Direct answer: There is no honest universal price for patient recruitment, because cost is driven by your protocol: how rare the eligible patient is, how tight the criteria are, how many competing trials want the same people, and where your sites sit. What you can compare across any vendor is the pricing model (what you pay FOR) and the only number that ultimately matters: cost per enrolled patient, after screen fails and unconverted referrals are counted. This guide explains both, and why the cheapest-looking quote is often the most expensive one.

The five pricing models, and what you’re really buying

1. Media-based (you pay for reach)

You fund an advertising budget plus a management fee. You’re buying impressions and clicks; everything after the click is your problem. Cheapest per unit, most expensive per surprise.

2. Per referral (you pay for hand-raisers)

A fixed price for each patient who completes some qualification step. Everything turns on how “referral” is defined. A lightly screened referral is mostly a click with paperwork; sites then spend their scarcest hours discovering that.

3. Per completed screen (you pay for process)

Pricing moves closer to the patient, but the vendor is still indifferent to whether screens convert to consents. The failure cost stays with you and your sites.

4. Per randomization with base fees (shared risk)

A retainer or setup fee plus per-randomized-patient pricing. Better aligned; read the fine print on how much sits in the fixed portion, because that’s the part that gets paid whether enrollment happens or not.

5. Success-based (you pay for enrolled patients, full stop)

Our model. The fee attaches to enrolled patients only, so the quoted number and the real number are the same number, and the waste (unconverted referrals, screen fails, ghosted handoffs) is the vendor’s cost, not yours. The unit price reads higher than a referral price. It should: it includes everything the referral price leaves out.

What actually drives your cost

• Prevalence: how rare the eligible patient is in the general population
• Criteria tightness: every exclusion multiplies the people you must reach to find one who qualifies
• Competition: how many other trials are recruiting your patients right now
• Site geography: patients who qualify but can’t reach a site cost money and enroll nobody
• Site capacity: screening slots, coordinator bandwidth, and scheduling speed set the funnel’s ceiling

Any quote produced before a vendor has studied these against your actual protocol is a guess wearing a spreadsheet.

How to compare quotes without getting fooled

Convert every quote to the same unit: expected cost per enrolled patient. Take the vendor’s pricing, apply their own claimed conversion rates from what you’re paying for down to a randomized patient, and add what unconverted volume will cost your sites in screening time. Do that once and the referral-priced quote and the success-priced quote become directly comparable, usually with a different winner than the sticker prices suggested.

Then add the number nobody puts in the spreadsheet: the cost of missing. Nearly 85% of interventional trials miss their enrollment milestones, and RFP responses overpromise timelines by 47% on average. Every month of delay carries site fees, CRO burn, staff time, and your therapy reaching patients later. Recruitment pricing is small next to that. Our sponsor programs have averaged $19.2M in savings, mostly by finishing 57 days ahead of plan.

Why we don’t publish our prices, honestly

Because a real quote requires your protocol, and a price published without one would be marketing, not information. What we publish instead is the structure: you pay for enrolled patients, the number is agreed before we start, and until we hit it, the risk is ours. Bring us a protocol and you’ll get a real number against it.

Frequently asked questions