The best pitch for AskEngine is how little of it there is to learn. The whole workflow is: decide what you want to learn, share a link, read what comes back. This post walks through each step as it exists today, in the current beta.
Creating a study is an interview
Everything in AskEngine lives inside a study, and here's the part we enjoy most: you don't fill in a form to create one. You get interviewed. AskEngine asks what you're building and what you're trying to learn, follows up until the objective is sharp, then sets the study up from that conversation — the same way it set up your workspace when you first arrived. We built an interview tool, so we use it on ourselves at every step. The product's first participant is you.
The objective that comes out of that conversation does real work. It shapes how the interviewer steers each participant and how the analysis reads the answers afterward. There's no discussion guide to write and no question matrix to fill in. One sharp objective is enough to start, and you can refine it as the study teaches you what to ask.
Share a link
Every study has an interview link. You put it wherever your users already are: a churn email, a support reply, a message after onboarding. When someone opens it, they're invited into a spoken conversation about your objective. They pick the moment. Nobody schedules anything, and you don't attend.
The conversation being spoken matters more than it sounds. People think out loud differently than they type. In a text box they give you conclusions; in a conversation they give you the story that led there, which is usually where the useful part hides. A typical interview takes a few minutes of the participant's time, and none of yours.
Read what comes back
Each finished interview processes on its own. You'll see a summary of what that one person said, grounded in their transcript. As interviews accumulate, the study level fills in: themes emerge across participants, each backed by quotes you can click through to the original conversation.
One rule runs through all of it. Only a participant's own words can become evidence. The interviewer's sentences, the AI's summaries, your own notes — none of that is ever quoted back to you as a finding. If a theme claims four people struggled with pricing, the four quotes are right there, in their words, with names attached.
When something crosses studies, it becomes a signal: a pattern the system now tracks over time, complete with the evidence for it and the evidence that complicates it.
Sitting above all of this is the inbox, and it deserves a pause. AskEngine doesn't wait for you to come digging. It watches what's accumulating and brings you the moments that need a decision: a study that's heard enough, a contradiction of something you believed, a recommendation ready to act on, or a gap where it admits it doesn't know enough yet. Each arrives as a card, and a card takes seconds to handle — open the signal behind it, or dismiss it. A named gap is an instruction to go collect more conversations, and we consider that answer more useful than a confident guess. This is the first shipped piece of a bigger idea: the product itself deciding what deserves your attention, then bringing it to you.
None of this stays locked in the app. The same record is reachable over API and MCP, so your own tools can ask what users believe before acting on it.
What it costs
Pricing is flat: $5 per interview, pay as you go. That covers everything downstream too — the analysis, the signals it feeds, the API access. No seats and no subscription, because the point is running interviews steadily over months, and a per-interview price is the one that stays honest at that rhythm. Your first interviews on signup are free, so you can see a study fill in before paying anything.
AskEngine is in early beta behind a waitlist. If you want to feel the participant side before the researcher side, joining the waitlist is itself an AskEngine interview — you'll be talking to the product within a minute of signing up.
That's the whole loop as it runs today. Where it's heading is a bigger story, and it gets its own post next.