When you try to prove the value of your design decisions, you often hit a wall. To back up your designs confidently, you need robust usability research.
But conducting that research yourself for every minor UI change or UX decision is expensive and time-consuming.
Baymard’s pre-validated research gives teams like yours access to established UX best practices in an instant, which helps you ship designs faster, more confidently, and protects your costs by reducing the research overheads.
To demonstrate that value, we’ve created a calculator that shows how a Baymard subscription helps you move faster and keep your UX research costs down.
Note: This calculator demonstrates initial cost savings based on consuming Baymard’s insights versus running new user research yourself. Baymard users typically see further value realizations from implementing those insights and improving website user experience and conversion rates.
The Hidden Cost of Your In-House User Research
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking: “We can just replicate this research in-house for less cost.”
But when you try to build everything from scratch without access to pre-validated UX insights, your team quickly runs into three major roadblocks:
- You move slower: Your product teams lose momentum and your project timelines stretch out because you are forced to conduct research from scratch
- You risk harming conversions: When timelines get tight, you risk making critical UX decisions based on gut feelings, which can ultimately harm your conversion rates
- You spend more money: To keep up with research demands, you end up spending vastly more on external agency services or expanding your internal headcount just to conduct baseline testing
What It Actually Costs You to Produce a UX Insight
To protect your resources, you need to shift the focus away from what a research subscription costs, and instead look at how much you save by having instant access to prevalidated, ready-to-go UX research.
Let’s look at the math. To produce a single standard moderated usability study with 15 participants, your team will spend an average of 55 hours of labor to plan, execute, and analyze it.
When you factor in regional hourly labor rates and participant incentives (around $85 per person in the UK and Europe; $100 per person in the US), the true cost of generating your own insights becomes clear:
To generate a single UX insight, the cost is $362 in the US, and $262 in the UK and Europe.
Note: These calculations focus strictly on your cost of producing the research itself (Labor Hours × Cost Per Hour + Incentives, divided by an average of 15 insights generated per study). This specific calculation does not address the value of implementing the insights (like your conversion rate uplift), but focuses entirely on what you save by bypassing bespoke research.
What Cost Savings Do Key Ecommerce Industries See?
Our calculator shows that the average ecommerce business (across 35+ industries) realizes up to 715% in net savings with a Baymard subscription, compared to the equivalent in-house research cost.
Here are the average number of insights consumed across the average ecommerce site from several key industries:
- Retail ~60 unique insights consumed per year
- Apparel & Fashion ~53 unique insights consumed per year
- Automotive ~44 unique insights consumed per year
- Finance ~49 unique insights consumed per year
- Health & Wellness ~48 unique insights consumed per year
- Telco ~55 unique insights consumed per year
- Travel ~52 unique insights consumed per year
Discover Your Tailored Cost Savings
To help you calculate exactly how much your specific organization can save, we have developed a Baymard cost-savings calculator.
Instead of guessing, we use real-world data from over 1,200 accounts across various industries to map out your exact financial baseline.
To keep the data credible, we only track unique insights consumed within an account — requiring a team member to spend a minimum of 45 seconds on an insight for it to count toward your savings.
If the same insight is visited again, it won’t count again, which helps to keep the saving calculation conservative and reliable.
Depending on where you are in your UX journey, we can map out two distinct scenarios for you.
If You Are New to Baymard’s Research
We will calculate the average unique insights you need to leverage in year one to completely break even.
You will see the exact equivalent cost of trying to build that research in-house, alongside your projected annual net savings and net savings percentage.
If You Are an Existing Baymard Customer
We will calculate the average unique insights you need to leverage in year one to completely break even.
You will see the exact equivalent cost of trying to build that research in-house, plus a definitive look at the net savings and cost savings you have already realized to date.
This gives you the exact data you need to confidently justify your budget to your stakeholders.
See Your Custom Cost-Savings Breakdown
When it comes to UX research, you can protect your team’s valuable time by avoiding reinventing the wheel.
By leveraging existing, pre-validated industry UX best practices, you can bypass the overheads, protect your resources, and ship higher-converting designs faster.
Let’s look at your numbers together.
Book a call with our team today to run your personalized calculation and see exactly how much time and budget you can save.
