# Refiner

> Refiner is an in-product survey platform built specifically for SaaS and digital products. It runs NPS, CSAT, CES, product-market-fit, and custom microsurveys inside web and mobile apps, on email, and on standalone survey pages, targeted by user attributes, segments, and product events. Its distinguishing commercial choice is pricing on monthly active users with unlimited survey responses, which removes the incentive to under-ask that response-metered competitors create. It is a sentiment tool in the retention stack: it surfaces the users and accounts turning against you well before billing notices, and it never touches a subscription.

- Category: Retention & Churn Prevention (https://saastracker.org/categories/customer-retention)
- Website: https://refiner.io
- 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: 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.
- Free trial: 30 days with 100 responses and full feature access, no credit card required, extendable on request
- Founded: 2018, HQ: Remote, based out of Europe, Ownership: Privately held, no disclosed institutional funding
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/refiner

## Overview

Every response-metered survey tool creates the same perverse incentive. You want more feedback, and every additional answer costs money, so you sample conservatively, cap your surveys, and end up with data too thin to segment. Refiner prices on monthly active users instead and makes responses unlimited, which changes the behaviour: you can survey a small segment aggressively, run several surveys in parallel, and keep a permanent always-on NPS running without watching a meter.

The company was founded in 2018 by Moritz Dausinger after experimenting with in-app microsurveys in an earlier venture, and it operates as a small remote team based out of Europe. It is deliberately narrow: this is not a general research platform or a form builder, and the product pages talk about SaaS, fintech, edtech, and marketplace product teams rather than about survey design. That focus shows up in the details, particularly in how user segmentation and event triggering work.

The tier structure follows capability rather than volume. Essentials covers all survey types across web, mobile, email, and survey pages, with twenty simultaneously published surveys, up to twenty user segments, one reporting dashboard, and the lighter integrations: Slack, Teams, email, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and BigQuery. Growth raises that to fifty published surveys and sixty segments, adds unlimited dashboards, event tracking, AI-powered translations, and the integrations that matter for a real go-to-market stack: Segment, RudderStack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Amplitude, and Mixpanel. Enterprise adds unlimited everything, SSO, granular access, and full white-labelling on an annual contract.

Two things to be clear about before buying. The published pricing is a monthly active user slider rather than a fixed list, with third-party sources reporting an entry point in the region of $79 to $99 a month for the smallest Essentials band and around $239 for Growth, so confirm your own number against the live calculator rather than a comparison article. And the amplitude of the free offer is smaller than it looks: a free plan capped at twenty five responses a month alongside a thirty day trial with a hundred responses is enough to evaluate, not enough to run.

## How it works

1. You install Refiner in your product. There is a JavaScript snippet for web apps, mobile support, and identity can arrive through Segment or RudderStack on the Growth tier if you already pipe user data through a customer data platform.

2. You identify users and pass traits: plan, tenure, role, company, usage counters, lifecycle stage, or anything else that describes them. Those traits build segments, and segments are what everything else targets.

3. You build a survey and choose when it fires. That can be a segment membership rule, a page or route, a manual trigger, or, on the Growth tier, a product event, which is what lets you ask about a workflow immediately after somebody completes it.

4. Responses accumulate without a meter running. They appear on reporting dashboards, attach to the identified user, and route outward to Slack or Teams for immediate alerting, to HubSpot or Salesforce so scores land on the customer record, to Amplitude or Mixpanel so sentiment can be analysed alongside behaviour, and to Google Sheets or BigQuery for teams that want the raw data.

## 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.

## Not the right fit for

- Support teams wanting per-ticket CSAT attributed to individual agents. There are no helpdesk integrations of the kind Nicereply and Simplesat are built around; Refiner fires from product context, not ticket closures.
- Businesses whose customers never log into software. If your relationship is delivered by people, there is no surface for an in-app microsurvey to appear on.
- Anyone expecting a survey tool to reduce churn. It produces a signal earlier and at higher volume than billing data ever will, and the entire response remains a human process.
- Companies with very few monthly active users but heavy survey needs. MAU pricing punishes a small high-touch business, which is exactly the shape that response-metered tools serve better.
- Buyers who need a large, well-capitalised vendor. This is a small remote European team with no disclosed institutional funding, which is a stability profile some procurement processes will not accept.

## Features

### Survey types and formats

The instruments, all available from the entry tier.

- **NPS**: Relationship-level loyalty, run continuously against segments rather than as an annual blast, which is what makes the trend line meaningful.
- **CSAT**: Satisfaction with a specific experience, most useful when fired immediately after the workflow you are asking about.
- **CES**: Customer Effort Score, the metric that exposes friction a satisfaction question is too polite to reveal, and the better churn predictor of the two.
- **Product-market-fit survey**: The disappointment-based instrument, which measures something genuinely different from satisfaction and is the most valuable of the set for an early-stage product.
- **Custom microsurveys**: Short custom questionnaires for anything the standard instruments do not cover, kept deliberately brief because in-product surveys that run long are simply dismissed.
- **Multiple survey formats**: Web in-app, mobile, email, and standalone survey pages, all included on Essentials rather than gated behind higher tiers.

### Targeting and segmentation

The part built for SaaS specifically, and the reason to choose this over a general survey tool.

- **User segments**: Up to twenty segments on Essentials and sixty on Growth, built from the traits you pass in, so a trial user, a power admin, and a lapsing account are treated as different populations.
- **Attribute-based targeting**: Survey by plan, tenure, role, company size, usage level, or any custom trait, which is how you get a segment-specific answer instead of an aggregate mood reading.
- **Event tracking**: A Growth-tier capability that lets a survey fire after a specific product action, turning a general NPS programme into targeted measurement of individual workflows.
- **Simultaneously published surveys**: Twenty on Essentials, fifty on Growth, and unlimited on Enterprise, which is the practical constraint on how many parallel programmes you can run.
- **Response identification**: Answers attach to the identified user and their traits, so a detractor is a named account you can act on rather than an anonymous data point.
- **AI-powered translations**: Growth-tier translation of surveys, which matters for products with a genuinely international user base where English-only surveys skew the sample.

### Reporting and dashboards

Turning unlimited responses into something readable.

- **Reporting dashboards**: One on Essentials and unlimited on Growth, which is a real constraint if several teams want their own view of different programmes.
- **Segment comparison**: Compare scores across plans, cohorts, and traits, which is how you find that one segment is generating a disproportionate share of your detractors.
- **Trend tracking**: Scores over time per survey and segment, made more reliable by unlimited responses since you are not sampling to save money.
- **Response-level detail**: Individual responses with their user context, so a low score can be traced to a specific account and their recent product behaviour.
- **Raw data export**: Google Sheets and BigQuery destinations on Essentials for teams that want to join sentiment with usage and revenue in their own warehouse.

### Integrations

Where the tier boundary genuinely bites.

- **Slack and Microsoft Teams**: Detractor alerting into the channels your team watches, available from Essentials, and the single most important integration for making the data produce action.
- **Zapier and Make**: General automation on Essentials, covering the workflows the native connectors do not.
- **Google Sheets and BigQuery**: Data destinations on the entry tier, which is unusually generous since most competitors reserve warehouse export for higher plans.
- **Segment and RudderStack**: Customer data platform integration on Growth, letting identity and events arrive through infrastructure you already run rather than a separate instrumentation effort.
- **HubSpot and Salesforce**: CRM routing on Growth, so satisfaction scores appear on the account record a CSM or account executive actually looks at before a renewal conversation.
- **Amplitude and Mixpanel**: Product analytics routing on Growth, which is the integration that lets you ask whether detractors behave differently in the product rather than only that they feel differently.

### Administration and branding

What the top tier adds, and what it costs.

- **Full white-labelling**: Enterprise-only, removing all Refiner branding for companies that need the survey to be indistinguishable from their own product.
- **SSO and granular access**: Enterprise-only, along with unlimited team members, which is the usual gate for a buyer with a formal security review.
- **Custom MAU and pageview limits**: Negotiated on Enterprise rather than taken from the standard slider, on an annual contract.
- **Concierge service and consulting**: A dedicated support representative and advisory help on Enterprise, which is where the vendor's small team becomes a personal relationship rather than a documentation site.

## Use cases

- **SaaS growth team running several parallel programmes**: They want an always-on NPS, a CSAT after onboarding, and a CES after the reporting workflow, but their response-metered tool makes running all three at once financially painful. Outcome: Unlimited responses under MAU pricing lets all three run continuously, and twenty published surveys on Essentials is more parallel capacity than most teams will use.
- **Product manager investigating a specific workflow**: A newly redesigned feature is suspected of driving churn, but usage data alone cannot distinguish between a confusing interface and a feature nobody wants. Outcome: A Growth-tier event-triggered CES fired immediately after the workflow gives a direct effort score from the exact users who just completed it, which no periodic survey could produce.
- **Customer success team with sentiment invisible in the CRM**: NPS lives in a survey tool nobody logs into, so renewal conversations happen without anybody knowing the account's last three scores. Outcome: HubSpot or Salesforce routing on Growth puts scores on the account record, and Slack alerts on detractors turn a passive dataset into a same-day follow-up.
- **International SaaS with a skewed feedback sample**: Surveys run in English only, so responses over-represent the English-speaking user base and the product roadmap follows a distorted signal. Outcome: AI-powered translations on the Growth tier let surveys reach the whole user base in their own language, which changes both the response rate and, usually, the conclusions.

## Pricing

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 per month. 25 responses per month; Essentials features; All survey types; No credit card required. Evaluation-sized rather than usable long term, which is a fair trade for a tool whose paid model is unlimited responses.
- **Essentials**: MAU-based, reported around $79 to $99 at the entry band per month. Unlimited survey responses; All survey types across web, mobile, email, and survey pages; 20 simultaneously published surveys and up to 20 segments; 1 reporting dashboard; Slack, Teams, email, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and BigQuery. Confirm the exact figure on the live slider for your own MAU count; published third-party numbers vary and should not be treated as a quote.
- **Growth**: MAU-based, reported around $239 at the entry band per month. Everything in Essentials; 50 published surveys and up to 60 segments; Event tracking and AI-powered translations; Unlimited reporting dashboards; Segment, RudderStack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Amplitude, and Mixpanel. The integration list is the real reason to move up. Event triggering and CRM routing are what make sentiment operational rather than decorative.
- **Enterprise**: Custom, annual contract only quoted. Unlimited published surveys and custom MAU limits; Unlimited team members with SSO and granular access; Full white-labelling; Dedicated support representative and consulting.

Billing notes:

- Unlimited responses on every paid tier is the structural difference from SatisMeter, Survicate, and Nicereply. You pay for reach, not for answers, so there is no reason to sample defensively.
- MAU is defined as users who logged into your app in the last thirty days for in-product surveys, so your bill tracks product usage rather than survey activity.
- Annual billing carries roughly a seventeen percent discount, and payment is by card in dollars, euros, or pounds, with bank transfer and invoicing available on Growth and Enterprise annual plans.
- There is no lock-in contract on the self-serve tiers; plans can be changed or cancelled at any time. Enterprise is annual only.
- MAU pricing inverts the usual value calculation. A high-touch B2B company with three hundred users and heavy survey needs does very well here; a consumer product with a million monthly users and modest survey needs does not.

Value assessment: 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.

## 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.
- Growth-tier integrations with Segment, RudderStack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Amplitude, and Mixpanel make sentiment operational inside the systems teams already use.
- A thirty day trial with a hundred responses, extendable on request, plus no lock-in contract on self-serve plans.

## 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.
- MAU pricing is poor value for high-volume consumer products with modest survey needs, where response metering would cost far less.
- Small remote team with no disclosed institutional funding, which is a stability question for any buyer with a formal vendor review process.
- No helpdesk integrations, so support quality measurement needs a separate tool entirely.

## Comparisons

- **Refiner vs SatisMeter**: The closest match in this batch, and the pricing model decides it. SatisMeter meters responses with a free plan at twenty five a month and $199 for a thousand; Refiner meters monthly active users and makes responses unlimited. If you want to survey continuously across many segments, Refiner removes the meter that would otherwise stop you. If your active user base is large but your survey needs are small, SatisMeter is cheaper.
- **Refiner vs Nicereply**: Different signal entirely. Nicereply attaches CSAT and CES to closed support tickets and reports by agent, integrating with Zendesk, Front, and Help Scout. Refiner fires inside the product against user segments and events. A support leader buys Nicereply, a product team buys Refiner, and neither answers the other's question.
- **Refiner vs 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.
- **Refiner vs Retently**: Retently is the broader customer experience platform, running NPS, CSAT, and CES campaigns with automation across the whole customer base including email and offline channels. Refiner is tighter, more product-native, and better at segment-level in-app targeting. Buy Retently for a company-wide sentiment programme, Refiner to instrument a SaaS product properly.
- **Refiner vs Akita**: Akita takes signals and turns them into customer success playbooks so a person intervenes before a renewal is lost, from $49 a month. Refiner produces one of the highest-quality signals to feed it. The natural sequence for a B2B SaaS is to buy the tool that makes someone act first, then add the instrument that tells them who to act on.
- **Refiner vs Churnkey**: Churnkey intercepts cancellations and retries failed cards, producing attributable saved revenue from the first month, at a flat $250. Refiner tells you months earlier why customers are drifting. Both are worth having, but if budget forces an order, intervention first and early warning second, because a signal with nobody acting on it is worth nothing.

## Implementation

- 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.
- 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.
- Onboarding: Entirely self-serve on Free, Essentials, and Growth, with a thirty day trial and no credit card required. Enterprise involves a sales conversation, an annual contract, and a dedicated support representative.
- Migration: Historical scores from another tool do not import, so expect a discontinuity in the trend. Be cautious comparing an old email NPS score with a new in-app one, because you are sampling a different population and the number will move for reasons that have nothing to do with your customers' feelings.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web in-app surveys, Mobile, Email surveys, Standalone survey pages
- API: API and webhook access alongside native integrations, with Segment and RudderStack available on the Growth tier for identity and event ingestion.
- Compliance: GDPR
- Data residency: Not published as a customer-selectable option on self-serve tiers; the vendor is a European company.
- SSO: Enterprise tier only, alongside granular access controls and unlimited team members.
- Security notes: The product stores the user traits you pass for targeting purposes, so send the attributes you need for segmentation rather than everything you have. It has no billing access and cannot alter subscriptions, which makes it a low-risk integration compared with cancel flow tools.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, In-app support, Dedicated support representative on Enterprise
- Documentation: Documentation covering installation, user identification, segments, targeting, billing definitions including how MAU is counted, and the integration set.
- Community: No large public forum; the vendor publishes a blog on SaaS feedback and growth practice.

## Company

- Founded: 2018
- Founders: Moritz Dausinger
- Headquarters: Remote, based out of Europe
- Ownership: Privately held, no disclosed institutional funding
- Employees: Small remote team, not disclosed
- Funding: No publicly disclosed venture funding; the company presents itself as a small independent remote team.

Timeline:

- 2018: Founded by Moritz Dausinger after experimenting with in-app microsurveys in an earlier venture, aimed specifically at SaaS user profiling.
- 2021: Reports serving hundreds of customers across SaaS, fintech, edtech, and marketplace businesses, with in-app, email, and link survey formats.
- 2023: Settles on monthly-active-user pricing with unlimited responses, differentiating from the response-metered model used across the category.
- 2025: Adds event tracking, AI-powered translations, and deeper integrations with Segment, RudderStack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Amplitude, and Mixpanel on the Growth tier.
- 2026: Operates a free plan at 25 responses a month, a 30 day trial with 100 responses, and MAU-based Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise tiers.

## Integrations

Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Segment (Growth), RudderStack (Growth), HubSpot (Growth), Salesforce (Growth), Amplitude (Growth), Mixpanel (Growth)

## FAQ

### What is Refiner?

Refiner is an in-product survey platform for SaaS and digital products. It runs NPS, CSAT, CES, product-market-fit, and custom microsurveys inside web and mobile apps, on email, and on survey pages, targeted by user attributes, segments, and product events, with responses routed to Slack, CRMs, and product analytics tools.

### Why is this in a retention category rather than under forms and surveys?

Because it is sold as a customer sentiment instrument for SaaS teams, not as a form builder. There is no general form designer or lead capture. It measures customer experience metrics against identified users inside a product, which makes it an early warning layer in a churn programme.

### How much does Refiner cost?

There is a free plan with 25 responses a month and a 30 day trial with 100 responses. Paid plans are priced on monthly active users with unlimited responses, sold through a slider rather than fixed list prices. Third-party sources report Essentials starting in the region of $79 to $99 a month and Growth around $239 at the entry band; confirm on the live calculator for your own user count.

### What does unlimited responses actually change?

It removes the reason to under-ask. Response-metered tools push you to sample conservatively and run one survey at a time, which produces data too thin to segment. With MAU pricing you can keep an always-on NPS, an onboarding CSAT, and a workflow CES all running without watching a meter, which is the difference between a programme and a periodic exercise.

### What is gated behind the Growth tier?

Event tracking, AI-powered translations, unlimited dashboards, fifty published surveys, sixty segments, and the integrations that matter most: Segment, RudderStack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Amplitude, and Mixpanel. If you intend the sentiment data to reach a CRM or be analysed against product behaviour, budget for Growth rather than Essentials.

### How much engineering work does installation need?

Half a day to a day. A JavaScript snippet for web, mobile support, or a Segment connection on Growth. The substantive work is passing accurate user traits at identification, because segmentation and targeting are only as good as the attributes you send.

### Does Refiner prevent churn?

No. It gives you an earlier and much broader signal than billing data, reaching users who would never contact support and would simply lapse. Acting on that signal is entirely a human process. If your churn is failed cards or one-click cancellation, tools like Churnkey or Stunning attack it directly and Refiner does not.

### Can it reach customers on annual invoiced contracts?

Yes, as long as their users log into your product. That is a real advantage over cancel flow and dunning tools, which cannot touch an annual invoiced account at all. A declining CES across the users at an account is often the only automated warning available before a renewal conversation goes badly.

### How does MAU pricing compare with response pricing?

It depends on the ratio between your user base and your survey appetite. A B2B SaaS with a few thousand active users that wants continuous feedback does very well under MAU pricing. A consumer product with a million monthly users and one annual NPS run does far better on a response meter, where SatisMeter or Survicate would cost a fraction of the price.

### Who is behind Refiner and how stable is it?

It was founded in 2018 by Moritz Dausinger and operates as a small remote team based out of Europe with no disclosed institutional funding. That means eight years of operation and no venture clock, but also a small team, which is worth weighing if your procurement process cares about vendor scale.

## Editorial verdict

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.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology