How much is my business data worth?

Start with the honest answer

There is no price list for business data. Unlike a used truck or a building, there is no public market where you can look up what a dataset like yours sold for last month. Value is set one deal at a time, by a buyer deciding whether your records fill a gap they can't fill anywhere else. Anyone quoting you a firm number before a buyer has reviewed a sample is guessing.

What you can know in advance is where your data is likely to land, because buyers judge every dataset on the same handful of factors. Our free worth estimator walks through them in six questions and shows its arithmetic.

The six factors that set the price

1. Uniqueness. Can a buyer get the same information somewhere else? Records of what actually happened inside an operation, such as real quotes, real job times and real outcomes, are rarely available publicly. The rarer the view, the higher the value.
2. Depth. How many years does it cover? Five or more years of continuous history lets a buyer see seasons, cycles and change over time.
3. Volume. How many records sit behind each year? Thousands of transactions or work orders a month matter more than a few hundred.
4. Freshness. Do new records keep arriving? A dataset that updates every day can be licensed as an ongoing feed, which is worth far more than a one-time export.
5. Structure. Does it live in real software, such as an ERP, dispatch system, point-of-sale or CRM, with consistent fields? Clean, documented data is cheaper for a buyer to use, so it is worth more to them.
6. Rights. Do your customer contracts and terms of service allow a de-identified license? If the rights are unclear, the value is close to zero until they are fixed.

Our data licensing readiness checklist turns these into a ten-item self-check.

Why company size matters so much

The federal numbers explain why most businesses don't qualify. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 7,826,020 private worksites in the U.S. with fewer than five employees. A shop that size usually doesn't generate enough records on its own to interest a buyer, however good the business is. At 100 to 249 employees there are 138,850 worksites, and that is where operating records typically get deep, steady and structured enough to review.

Size is not the whole story. A small software company with years of clean transaction history can be a better fit than a large firm that runs on paper. But volume and depth tend to follow headcount, which is why most successful data licenses come from established, mid-sized and larger operators.

What public filings show

The clearest public evidence that operating data has real value comes from company filings. When Reddit filed to go public, it disclosed data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million on terms of two to three years, with at least $66.4 million expected to be recognized in the first year.

That is a large public platform with an unusual dataset, so treat it as proof that the market exists, not as a benchmark for your company. Private deals are rarely published, and terms vary widely. You can read more sourced examples, with dates and links, on the market page.

What lowers the value, or kills a deal

• Personal information mixed in. Names, emails and phone numbers must come out before anyone reviews a sample. Data that can't be de-identified cleanly is hard to license at all. Our privacy and rights guide explains the rules.
• Gaps in history. A switch of software that lost three years of records cuts depth sharply.
• One-off exports. If the records stop updating, the license is a single payment at best.
• Messy fields. Free-text everything, inconsistent codes and missing dates all raise a buyer's cost.
• Exclusivity you didn't price. Granting one buyer exclusive rights can be worth it, but only if the price reflects what you're giving up.

How to find out what yours is worth

The fastest honest path has three steps. First, answer the six questions in the worth estimator to see which factors help you and which hold you back. Second, request a free partnership review. It takes six fields, costs nothing, and we never take custody of your data. Third, if your records look like a fit, and only with your written go-ahead, we introduce you to programs that license business data. They review on their own criteria and pay your company directly. If an introduction leads to an engagement we may be paid a referral fee by that program, and we tell you before your name goes anywhere.

Most companies won't qualify today. The ones that do usually didn't know they were sitting on an asset.