QUALLEE
QUALLEE is a Berlin research platform whose AI interviewer conducts qualitative depth interviews by chat or voice in five languages, then transcribes, clusters and reports on them automatically, turning weeks of fieldwork into hours.
What is QUALLEE?
QUALLEE is a web platform that automates the qualitative depth interview. Instead of a human moderator running each conversation, an AI interviewer built on Anthropic's Claude, named as Claude Sonnet 4.5 in the privacy policy, conducts the session: it asks adaptive follow-up questions, pursues what turns out to be interesting, and keeps the guide on track. The stated ambition is the depth of a personal conversation with the logistics of an online survey.
The product covers the whole chain. You describe a research goal and an AI assistant drafts the interview guide; you share a link and participants answer asynchronously by chat or voice, in German, English, French, Spanish or Italian; the system transcribes, extracts themes, clusters statements, scores sentiment and produces a report with recommendations. An Analysis Chat lets you interrogate your own results in plain language and returns answers anchored in actual quotes. You can feed the AI your working context, upload your own TXT or JSON material for the same treatment, embed classic questionnaire blocks inside an interview, and follow how themes and sentiment move across time windows.
Recruitment is built in: an integrated TestingTime panel of more than 985,000 verified European testers handles screening, scheduling and incentives, billed in credits at roughly ten credits per participant. Typical interviews last twenty to thirty minutes, and the vendor points to thematic saturation around eight to twelve conversations while noting you can now afford thirty, fifty or a hundred.
The positioning is explicitly European: raw audio and transcripts stay on German servers, the EU AI Act classification is published as limited risk under Article 50, and the processing agreement is public. QUALLEE refuses synthetic personas outright and interviews only real people. The company is young, incorporated in Berlin in February 2026, but presents itself as the continuation of more than twenty years of UX and CX practice at the agency interactive tools, with its own UX lab.
What it does
- Run automated depth interviews with adaptive follow-up questions, in parallel and around the clock
- Collect answers by text or by voice, with automatic language detection and transcription
- Analyse every conversation automatically: themes, patterns, clusters and sentiment
- Question your own results conversationally and get answers backed by real participant quotes
- Recruit verified participants across Europe through the built-in TestingTime panel
- Track how topics and sentiment shift over time across successive interview waves
- Export findings as PDF, CSV or JSON reports ready to share with stakeholders
When to use QUALLEE / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if QUALLEE is the right fit.
When to use QUALLEE
- UX and product teams that keep skipping discovery because scheduling and transcription eat the quarter
- Freelance and solo researchers who need agency-grade interviews at a price small projects can carry
- Agencies and consultancies wanting to run research in-house instead of subcontracting it to an institute
- HR and People & Organization teams running anonymous employee, stay or engagement interviews
- European enterprises with procurement rules that require GDPR, EU AI Act and German-hosted raw data
When not to use QUALLEE
- Consumers and private individuals: the terms restrict the platform to business users and exclude consumers
- Teams needing purely quantitative surveys or on-site observation, which the vendor itself points elsewhere for
- Researchers who depend on non-verbal cues, since there is no facial recognition and depth is described as medium to high
- Anyone wanting synthetic personas: QUALLEE interviews real people only, and says so explicitly
- Developers expecting to script the platform, as the API is still labelled Coming Soon and there is no mobile app
How to use QUALLEE
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account on the registration page; the Free plan needs no credit card and QUALLEE activates the account
- Open a project and describe your research objective and core questions
- Let the AI assistant propose topics and follow-up questions, then edit the guide until it fits
- Optionally give the AI your working context: hypotheses, industry, role, product
- Generate the interview link and share it by email, intranet, Slack or through your own panel
- Or order participants from the Recruitment tab: set target group, language, country, age and gender, add up to three screening questions, review the credit quote and confirm
- Let the AI run the interviews by chat or voice, in parallel and around the clock
- Watch progress in real time on the central dashboard
- Read the automatic analysis, then dig further in the Analysis Chat with your own questions
- Export the results as PDF, CSV or JSON, or add your own TXT and JSON files for further analysis
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Turnaround measured in hours rather than weeks, since analysis starts the moment interviews close
- Cost per interview the vendor puts under EUR 5 against EUR 1,000 to 2,000 for a traditional session
- Scales without headcount: parallel, asynchronous interviews with no calendar coordination
- Consistent moderation with no interviewer fatigue and no leading questions
- European data posture: raw data on German servers, contractual no-training commitment, public Article 28 agreement
- Genuinely permanent free plan with no credit card, no minimum term and two months free on annual billing
- Participant recruitment built into the product instead of handled through a separate supplier
Cons
- No API yet: it is advertised as Coming Soon on the Business plan and no documentation exists
- Web only, with no mobile application and no browser extension
- Tight entry quotas: 15 interviews and 5 analyses per month at EUR 99, and included quotas do not roll over
- Subscriptions are in principle non-refundable across all plans, with exceptions only for demonstrable bugs
- Limited on non-verbal signal, which the vendor's own comparison acknowledges
- Downgrading automatically pauses the oldest projects until they fit the new limit
- Recruitment credits expire twelve months after purchase and are neither transferable nor redeemable for cash
Pricing & Plans
QUALLEE is offered on a freemium basis. A permanent Free plan is available at no cost, with no credit card and no time limit, covering three interviews, one analysis, one project and one user. The lowest paid entry point is the Starter plan at EUR 99 per month excluding VAT. Team costs EUR 299 per month and Business EUR 599 per month, both excluding VAT, while Enterprise is quoted individually. Annual billing grants two months free. Additional interview packages start at EUR 69 and analysis packages at EUR 49; participant recruitment is billed separately in credits. A fully managed research project starts at EUR 9,900. All prices are net and the offer is reserved for organisations.
- 3 interviews
- 1 analysis
- 1 project
- 1 user
- no credit card required
- 15 interviews
- 5 analyses
- 3 projects
- 3 users
- email support within 48 hours
- 50 interviews
- 20 analyses
- 10 projects
- 10 users
- team collaboration
- unlimited read-only viewers
- own data upload
- support within 24 hours
- 150 interviews
- 60 analyses
- unlimited projects
- 25 users
- priority support within 8 hours
- API access announced as Coming Soon
- fair-use interviews and analyses
- unlimited members and viewers
- DOCX and XLSX exports
- dedicated contact
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how QUALLEE handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is documented in unusual detail. The controller is QUALLEE AI Research UG in Berlin, with a named Data Protection Officer, Marcus Völkel, reachable directly. A full Article 28 data processing agreement is published and accepted through use of the platform, listing sub-processors, retention tables and technical measures. The privacy policy states an effective date of 4 May 2026, enumerates rights under Articles 15 to 21 and Article 7(3), and names the legal basis for each processing operation. Cookie consent runs on Klaro under the German TDDDG. Transfers outside the EEA are itemised: Data Privacy Framework for the US providers, Standard Contractual Clauses plus a Transfer Impact Assessment for one, an adequacy decision for Switzerland. Residual US access risk is acknowledged rather than hidden. Breaches are reported to the controller within 24 hours.
Who owns the data?
The customer remains the data controller and QUALLEE acts as a processor under Article 28 GDPR, working only on documented instructions, with any use of platform functions counting as an instruction. Results belong to the customer, who can export them in PDF, CSV or JSON at any time, correct them from account settings or delete them; the vendor states it never sells or shares data with third parties. Ownership of the platform itself, including software, algorithms and design, stays with QUALLEE, and the customer acquires no rights over it. Interview participants, the customer's own staff and third parties named in research material are the data subjects covered.
Reuse rights
Customers may reuse their own interview material freely for their own business purposes, without asking permission: raw data stays accessible, exports come in PDF, CSV and JSON, and Enterprise adds DOCX and XLSX. QUALLEE itself uses the data only to deliver the contracted service. Content passes through Claude for interviewing and analysis, OpenAI Whisper for transcription and OpenAI embeddings for thematic clustering, and the vendor states contractually that none of it trains those providers' models; the terms frame the reverse as opt-in, requiring the customer's express consent. Automated moderation screens content at project creation and during interviews, and flagged material can be reviewed by an internal team. Usage rights over the software are non-exclusive, non-transferable and limited to the chosen plan.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Raw research data, meaning audio files and complete transcripts, is stored exclusively on servers in Germany. The processing agreement names Hetzner Online GmbH as the hosting sub-processor, and the site footer states that the product is made and hosted in the EU. Only the text content strictly required for each operation is transmitted to the AI interfaces. Those transfers leave the EEA: Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Google, Microsoft and Sentry are covered by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework adequacy decision of 10 July 2023, Resend relies on Standard Contractual Clauses supplemented by a Transfer Impact Assessment, and TestingTime AG in Zurich falls under the Swiss adequacy decision. Sentry processes in the EU region at Frankfurt am Main, and the newsletter runs on Listmonk self-hosted in Germany with no third-country transfer. Encryption is TLS 1.3 in transit and AES-256 at rest. The data centres are described as ISO 27001 certified, a certification held by the hosting provider rather than by QUALLEE. The applicable law is German and the place of jurisdiction is Berlin.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting QUALLEE.
- Automating the interview can quietly deskill a team: if nobody ever sits in a conversation again, the judgement needed to read what the AI missed erodes, and the vendor's own framing keeps interpretation with humans for good reason
- The published documentation contradicts itself in places, so verify before committing: the free plan is three interviews on the pricing table but two in the FAQ, and structured data still describes a beta waiting list that no longer matches the live product
- Interview participants entrust genuinely personal material to an anonymous system, and honesty is the selling point; the responsibility for consent, for what is asked and for how findings are used sits with the customer as controller, not with the tool
- Raw data stays in Germany but the text content still travels to Anthropic and OpenAI in the United States, and the privacy policy itself acknowledges residual access risk under FISA 702 and Executive Order 12333
- Anonymity has a flip side in employee research: interviews that feel confidential can surface grievances an organisation is not prepared to act on, and running them without a plan for the answers damages trust more than not asking
- Certifications visible in the documents belong to third parties, not to QUALLEE: ISO 27001 covers the hosting provider's data centres and SOC 2 covers the AI sub-processors, so do not read them as vendor certifications
- There is no API, exports are the only way out, subscriptions are in principle non-refundable, and the company was incorporated only in February 2026, so treat continuity and portability as questions to ask rather than assume
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. QUALLEE is entirely web-based, so there is nothing to install, deploy or connect, and no API to integrate since none exists yet. You register online, the Free plan needs no credit card, and the vendor claims no setup and no training are required. Methodological expertise is not assumed either: an AI assistant helps turn a research objective into an interview guide. Distribution is a shared link, and participation is asynchronous. The only optional configuration is the AI's working context and, for recruitment, a short screener. Team roles and read-only viewers appear from the Team plan upwards.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind QUALLEE
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI model actually conducts the interviews?
Where is the interview data stored?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Is there a free plan, and what does it include?
What does the cheapest paid plan cost?
Do unused interviews carry over to the next month?
How do I recruit participants?
Does QUALLEE offer an API?
Can I cancel whenever I want?
Should you pick QUALLEE?
QUALLEE addresses a real and well-diagnosed problem: qualitative research that everyone agrees is valuable but almost nobody runs often enough, because recruiting, scheduling, moderating and transcribing consume the budget before the insight arrives. Automating the interview itself is the sharp end of that problem, and the vendor is unusually candid about where the trade-off falls, admitting that non-verbal reading is weaker and that quantitative work belongs elsewhere. The refusal to interview synthetic personas is a credibility marker worth noting.
The European data posture is the other distinguishing feature. Raw audio and transcripts stay on German servers, the Article 28 processing agreement is published in full with its sub-processor table and retention schedule, the EU AI Act classification is stated, and the no-training commitment is contractual rather than promotional. For a procurement team in a regulated European organisation, that dossier is more complete than most tools of this size publish.
The reservations are practical rather than fundamental. There is no API and no mobile application, entry quotas are tight at fifteen interviews a month for EUR 99, included quotas do not roll over, and subscriptions are in principle non-refundable. The published material also carries stale artefacts: structured data still describes a beta waiting list, several declared image assets return errors, and the free plan is announced as three interviews on one page and two on another. None of this is disqualifying, but it signals a product moving faster than its documentation.
The company was incorporated in Berlin in February 2026, though it presents as the continuation of over twenty years of agency UX practice. Teams should weigh that youth against the permanent free plan, which costs nothing to test and answers the only question that matters: whether an AI-led conversation yields the depth their participants would give a human.
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