Comparing Virtual Data Room Pricing in 2024

How much do TOP 12 VDRs cost in 2024?

A virtual data room plays a significant role in securely managing the M&A due diligence process, bidding, restructuring, bankruptcy, and contract negotiations. It helps streamline key business operations, facilitate decision-making, and complete deals faster and more efficiently.

There are numerous virtual data rooms in the modern market. And each provider seems to have an entirely unique approach to putting a price on their product. Such an inconsistent variety of virtual data room pricing leads to a great deal of user confusion.

Luckily, there are a few tricks that can help easily navigate between available data rooms and pick a solution that fits your budget. Let’s take a closer look at different data room pricing factors, including cost-formation models, features and extras that affect the final price, and more.

4 main data room pricing strategies

Every data room provider grants access to a specific set of features and services, essentially creating a unique value offer for the clients. But there are several common virtual data room pricing patterns that apply to most providers.

• Per-page at $0.40-$0.80 per page per month. The majority of data rooms work as secure document storage and exchange platforms. Therefore, some providers charge according to the number of files stored. Typically, the provider will offer a few fixed per-page dataroom pricing solutions with an option to add extra files at an additional charge.
  Best for: Small and medium companies with minimal paperwork flows.
• Per-user at $15-$25 per user per month. Virtual data rooms that charge for the number of users licenses focus on the people who will actively collaborate on data rather than just view it. Some providers also differentiate administrative users, which can affect the layout, structure, and workflow of the data rooms. Administrative users may cost $100-$250 per user per month
  Best for: Small companies that operate with large document volumes.
• Storage volume at $60-$77 per GB per month. Per-GB data room pricing offers different levels of storage capacity. The users can store as many files as they need to as long as the total file size doesn’t exceed the limit. Similar to the per-page and per-user approaches, additional storage is charged separately.
  Best for: Small, medium, and large companies that don’t work with heavy video or audio files.
• Fixed plans at $400-1,000 per month. Flat fee or subscription-based dataroom pricing is the most common strategy among modern providers. A plan would typically accommodate users based on their company size or industry. And the user, storage, and feature capacities of such virtual data rooms come in either pre-determined or customized packages.
  Best for: Any company size and any type of project.

What pricing strategy is the best?

There is often no one-size-fits-all approach regarding virtual data room costs. Virtual data rooms provide different pricing structures to tackle different business challenges, ultimately helping each company succeed at an optimal price.

That being said, a flat monthly fee might still be a better pricing plan overall. It allows you to focus on the deal entirely and ditch financial considerations about extra storage capacity, advanced features, and additional user count.

Features that determine the data room pricing

At this point, virtual data rooms have to adhere to strict standards to meet the clients’ expectations and successfully compete with the other solutions. Several of those fundamental aspects affect the cost of the data rooms.

Security

Virtual data rooms guarantee sensitive document safekeeping through a combination of physical server maintenance and sophisticated software protocols.

Secure data rooms have geographically dispersed data centers with top-notch physical security, data protection and backup, and disaster recovery and emergency prevention.

For enhanced work with information, data rooms integrate dynamic watermarking, restricted document viewing, and other innovative tools to protect highly sensitive documents. For secure data room access, they offer single-sign-on (SSO) and two-factor authentication.

On top of that, top-tier data rooms conduct regular ISO audits, SOC 2 Type II reports, HIPAA, GDPR certifications, and other assurances combined. Obtaining these certifications is quite an expensive process. As a result, higher levels of protection involve enormous budget spending and typically translate into higher dataroom pricing.

However, one should never cut corners regarding security as a single data breach costs $9.4M and definitely exceeds any virtual data room costs.

Ease of Use

Data rooms that offer enhanced functionality, platform adaptability, and intuitive interfaces tend to have big expert teams.

They ensure that drag-and-drop functionality, optical character recognition text search, index numbering, and other tools work.

Project management

Project management and workflow capabilities go beyond the traditional functions of virtual data rooms. This is why leading VDR providers offer end-to-end M&A management capabilities.

Collaboration workflows, due diligence checklists, and project milestones allow for managing multiple deals simultaneously, but at the same time they affect data room pricing.

You should always consider the total cost of ownership. A seemingly expensive M&A deal room might cost you fewer dollars overall than a cheap alternative choking your deal with communication silos.

Analytics

Reporting is yet another software addition that allows the users of data rooms to make faster, informed decisions based on virtual data room activity.

Customizable interactive reports with color-coded document activity graphs and flexible export features also impact data room pricing structures.