hello, researcher ✉

Send little
postcards
to your participants.

Schedule notifications that land on participants’ phones — random, fixed, or event-contingent — and route each tap to the survey or task you already use.

Start a study →Free for academic use
EST · 2020
for research
four moving parts

From schedule to survey, without lifting a finger.

Samply is the bit between your study design and your survey tool. It runs the cron, lands the notification, and routes the tap.

01
Schedule
Pick a timing rule — random, fixed, or event-contingent. Draw a window on the day, set quiet hours and a minimum gap.
step 1 of 4
02
Ping
Samply runs the cron. Each participant receives a small push notification in their timezone, on the Samply Research app.
step 2 of 4
03
Tap
They tap. Samply attaches their participant ID and ping ID, then forwards the tap to the URL you specified.
step 3 of 4
04
Survey
Your existing tool — Qualtrics, REDCap, LimeSurvey, your own URL — handles the rest. Samply records that the tap landed.
step 4 of 4
step 01 · in detail

You draw windows on the day. We fill them.

→ pick one, or mix
01 · random
Five surprise pings, sometime today.
Set a window, a count, a minimum gap. Samply scatters the prompts so participants can’t predict the next one.
09:00 ──●──────────●────────●──●───●── 21:00
02 · fixed
Every evening at 9, a one-minute diary.
Pick the times that fit your protocol — 9 a.m., 3 p.m., bedtime — and let participants build the habit.
09:0015:0021:00
03 · event
Right after they finish a workout.
Trigger pings from upstream signals — wearables, web hooks, participant tap.
on(activity.end) → ping(reflection)
steps 02 + 03 · in detail
Samply Research
The participant app.

The phone is the easy part.

The Samply Research app on the participant’s phone receives the schedule and shows the prompt. Tap it, and they land in your survey with their ID attached.

iOS · AndroidPer-participant TZ
14 languages — English · Deutsch · Français · Español · Português · Italiano · Nederlands · Polski · Русский · Türkçe · 中文 · 日本語 · 한국어 · العربية
9:41●●●
Samply · now
How are you, right now?
tap to begin · ≈90s
→ that’s it.
step 04 · in detail

Then we hand the tap to your survey.

plays nicely with
Qualtrics
REDCap
LimeSurvey
SurveyMonkey
Your own URL
Webhooks
/survey?pid=<PID>&ping=<PING>&ts=<TS>
for the working researcher

The methods we were built for.

ESM
EMA · diary

Samply has opinions about timing, gaps, and quiet hours — borrowed from the methodologists who taught us. Here are the protocols we know inside-out.

ESM
Experience sampling
Random pings within blocks; 4–8 per day; 7–21 days. Probably what you mean.
EMA
Ecological momentary assessment
Same as ESM with a clinical accent. Compliance bands, drop-out tracking, audit trail.
DIARY
End-of-day diary
A single fixed-time prompt, often at 21:00 local. The slow cousin.
AMBL
Ambulatory assessment
Event-contingent prompts triggered by wearables, geofences, or webhooks.
BURST
Measurement-burst
Two or three weeks of dense sampling, repeated at quarterly intervals.
DCE
Discrete-choice experiment
Pre-randomised conditions, attached as embedded data on the route URL.
defaults · borrowed from the literature

Sensible numbers, on by default.

We pre-fill the knobs that researchers most often get wrong. Override any of them per-study.

settingdefaultwhy
Min gap45 minBelow 30, response styles bleed across pings.
Window09:00–21:00Quiet hours respected per-participant timezone.
Pings / day5Five is the sweet spot for ESM in adults.
Burst length14 daysLong enough for within-person variance.
Compliance floor40%Below 40% triggers a soft re-engagement.
Token formatpid · ping · tsThree variables, every time, in every URL.
IRB
An IRB-friendly footprint.
Nothing leaves your survey tool.
Read the brief →
got an idea?
Collaborate with the Samply team.

If you're running an ESM study and want help with the protocol, the platform, or a feature you wish existed — we're open to co-authorship in exchange for support. Bring the question, we'll bring the tooling.

How collaboration works →
See it in your own protocol.
Free for academic use.
Start a study →