"But I don't use tokens. So the workaround in the first paragraph cannot be applied.
there really is a JS in the forum which assigns people based on survey ID. I was part of the discussion, but I cannot find it anymore. Sorry.
"You just limit the choice to three. In my case the respondent should tick as much as he liked. If I ask for ranking or a e.g 3 items limits I could just use a random number."
you can split into an informative question about the cities they know and a choice for the cities they want to speak about. I do not think it would confuse the respondent in any way.
Regarding how the developers position LS, this is a bit tricky. Prices are indeed going down. You can find hosted software as low as 5-10 k/year (depending on features and number of interviews) and the trend of lowering prices has been going on for a few years now. On the other hand I presume that developing new features is still costly. So LS will face competition from companies that develop their product for paying customers, and then give it for cheap/free once the costs have been covered.
the dynamic allocation of respondents into groups is actually an excellent example of the dilemma. If someone has an idea on how to do it, this would be a competitive advantage because all solutions struggle with it (afaik). But asking someone to develop it from scratch might be too much given the resources.
Hopefully the expression manager will land close enough.
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