Is Refiner or Simplesat cheaper?

Refiner starts at $0 for 25 responses per month, with paid Essentials reported in the region of $79 to $99 per month at the smallest MAU band (free plan available). Simplesat starts at $109 per month billed annually, or $119 billed monthly (14 days trial).

Refiner vs Simplesat

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Refiner compared with Simplesat

Simplesat is service-delivery measurement with PSA integrations for managed service providers and response allowances from $119. Refiner is in-product measurement for software companies with unlimited responses. If your customers file tickets with your staff, Simplesat; if they use your software, Refiner.

Simplesat compared with Refiner

Refiner is MAU-priced with unlimited responses and event-triggered in-app microsurveys aimed at SaaS product teams. Simplesat is response-priced and helpdesk-triggered. If your customers interact with software, Refiner reaches them; if your customers interact with your staff, Simplesat does. The pricing models tell you who each is for.

Choose Refiner if

SaaS product, growth, and customer success teams that want to run several in-product surveys continuously against defined user segments, especially companies with enough active users that a response meter would force them to sample when they would rather ask everybody.

Choose Simplesat if

Managed service providers and IT service businesses running ConnectWise, Autotask, Halo PSA, Atera, or NinjaOne, and support teams on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, or Intercom with enough ticket volume that a 1,000 response monthly allowance is useful rather than excessive.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Refiner	Simplesat
Category	Retention	Retention
Starting price	$0 for 25 responses per month, with paid Essentials reported in the region of $79 to $99 per month at the smallest MAU band (free plan available)	$109 per month billed annually, or $119 billed monthly (14 days trial)
Pricing model	Freemium with monthly-active-user pricing and unlimited survey responses on all paid tiers, sold on a slider rather than as fixed list prices.	Tiered subscription metered by monthly responses received and account user seats, with a modest discount for annual billing.
Free plan	A free plan capped at 25 responses a month with the Essentials feature set, which is enough to evaluate and not enough to run a programme on.	No
Free trial	30 days with 100 responses and full feature access, no credit card required, extendable on request	14 days with Elite-level features, no credit card required
Best for	SaaS product, growth, and customer success teams that want to run several in-product surveys continuously against defined user segments, especially companies with enough active users that a response meter would force them to sample when they would rather ask everybody.	Managed service providers and IT service businesses running ConnectWise, Autotask, Halo PSA, Atera, or NinjaOne, and support teams on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, or Intercom with enough ticket volume that a 1,000 response monthly allowance is useful rather than excessive.
Setup time	Half a day to a day. Install the snippet or connect through Segment on Growth, pass user traits, define segments, and build the first survey. Slack alerting should be configured on day one, because it is what converts the data into behaviour.	A day for the standard path. Connect the PSA or helpdesk, build a survey, set the dispatch trigger, and roll out signature embedding to technicians. Signature deployment across a large team is the slowest step and is administrative rather than technical.
Learning curve	Low for building surveys, moderate for segmentation. The determining work is upstream: passing rich, accurate user traits at identification time, because segments and targeting can only be as good as the attributes you send.	Low to operate, moderate to run well. Configuring conditional logic and segmentation is straightforward; deciding how satisfaction data is used in technician reviews is the decision that determines whether the data stays honest.
Platforms	Web in-app surveys, Mobile, Email surveys, Standalone survey pages	Web application, Email surveys and signature embedding, Survey links, Helpdesk and PSA embedded experiences
Compliance	GDPR	GDPR, SOC 2 posture and enterprise SSO available on the Enterprise tier
Founded	2018	2016
Headquarters	Remote, based out of Europe	Seattle, Washington
Ownership	Privately held, no disclosed institutional funding	Privately held, no disclosed institutional funding

Strengths and limitations

Refiner

Strengths

Unlimited responses on every paid tier removes the incentive to under-survey, which is the quiet failure mode of every response-metered competitor.
Purpose-built for SaaS rather than adapted from a general survey tool, which shows in segmentation, user identification, and product event triggering.
All survey types and all channels, including mobile and email, are available from the entry tier rather than gated upward.
Google Sheets and BigQuery export on Essentials, so raw data is available to a team that wants to join sentiment with usage without paying for the top plan.

Limitations

It measures and never intervenes. No cancel flow, no dunning, no playbook, and no automated action of any kind on a subscription.
The single reporting dashboard on Essentials is a genuine constraint once more than one team is interested in the data.
Event tracking and the CRM and product analytics integrations, arguably the features that make the tool worth having, all sit behind the Growth tier.
Published prices are a slider rather than a fixed list, and third-party sources disagree on the entry figure, which makes budgeting harder than it should be.

Simplesat

Strengths

The MSP integration set across ConnectWise, Autotask, Halo PSA, Atera, and NinjaOne is genuinely differentiated and hard for competitors to replicate.
Generous response allowances starting at 1,000 a month, with unlimited surveys and unlimited surveyed agents on every tier.
Email signature embedding plus automatic dispatch on ticket close, covering both the highest-response and the most systematic distribution methods.
AI topic detection makes large comment volumes readable, which is where most satisfaction programmes quietly fail.

Limitations

It measures and never intervenes. Every improvement depends on somebody reading the data and picking up a phone.
Poor value below a few hundred responses a month; the entry plan is sized for volume that a small team will not generate.
No in-product surveys triggered by user behaviour, so software companies get a support signal only and learn nothing about how customers feel about features.
The annual discount is unusually small at roughly eight percent, weakening the case for a yearly commitment.

Pricing compared

Refiner

Freemium with monthly-active-user pricing and unlimited survey responses on all paid tiers, sold on a slider rather than as fixed list prices.

Free$0
EssentialsMAU-based, reported around $79 to $99 at the entry band
GrowthMAU-based, reported around $239 at the entry band
EnterpriseCustom, annual contract only

Refiner is best value for a SaaS company with a moderate active user base that wants to run continuous, segmented feedback rather than a periodic NPS blast. Unlimited responses is not a marketing detail, it is the thing that lets you actually operate a programme, and having Google Sheets and BigQuery export on the entry tier is genuinely generous. The frustrations are the tier boundaries rather than the price: one dashboard on Essentials is stingy, and event tracking plus the CRM and product analytics integrations, which are what make sentiment actionable, all sit on Growth. Budget for Growth if you intend the data to change anything, and treat Essentials as the tier for a team still proving the concept.

Simplesat

Tiered subscription metered by monthly responses received and account user seats, with a modest discount for annual billing.

Standard$119 monthly, $109 annually
Pro$249 monthly, $229 annually
Elite$499 monthly, $459 annually
EnterpriseCustom

Simplesat is priced for a business with real ticket volume, and within that context the value is strong: 1,000 responses, unlimited surveys, unlimited surveyed agents, and full integration and API access for $119 a month compares well against Nicereply's 100 responses at $59 or Survicate's 250 at $114. The MSP integration set is the genuine moat, because ConnectWise and Autotask coverage is not something a SaaS-focused survey vendor will build. Where it looks expensive is at the small end, where a team collecting fifty responses a month pays for a thousand, and at the top, where Elite at $499 lands in the same budget conversation as a customer success platform that actually drives action.

Editorial verdict on each

Refiner

Refiner is the in-product survey tool for teams that intend to survey seriously rather than occasionally. Pricing on active users with unlimited responses is the correct structure for a feedback programme, because it stops the meter from making your product decisions for you, and the SaaS-specific segmentation and identification work is clearly built by people who have run this themselves. The catch is the tier boundary: one dashboard on Essentials is thin, and event triggering plus the CRM and product analytics routing that make sentiment actionable all sit on Growth, so price the tier you will actually need rather than the one you will start on. As with every tool in this half of the category, remember what it is. Refiner will tell you which accounts are turning against you months before billing does, and it will not save a single one of them. That part is still your job.

Read the full Refiner profile

Simplesat

Simplesat is the right satisfaction tool for a business whose customers talk to people rather than to software. The PSA integrations across ConnectWise, Autotask, Halo PSA, Atera, and NinjaOne are a real moat, the response allowances are generous where competitors are stingy, and the client-ready exports turn satisfaction into something you can put in front of a client at renewal time. For a managed service provider it is close to the only automated churn signal available, since nothing in the billing layer can see an annual agreement quietly going sour. Two caveats. It is poor value below a few hundred responses a month, where Nicereply fits better, and it prevents nothing on its own. Buy it as the instrument, then make sure somebody is accountable for the phone call it triggers.

Read the full Simplesat profile

Refiner profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Simplesat last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.