TCO Calculator: What your data will really cost
Compare quotes from different data vendors to understand the true price per usable record.
Price per record only measures the cost of an attempt
Almost every quote gets compared on “price per record”. That’s the number on the pricing page and in the spreadsheet, so it’s the number people anchor to. But price per record only measures the cost of an attempt. It says nothing about how much of what arrives is actually usable. And usable is really two questions, not one: did the crawler find the record at all (recall), and of the records it did return, how many are correct (accuracy). Missing data isn’t the same as wrong data, but both land in the same equation:
Here’s why splitting the figure matters. A vendor that finds 85% of records and is 85% accurate on the ones it found sounds fine in isolation. But 0.85 × 0.85 lands at roughly 72% usable data. Two reasonable-sounding numbers multiply into one uncomfortable one. And a record is only fully correct if every field is correct, so the gap widens with each field you add. That’s the whole game, and the calculator below shows it on your numbers.
Usable records
Recall × accuracy, compounded across every field in a record. The number that makes two quotes comparable, and rarely the one on the pricing page.
Your cleanup cost
The months your own QA team spends closing the cheaper vendor’s gap. People stuck cleaning data that was supposed to arrive clean.
Churn exposure
A wrong record doesn’t announce itself. Whatever your team doesn’t catch, your customers will. This is what a year of that costs, kept separate from the hard total.
Drop in your quotesReplace the defaults with the two quotes you’re actually weighing. Every figure is editable.
Set your assumptionsRecall, accuracy, fields per record, what your QA team costs, and what a lost customer is worth.
Read the verdictThe numbers recalculate live as you type. Enter your business email to see the full breakdown.