FAQ
What is Subconscious.ai?
A platform for running causal experiments at scale. Instead of recruiting human respondents, it builds a representative synthetic population and runs a randomised discrete choice experiment against it. Causal experiments of this kind are standard in product design, transport, political science, public health, and economics, wherever a decision-maker needs to know how a population will respond to different options.
Who uses it?
Researchers and product teams who need to know why a population chooses what it chooses — in academia, in industry, and in policy.
How is this different from asking a language model?
An experiment is not a question to a model. Attributes are randomised independently, respondents see structured choice tasks, and effects are estimated with the same statistics used on human conjoint data. Randomisation is what makes the result causal, and the design is what makes it measurable.
Why should I trust simulated respondents?
Because the platform is checked against human studies rather than assumed to work. Published human conjoint studies are replicated and compared effect by effect. See Human baselines.
How long does an experiment take?
Tens of minutes, not seconds. The smallest conjoint experiment is roughly 2,400 model calls. Poll every 30–60 seconds; see Poll a run.
What does it cost?
Experiments consume model capacity and are billed accordingly. Check your plan in Settings, and review a design before launching it rather than after.
Can I use my own attributes and levels?
Yes. Generate them from your question and edit, or supply your own outright. See Run an experiment.
Can I bring my own audience?
Yes — supply external personas, or target a population by traits and demographics. Note that external personas and named population groups are mutually exclusive. See Design a population.
Is my experiment private?
Set is_private: true on the request and the run is hidden from other users.
My run says finished but there are no results
Then it did not succeed. The status endpoint has known failure modes in both directions; artifacts are the reliable signal. See Poll a run.
Is there an SDK?
Not yet. The API is plain JSON over HTTP, and there is an
MCP server for driving it from Claude or Cursor. The
published spec is available at
/openapi/subconscious.public.json
if you want to generate a client.
How do I report a problem?
Contact us with the run id and the exact request body.