This stays free because people pay for it quietly
No ads, no paywall, no account, no data collection. If Psychometrics Today has been useful to you and you can spare something, that is what keeps it running for the person who finds it next.
Donations are not open yet. When they are, they will run through PayPal. Nothing on this site is behind a payment now, and nothing ever will be.
If money is tight, please do not. Genuinely. You are exactly who this was built for.
Why this exists
A private psychological assessment costs somewhere between £150 and £1,500 depending on where you live and what you need. Waiting lists for the free equivalent run to months, and in many countries there is no free equivalent at all.
Meanwhile the instruments themselves (the PHQ-9, the GAD-7, the PTSD checklist, the attachment scales) were published in academic journals decades ago and are free for anyone to reproduce. They are not scarce. They are not secret. They have simply been placed behind interfaces that charge for access to something nobody owns.
So the people most likely to need a starting point are the least likely to get one, and they end up on sites that harvest their answers, or in a spiral of searching that ends inself-diagnosis by algorithm. That is the gap this fills. Not treatment. A clear, honest, properly explained starting point, for free, at 3am, without an account.
What your money actually pays for
There is no office and nobody draws a salary. The costs are small and specific, which means small donations genuinely cover them.
- £3Serves roughly 10,000 assessments. Hosting is the main cost.
- £12Covers a month of domain, bandwidth and the crisis-line verification we redo quarterly.
- £60Funds the research time to add and properly source one new assessment.
What we will never do
These are the commitments the donations buy. If we ever break one of them, stop giving.
- Never charge for an assessment, or put results behind a payment.
- Never run advertising. It would cost us a dozen instruments and your privacy at once.
- Never store, transmit or sell your answers. Scoring happens in your browser and stops there.
- Never require an account, an email address, or a login to see your own results.
- Never publish an instrument we do not have the right to publish.
- Never state a fact without saying where it came from.
Why donations rather than ads
This is the part most people find surprising. Advertising would not just be distasteful on a page where someone has answered questions about self-harm. It would be legally disqualifying.
Around a dozen of the 41 assessments here are offered by their authors free fornon-commercial use only. Carrying a single ad makes the entire site a commercial use, and those instruments would have to come down the same day. Donations are what let us keep them up.
You can read exactly which instrument sits under which licence, including the ones we deliberately do not host.
Other ways to help, all free
Money is the least interesting way to support this.
- Tell someone. The person who needs this most is usually not searching for it yet. They were told about it.
- Report anything wrong. A broken crisis number, a mis-scored result, a confusing explanation. Tell us and it gets fixed.
- If you are a clinician or researcher, check our scoring and our sources. We publish the interpretation logic precisely so it can be audited.
- If you hold rights to an instrument and would let it be offered free to the public, that would open it up for everyone.
Where the money goes if there is ever too much
Surplus beyond running costs goes to adding assessments and translating the site. The largest barrier after cost is that almost all of this exists only in English. Nothing is distributed to anyone.