Why Most Online Psychology Tests Hide Your Own Results Behind a Paywall

You've been at it for fifteen minutes. Some of the questions were easy — do you prefer parties or a quiet night in. Some were not: whether you second-guess yourself in relationships, how often you feel like a fraud, what you actually do when someone you love is upset with you. You click through the last one, a progress bar fills, and for a second it feels like something is about to be handed to you.

Then it isn't. What loads instead is a paywall, an email form, or a thin one-line "snapshot" with a button underneath it that says something like Unlock My Full Results. The thing you just spent fifteen honest minutes producing — your own answer, about yourself — is now a product, and you're the customer.

This isn't one company having a bad idea. It's close to the default business model for online psychology tests, and it's worth looking at plainly, with real numbers, because the pattern is more consistent than any single site.

The pattern, with real prices

Every one of these sites lets you finish the test for free. That's not the trick. The trick is where the wall goes up afterward, and how much it costs to get past it:

• 16Personalities gives a genuinely substantial free result — your four-letter type plus free articles on career and relationships. But the deeper growth guides, career guides, and relationship guides sit inside a Pro Suite priced at EUR 99, with individual Premium Profiles running around $29 on their own.
• Truity lets you complete its full questionnaire — 60 to 105 questions, ten to fifteen minutes of honest answering — then shows you a type label and a bare chart. The actual interpretation, career matches, and growth strategies are a separate purchase, $19 to $29 per report, and even that free overview quietly expires after about 90 days unless you register with an email.
• Psychology Today's self-test library hands you a "Snapshot Report" after you finish: one summary line, one graph. The real report — the part that explains what your score means — is priced per test, anywhere from about $2.95 to $12.95, and the price is only shown once you've already answered everything.
• MyIQ.com runs the same shape on the IQ side: finish the whole test, then a $0.99 seven-day "trial" is the only way to see your score — a trial that quietly renews into roughly $14.99 a week or $39.99 a month (some users report $19.99 a week or $24.99 a month instead). A neighboring competitor, iqtest.net, uses a similar $1.99 trial that converts into $27.88 a month.

None of this is hidden, exactly — it's usually disclosed somewhere in the terms. But disclosed and honest aren't the same thing when the price only appears after the effort is already spent.

Why the wall goes up after the test, not before

If you wanted to sell someone a psychology report, the straightforward thing would be to show the price first. Almost none of these sites do that, and the reason is a fairly well understood piece of consumer psychology rather than a coincidence.

By the time you've answered sixty questions about your own inner life, you've paid a cost that has nothing to do with money — your time, your attention, and a certain amount of honesty about things you don't usually type into a form. That's a sunk cost, and sunk costs make people more willing to spend a little more to avoid feeling like the first cost was wasted. Layer a curiosity gap on top of it — a result deliberately thin enough to raise more questions than it answers, like a single summary line and one chart — and you have a page that is, quite precisely, engineered to convert at the exact moment you're most invested in finding out what the rest of the sentence says.

It works because the test itself did the hard part. Getting someone to answer sixty intimate questions for free is, in marketing terms, the expensive step. Everything after that is just deciding where to put the door.

What free actually costs here

PsychIQ doesn't paywall a result, gate it behind an email address, or start a trial that quietly turns into a subscription. That's a real design choice, not a magic trick, and it deserves the same plain treatment as everything above: PsychIQ is ad-supported. You'll see ads on the page. That's the actual tradeoff for a test that costs nothing and asks for nothing — we'd rather say that once, clearly, than let anyone assume free means costless to run.

It's also worth naming the other way "free" sometimes gets paid for in this category, because it's a sharper cost than an ad. In 2023 the FTC finalized a $7.8 million settlement against BetterHelp after finding the company shared sensitive mental-health questionnaire answers — along with users' emails and IP addresses — with Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for ad targeting, despite telling users that health information would not be disclosed. Nobody paid BetterHelp's intake quiz a dollar. The answers themselves were the payment.

That's the comparison that actually matters, more than the price tags above. PsychIQ processes your answers on your device rather than storing them on a server tied to your identity, which isn't a promise about good intentions — it's just that there's nothing sitting on a server to sell, retarget with, or eventually have to explain to a regulator.

The whole deal, stated plainly

You take the test. You see your full result the moment you finish — the score, the interpretation, all of it, on the same screen. No email address. No account. No trial that turns into a monthly charge next week. No card, ever. That's not an introductory offer or a limited-time thing, and it isn't the generous version of the product with a better one hidden behind it. It's just what a result looks like when it was never the thing being sold in the first place.