Taking on Qualtrics and Building the Survey Platform We Actually Needed

I’ve worked in feedback analytics for over a decade.

For most of that time, Qualtrics has been the default choice for enterprise. They positioned themselves as the serious option, especially for big contracts, and they won a lot of business through strong sales execution. But underneath, the product was never the reason they dominated.

I think the thing that always really annoyed me, was that the real value in understanding feedback was always locked away behind spend thresholds that only the biggest accounts could reach.

The Pricing Barrier No One Talks About

Qualtrics’s average contract value is around $50,000. That buys you templated surveys, a dashboard, and keyword tags, and not much more. Until recently, small and medium sized businesses were given an entirely different piece of software, an acquisition called Delighted, that was severly limited in capabilities.

If you want advanced features, of the kind that actually help you understand patterns, explain changes, and act on insight, you need to be spending major cash. That’s when the “enterprise” capabilities like TextIQ finally show up.

And that’s the part that has never made sense to me. The tech to do this well is not inherently expensive. Keeping it behind that kind of paywall is a sales decision, not a product necessity.

What Customers Actually Get

Even among large accounts, many are still working with keyword-based sentiment tagging. It’s shallow, it’s noisy, and it leaves teams no clearer about what’s really going on. It’s the kind of approach that made sense in 2010, but it’s not enough today.

When these customers move to Sunbeam, the reaction is usually the same: they thought they had “analysis” before, but all they really had was word counting. The difference is immediate.

Why We Built a Survey Tool

Sunbeam began with one focus: the analysis layer. That’s where most of the value sits, and where most companies were falling short.

But as we worked with more customers, we kept running into the same friction. The surveys themselves were slow to launch, expensive to change, and tied to rigid enterprise contracts. The tools people were using to collect feedback were part of the problem.

So we built our own clean, fast survey platform that works seamlessly with our analytics engine. It wasn’t the original plan, but it became the right move.

A Full Stack Without the Paywalls

Now, Sunbeam covers the whole process, from survey creation through to deep feedback analysis, without holding back useful features for a certain spend level. There's no expensive upsell path just to get what’s actually valuable.

Our customers get the full picture from day one: AI-led analysis, real explanations for score changes, and the ability to track meaning over time. And they get it at a fraction of the cost.

Moving Faster

We ship quickly. We integrate new techniques as they become available. We’re not tied up in months of internal process before a feature sees the light of day.

That speed matters. It’s the difference between adapting to new challenges as they happen and being stuck waiting for next year’s “roadmap.”

Looking Back

I never set out to take on Qualtrics directly. But when you look at what they deliver for the price, and how they gatekeep the features that matter, it’s hard not to.

They made themselves the benchmark. We’re here to replace it.