The published price anchors for lower middle market deal sourcing run from $299 a month to a retained engagement, which is a range so wide it stops being useful as a comparison. The more useful question is underneath it: what does each model leave you still having to do?
Here is what is actually published, as of 20 September 2026, with the caveat that every figure in this category moves without announcement.
What each model publishes
Self-directed deal marketplace — $299 a month. $149 for the first month, month to month, no success fee, deals under $150M. You browse what members have listed and pursue it yourself; these providers state plainly that they are not hands-on matchmakers. Published on the provider's own pricing page, read 21 August 2026.
Flat-retainer lead generation — $1,000 to $3,000 a month. No success fee on the standard tier, with a first conversation typically 60 to 90 days out. The provider runs outbound on your behalf and has no stake in whether the leads convert, which cuts both ways.
Outsourced outbound retainer — $4,000 to $8,000 a month plus 1–2% on close. Month to month, usually exclusive to one client per sector and geography, targeting companies at $1M to $10M of EBITDA, with a first qualified conversation typically 40 to 65 days after signing. The deliverable is a qualified founder meeting with a memo. Off-market only — this model's published stance is to avoid brokered processes.
Private-company data platform — not published. Grata gates all three tiers behind a demo. The only dollar figures it publishes on its own site are on its referral page, which uses a $20,000 contract and a $30,000 contract as worked examples. Third-party review sites report roughly $25,000 to $50,000 a year depending on seat count, unconfirmed by Grata.
Private capital data — not published. PitchBook's pricing page is a request form and states that pricing varies with seat count and firm type; Morningstar's FY2025 10-K describes pricing as primarily based on the number of user seats. Third parties report a single seat around $12,000 to $20,000 a year, with one procurement aggregator reporting a median of $31,875 across 132 recorded purchases.
Buy-side broker or retained search — rarely published. Typically an engagement fee plus a success fee on close, negotiated per search. BizNexus publishes its own retained search and membership pricing on biznexus.com/compare; this site deliberately carries no price table, so the numbers live in one place and cannot drift apart.
Full sources and dates for every figure above are on the comparison page.
The number that is not on any price list
Your own hours. A $299 marketplace subscription is not cheap if working it takes an associate two days a week; that associate costs more than the retainer you did not buy. A $6,000-a-month retainer is not expensive if it replaces a hire and covers a channel nobody internally was ever going to work.
The honest way to compare these is not price per month. It is:
What does this cost, plus what does it still leave me doing, valued at what my team's time is worth?
Run that on a two-person corporate development team and a data seat and a marketplace both get more expensive than they look, because both hand the entire workload back to the two people who did not have time in the first place.
The other number nobody puts in the comparison
Which channels it covers. Most workable deals below $10M of EBITDA are intermediated — an owner who decides to sell usually hires an advisor. An off-market-only retainer, by its own published stance, does not touch that market. A marketplace touches only the part of it somebody chose to list. A data platform carries no deal status at all.
So a model can be correctly priced, well executed, and still leave the largest channel in your market uncovered. That is not a price problem and no amount of budget fixes it. See how private equity firms find deals in the lower middle market for what the four channels actually produce.
A decision rule that holds up
- Name the gap. List, hours, or coverage. Not all three — the real one.
- Buy the cheapest reversible thing that addresses it. A month-to-month subscription or one seat tells you more in six weeks than a spreadsheet will.
- Check what it left you doing. If the answer is "the same work, with better inputs", you bought information when you needed capacity.
- Then commit. Retainers and engagements are worth it once the mandate has stopped moving. Before that you are paying for a search that changes shape halfway through.
Where we sit, stated plainly
OmniSource is the last category — a platform and an origination team on one pipeline, covering Off-Market, Pre-Market and On-Market against a documented mandate. We are in the comparison, which is a reason to read our framing of the others skeptically; the price anchors above are all from the providers' own pages, and the comparison page lists every source with the date we read it so you can check them.
BizNexus holds the broader model comparison for readers on the advisor and seller side at biznexus.com/compare/deal-sourcing-platforms.