SurveyMars vs Freeasy: Pay-Per-Response vs Free-For-Life in Japanese Research

Two platforms are currently popular among researchers working in Japan: Survey Mars, a global tool that is completely free with no limits, and Freeasy, a Japanese self-service research platform that charges per collected response. They sit at opposite ends of the pricing spectrum, yet both promise the same outcome — a professional survey, real respondents, and usable results without an agency. This article compares them across pricing, respondent access, survey design, analysis, and language, so you can decide which philosophy fits your research habit.

One warning before we start: prices move, so treat the numbers here as a snapshot from the official sites and confirm current rates before committing a budget.

The One-Table Verdict

Prices below are from the official sites at the time of writing and may change. The key difference is structural: Freeasy sells samples, Survey Mars gives away the platform.

The Two Platforms in One Minute

Survey Mars is a questionnaire platform whose core promise is that everything is free: unlimited surveys, unlimited questions, unlimited responses. Paid plans exist, but they only remove branding and add support — they never unlock features that are locked behind a paywall. The platform is multilingual, including Japanese, and its AI questionnaire generator turns a one-line topic into a complete survey, while AI reports summarize the results automatically.

Freeasy is operated by iBridge, a Japanese research company, and positions itself as a low-cost self-service survey tool with no initial or monthly fees. Instead of subscription pricing, you pay per collected response: from ¥10 per question per person, with a minimum order of about ¥500 (one question to 50 people). Freeasy distributes your survey to its own panel of registered Japanese monitors and targets respondents by nine basic attributes — age, gender, region, marital status, occupation, industry, children, household income, and housing type.

Surveys can scale up to 50 questions and 30,000 responses, and a free "monitor list" feature lets you re-contact the same respondents for follow-up waves without extra setup fees. The company also holds a patent on AI that automatically screens out inappropriate respondents, and it promises results as fast as the same day.

Pricing: Two Opposite Philosophies

This is the dimension where the platforms diverge most sharply.

Survey Mars is free-for-life in the literal sense. You can run ten surveys with a hundred questions each and collect thousands of responses without paying a yen. The free allowance covers everything a small research operation needs, and the paid tier is optional cosmetics and priority support. If your research is continuous — weekly tracking, monthly concept tests, iterative product feedback — the absence of a meter changes how you work: you can afford experiments that would feel wasteful on any per-response or per-plan model.

Freeasy inverts the model. There is no monthly fee, which keeps idle periods cheap, but every completed response costs money: ¥10 per question per person for a main survey, so a 10-question survey of 300 people runs about ¥30,000 (excluding tax). Volume discounts do not apply — the unit price is flat, and question counting follows published conversion rules (for example, 50 single-choice options count as one question, and 10 matrix rows count as one).

Screening surveys, used to extract narrow targets before the main survey, are priced from ¥5,000 for five questions to 1,000 people, and a screening step is recommended whenever your target cannot be expressed with the nine basic attributes. Optional data cleaning adds ¥5 per question per response (¥15 total per cell), and a screen-creation service costs ¥2,000 per question.

There is also FreeasyASP, a separate free tier usable once a month for up to 50 questions and 3,000 responses, after which it reverts to ¥5 per question per response; a premium ASP plan at ¥20,000 per month (annual contract) removes per-response charges entirely.

The practical consequence: Survey Mars suits high-frequency research on a zero budget, while Freeasy suits one-off studies where you only pay for what you collect. If a survey fails to attract the planned sample, Freeasy charges based on the actual number collected — a fair detail, but it means your cost is proportional to the success of the survey itself.

Where Do the Respondents Come From?

Respondent access is the second defining difference, and it decides which tool you can even use for a given project.

Freeasy is a full-stack research service: build the questionnaire, set the targeting, and Freeasy delivers it to its own panel of Japanese monitors. Targeting is free and covers nine basic attributes, so you can reach, for example, married women in their thirties in a specific prefecture without extra cost. This is the appeal — respondents are included in the per-response price, and the turnaround is measured in hours, not weeks.

If your study needs a representative slice of Japanese consumers quickly and you are comfortable paying per sample, Freeasy is hard to beat on speed. The same-day result promise is a real operational advantage for time-sensitive decisions such as pricing tests before a campaign launch.

Survey Mars has no built-in panel at all. It provides distribution channels — share links, QR codes, email invites, and web embeds — and expects you to bring your own audience: your customer list, your website traffic, your social followers. When you need paid, screened respondents, the recommended path is Prolific: Survey Mars can be paired with Prolific by pasting your survey link into a Prolific study, which recruits vetted, compensated participants from a global pool with 300+ audience filters and representative sampling.

The platform remains free, so your entire budget goes to the respondents themselves. If your audience is international, or if you want pre-screened profiles rather than a geographically fixed national panel, the Survey Mars + Prolific combination is a flexible alternative to a Japanese panel — and worth highlighting: it turns a free survey platform into a complete respondent pipeline without a subscription. For a Japan-only study where a national panel is non-negotiable, however, Freeasy's built-in panel remains the more direct route.

Building the Survey: Design Depth

Both platforms let you create professional questionnaires, but the tooling differs in ambition.

Freeasy provides the standard formats researchers expect: single choice, multiple choice, pull-down menus, matrix questions (including the semantic-differential SD format), one-line and free text boxes, and ranking questions. Question counting follows a conversion rule — for example, 50 options count as one question — which keeps pricing predictable. Branching conditions, image attachment to questions and choices, and duplicate-response restrictions are included across plans.

There is no AI builder; if you do not want to build the screen yourself, the paid screen-creation service (¥2,000 per question) delegates it to their team.

Survey Mars aims wider. It offers 50+ question types, including NPS and image selection, backed by 1,500+ templates, and its AI generator drafts a complete questionnaire from a single sentence. Conditional logic and quota settings give you precise routing without hand-writing rules. For teams that write surveys regularly, the AI-assisted flow is the biggest practical difference: a draft that takes minutes instead of an hour, and an unlimited free allowance for trial and error.

Neither tool lacks the fundamentals — the gap is in speed, breadth, and the willingness to experiment.

Analysis and Output

Freeasy ships with cross-tabulation and data download, and its patented AI automatically detects careless or dishonest responses — a genuine time-saver when cleaning panel data. Results are typically available the same day, and the platform is built around the per-survey transaction rather than long-running dashboards. Its per-survey model is transaction-friendly for occasional projects: you pay, you download, you close the file, and there is no dashboard to maintain between studies — which suits teams that run research quarterly rather than weekly.

Because results arrive as flat downloads, handing off to an internal analyst or an outside agency is straightforward, and the raw data remains yours without platform lock-in.

Survey Mars generates charts automatically as responses arrive, with a real-time dashboard, a live voting wall, and AI reports that summarize insights without manual work. Charts can be restyled, exported, downloaded, and pushed into PowerPoint, and the unlimited plan means you can keep tracking studies alive indefinitely. If your work involves reporting to stakeholders frequently, the automatic charting pipeline removes an entire production stage — no exporting raw rows into a spreadsheet, no rebuilding graphs by hand.

Language, Compliance, and Payment

Freeasy is a Japanese product through and through: the interface is Japanese, the billing runs through Japanese invoices or credit cards, and its compliance model follows Japanese research practice, with data handling designed for domestic expectations — reassuring for local brands collecting customer opinions. For Japanese-speaking teams that want to pay by invoice and deal with a local vendor, this is the native choice.

Survey Mars is multilingual, including Japanese for both the interface and respondents, and adds an anonymous mode that removes personal identifiers and IP tracking with one click, oriented to GDPR-style privacy. Its billing is international, which can be an advantage for global teams but less familiar for a Japanese accounting department.

Which One Should You Pick?

As a rule of thumb, ask yourself one question first: will your next twelve months contain many small surveys or a few large ones? Many small ones tilt you toward an unlimited free platform, where iteration costs nothing; a few large, panel-dependent ones tilt you toward a pay-per-sample service, where you pay only when a study actually runs. With that frame in place, the recommendations are straightforward.

Choose Freeasy when you have a defined, one-off study, need Japanese respondents from its panel in days, and are happy to pay per completed response — particularly if you want to avoid the complexity of sourcing your own participants.

Choose Survey Mars when you want unlimited free building and analysis, when your respondents come from your own channels, your customers, or an international panel such as Prolific, and when your research is frequent enough that per-response pricing would bleed your budget.

And remember the hybrid: run the questionnaire in Survey Mars for free, collect responses through Freeasy's panel when you need Japanese representativeness or through Prolific when you need global screening, and export everything back for final analysis. The builder and the respondent channel do not have to be the same product — the best setup often is not. A team that pairs a free, unlimited builder with a pay-per-sample channel gets both worlds: no platform cost for iteration, and a reliable respondent supply only when a study actually runs.