, one challenge I haven't seen addressed (forgive me if I missed it!) is trying to estimate costs. I know that jsPsych itself is free, and that it's pretty standard to pay participants in many cases (I'm planning to, so that's accounted for), but what about the costs of hosting the study online? This is a technical piece of the puzzle that I haven't figured out yet, but want to make sure to include in my grant considerations. But, I'm having trouble figuring out where to begin with this question, as I am very new to this whole area (unfamiliar with servers, what would be required, etc. etc.).

Thanks much,

Katherine

[Josh de Leeuw]

Hi Katherine,

Hosting a relatively low traffic study, like one where you are primarily recruiting paid participants, is pretty cheap. Depending on how much time you want to put into saving money, monthly costs for a cloud-based system could be anywhere from $0-20. 

If you are running an online laboratory with variable traffic (like Josh Hartshorne's gameswithwords.org) then it can cost significantly more because you need to be able to handle sudden surges where tens of thousands of people are visiting the site in a short period of time. Josh can chime in here about those costs.

Josh

[Stephane Dufau]

Hello,

For a server of 10+ active online tests hosted on DigitalOcean, 40 to 60 EUR a month (price depending on the number of virtual CPU and RAM, increased when an experiment is about to be launched). 

Then the workforce, we have ~1 full time engineer to handle the general website (presentation of experiments, database, XP writing). 

In France, this would cost 60000 EUR a year. 

The other option we offer in our department is Labvanced, 3000 EUR for a year licence. 

Stéphane Dufau

ilcb-online-test.net

Le 21 juil. 2020 à 23:33, Josh de Leeuw <josh.d...@gmail.com> a écrit :



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[Jon Peirce]

You can use PsychoPy with Pavlovia for a cost of £0.20 per participant or £1500 for unlimited participants for your entire institution.

Jon

[Kristian Lange]

Another option is JATOS (jatos.org) that simplifies the server setup for you, although you still have to install JATOS on some kind of server: http://www.jatos.org/Bring-your-JATOS-online.html. And for the cost: If you host it in the cloud: I'd expect 10-30 USD per month - although I'd always prefer an institutional server for data privacy reasons.

You can also use https://experiments.jatos.org/ for free during COVID-19 (it's in the cloud).

Disclaimer: I'm the programmer behind JATOS.

Best,

Kristian