Scale From 10 Interviews to 100 Without Doubling Your Budget

"Can we double the sample size?" is the question every qualitative researcher dreads, because the honest answer is usually "not without doubling the budget." Recruitment scales linearly. Transcription has gotten cheap. But analysis and coding? That's traditionally 60-70% of your total project cost — and it used to scale right along with your sample size.

It doesn't have to anymore.

Where the money actually goes

Break down a qualitative project honestly and three buckets emerge: recruitment and incentives (scales linearly, no way around it), transcription (now nearly free thanks to AI), and analysis and coding (still the biggest line item by far). Ten interviews might take 15-20 hours of manual coding. A hundred interviews is months of a researcher's time at a day rate that adds up fast.

If you want to scale affordably, coding is the bucket you have to attack — and that's exactly the problem Paideias was built to solve.

What changes when AI does the first pass

Paideias is an AI-assisted qualitative research tool that handles the repetitive first cycle of coding — the part that eats researcher hours — while keeping you fully in control of every decision. You define the codebook, Paideias proposes codes across every transcript in your project, and you review and approve before anything is finalized.

That's a 40-50% reduction in total project cost at scale — and the savings come almost entirely from reclaimed coding time, not from cutting corners on rigor.

Built to run more interviews, not more overhead

Unlike desktop QDA software with per-seat licenses that scale linearly with your team, Paideias runs in the browser with no desktop install and a workflow designed to keep costs proportional to your research, not your headcount. Every coded segment is stored in a structured, searchable database and exports cleanly to QDPX, so scaling up never means losing portability or defensibility.

• AI-assisted coding that collapses the time between reading a transcript and having a defensible set of codes.

• An AI interviewer to help you run more interviews without a proportional increase in staff time.

• Researcher-in-the-loop review on every suggested code — nothing gets finalized without your approval.

• Full thematic analysis support across a growing corpus, without the coding backlog piling up.

The real answer to "how do we scale cheaply"

The cheapest way to scale qualitative research isn't the cheapest tool — it's the workflow that minimizes rework and protects your most expensive resource: researcher time. A free tool that produces messy codes you have to redo costs more in the long run than a tool that gets it right the first time and lets you move faster with every added interview.

That's the case for Paideias: AI transcription, AI-assisted first-cycle coding, and human judgment for theme development and write-up — all in one workflow, without a per-project license fee standing between you and the sample size your research actually needs.

Try Paideias and see how much of your coding backlog it can clear before your next deadline.