United States. Virtual data rooms for M&A and due diligence
What does data room software actually cost?
This is the least transparent corner of deal software, and the opacity is structural rather than accidental. We read five providers' pricing pages on 15 August 2026 and exactly one published a rate. The other four quote privately, and they do not quote in the same unit: one bills data volume on peak usage, one bills the number of deals you run, and two publish no unit at all. That is why the quotes you collect cannot be lined up without work, and it is what this page exists to fix.
| Option | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CapLinked Anyone who wants to know the price before speaking to a salesperson | Yes, and it is the only provider here that does. Team is $399 a month. Enterprise starts at $500 a month or $5,000 a year. | A flat monthly rate, not pages and not gigabytes. Team includes 5GB of storage; Enterprise states flexible storage with no maximum. A flat rate is rarer in this market than it sounds and it is the reason this provider can publish at all. | Unlimited guest users on both plans. Team includes 1 workspace and 2 administrators, so the limit that bites is administrators and workspaces rather than the bidders you invite in. | No long term contract required on Team. Enterprise is a custom quote. | 14 days with full access to Team plan features, and 500MB of trial storage. | The 5GB ceiling on Team. A document-heavy diligence process will pass it, and the page does not publish what the overage costs, so ask before you start uploading rather than mid-deal. Enterprise also carries a price match guarantee against a competing written quote, which is worth using precisely because everyone else quotes privately. |
| Ansarada Deals with an uncertain start date, because the room is free until it is live | No. A quote builder offers a tailored VDR quote and no rates appear on the page. | Data volume. The page does not publish a rate but does publish the mechanism, and the mechanism is the thing to understand: overage is charged on PEAK usage for the billing period, for the remainder of your contracted term. | Not published. | A contracted term, and a strict one. Upgrades and downgrades are available only at the end of the contracted term, so you cannot shrink the room when diligence finishes. | Better than a trial for this use case. The data room is completely free until your transaction is live, or 90 days after it was created, whichever comes first. That lets you build and index the room before the clock starts. | Peak usage billing, which is the single most expensive convention in this market. Upload everything, get through diligence, delete half of it, and you still pay the peak for the rest of the term. Ask what the peak measurement window is and whether deleting data reduces the charge before the term ends. It usually does not. |
| DealRoom Corporate development teams running several deals a year rather than one exit | No. The page states the subscription scales with the number of deals you run and directs you to contact sales. | Deal volume, which is a genuinely different model from everyone else here and the right one for a serial acquirer. It also states no per-document charges, so you can upload freely. | Unlimited users included in the subscription. | An annual commitment. | None published. A free walkthrough is offered, which is a demo rather than a trial. | What counts as a deal, and what happens when you exceed the number you bought. Pricing by deal volume is only predictable if the definition is tight, and a process that stalls and restarts twelve months later may or may not be one deal. Get the definition and the overage in writing. |
| ShareVault Buyers who want a tier that matches deal complexity rather than data volume | No. Three tiers are named, Express for smaller deals or simple sharing, Pro for serious dealmakers and Enterprise for complex ongoing secure file sharing, each behind a Get Pricing button. | Not published. The tier names describe deal complexity rather than a metered unit, which tells you nothing about what moves the bill. | Not published. | Not published; no minimum term is stated either way. | A free trial is mentioned without a stated length. | Everything, because nothing is published. If this is on your shortlist, ask for the billing unit first and the number second: a quote you cannot decompose into a unit and a rate cannot be compared with any other quote you hold. |
| Brainloop Organisations buying board and deal rooms together as one governance platform | No pricing is disclosed on the page we read. | Not published. | Not published. | Not published. | A free trial is referenced. | Scope, more than price. It presents BoardRoom, MeetingSuite, DealRoom and CollaborationRoom as a family, so a quote may cover more than the deal room you came for. Ask for the deal room priced on its own, then decide whether the rest is worth the bundle. |
What virtual data room providers publish about price, 2026
Last updated
Buyers of this software routinely collect four quotes and find they cannot be compared, because the providers are not quoting for the same unit. This table records what each one states in public, so the shape of a quote can be predicted before it arrives.
Read from each provider's own pricing page on 15 August 2026, cited in full below. A cell states what the provider publishes; where it publishes nothing the cell says not published, which describes its page on that date rather than asserting a price or a policy does not exist. No figure here is derived, averaged or estimated, and none is taken from a third party review site, because the whole subject of this table is what providers themselves will state. Providers whose pricing pages did not return a readable response on that date, including Datasite, iDeals, Firmex and SecureDocs, are excluded rather than represented by an estimate, and that exclusion is a limit of the method.
| Provider | Price published | Billing unit | Users included | Commitment | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CapLinked | Yes, $399/mo Team | Flat monthly rate | Unlimited guest users | None on Team | 14 days |
| Ansarada | No | Data volume, billed on PEAK usage | not published | Contracted term, changes only at end | Free until live or 90 days |
| DealRoom | No | Number of deals run | Unlimited | Annual commitment | None; demo only |
| ShareVault | No | not published | not published | not published | Mentioned, length unstated |
| Brainloop | No | not published | not published | not published | Referenced |
- Only one of five virtual data room providers compared publishes a rate: CapLinked, at $399 a month for its Team plan.
- The five bill for at least three different units, flat rate, data volume and deal count, with two publishing no unit at all.
- Data overage at one provider is charged on PEAK usage for the billing period, for the remainder of the contracted term, not on average usage.
- Both providers that publish a user policy include unlimited users; the published limits fall on administrators and workspaces instead.
- One provider makes the room free until the transaction goes live or 90 days after creation, which covers the build and index phase rather than testing the product.
Cite this page
“What virtual data room providers publish about price, 2026”, Data Room Picker, https://dataroompicker.com/ (updated 2026-08-15). Read from each provider's own pricing page on 15 August 2026, cited in full below. A cell states what the provider publishes; where it publishes nothing the cell says not published, which describes its page on that date rather than asserting a price or a policy does not exist. No figure here is derived, averaged or estimated, and none is taken from a third party review site, because the whole subject of this table is what providers themselves will state. Providers whose pricing pages did not return a readable response on that date, including Datasite, iDeals, Firmex and SecureDocs, are excluded rather than represented by an estimate, and that exclusion is a limit of the method.
Want comparable quotes, in the same units?
Tell us the shape of the deal and roughly how much data the room will hold at its peak. We will ask providers for the unit and the rate, which is what makes quotes comparable.
How we chose these, and how they are ordered
Five virtual data room providers whose pricing pages returned a readable response when we checked on 15 August 2026. Every figure is copied from the provider's own pricing page; nothing comes from a review site, a listicle or a reseller.
Order runs by how much of its commercial model a provider will state in public: the one publishing rates first, then those publishing a billing mechanism without a rate, then those publishing neither. That is a ranking of disclosure, which is checkable, not of security or product quality, which are not observable from outside.
Several providers are absent because their pricing pages did not serve us a readable response on that date, among them Datasite, iDeals, Firmex and SecureDocs. They are significant in this market and their absence is a limit of our method, not a judgement; a shortlist should include them and ask them the same four questions.
Where a provider publishes nothing, the cell says not published. In this category that phrase carries information rather than being a gap: a market where four of five decline to publish is telling you something about how it prefers to sell.
- CapLinked CapLinked, pricing
- Ansarada Ansarada, pricing
- DealRoom DealRoom, pricing
- ShareVault ShareVault, pricing
- Brainloop Brainloop, pricing
Data Room Picker is an independent site operated by Ellul Solutions Ltd. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any data room provider named here, and nothing on it is legal, security or contractual advice. We take no commission from any provider in this comparison and carry no paid placements. Prices, billing units and terms change without notice: every figure carries the date we read it on the provider's own page, and in a market where four of five providers decline to publish a rate at all, the figure that decides your bill will come from a quote rather than from any comparison, including this one.
Questions, answered directly
How much does data room software cost?
Almost nobody publishes it. Of five providers whose pricing pages we read on 15 August 2026, only CapLinked published rates: $399 a month for its Team plan including 5GB of storage, and Enterprise starting at $500 a month or $5,000 a year. Ansarada, DealRoom, ShareVault and Brainloop all quote privately. That opacity is the single most important fact about buying in this category, because it means the quotes you collect will not be comparable without work.
What are you actually billed for in a virtual data room?
It depends on the provider and the units are not interchangeable. CapLinked charges a flat monthly rate. Ansarada charges by data volume. DealRoom charges by the number of deals you run and states no per-document charges. ShareVault and Brainloop publish no unit at all. Older comparisons also mention per page pricing, which is why any quote should be decomposed into a unit and a rate before it is compared with another.
What is peak usage billing and why does it matter?
Ansarada publishes that additional data is charged at peak usage for the billing period, for the remainder of the contracted term. Diligence is a spike: you load everything, buyers work through it, then the room goes quiet. Under peak billing you pay for the spike across the whole term rather than for your average. A room that briefly held 80GB is an 80GB room until the contract ends, so it is worth modelling before uploading a full archive.
Do virtual data rooms charge per user?
The published ones mostly do not. CapLinked includes unlimited guest users on both its plans, and DealRoom includes unlimited users in its subscription. What CapLinked does limit on Team is your own side: 1 workspace and 2 administrators. So the constraint is usually administrators and workspaces rather than the number of bidders you invite, which is the opposite of what most buyers expect.
Is there a free trial for data room software?
Yes, and two different shapes of it. CapLinked offers 14 days with full access to Team features and 500MB of trial storage, which tests the product. Ansarada offers something more useful for a sell-side process: the room is completely free until your transaction is live, or 90 days after creation, whichever comes first, which covers the slow work of building and indexing before the clock starts. DealRoom offers a walkthrough rather than a trial.
Which data room is best for M&A due diligence?
It depends whether you are running one exit or a deal programme, and that question picks the billing model. DealRoom prices by deal volume on an annual commitment, which suits a corporate development team acquiring several times a year and is poor value for a single sale. CapLinked's flat $399 a month with no long term contract on Team suits a one-off process. An annual commitment bought for an exit that closes in four months is eight months of paying for nothing.
How do I compare quotes when nobody publishes prices?
Ask every provider for the same four things and refuse any quote that omits them: the billing unit, the rate per unit, what is included before that rate applies, and the commitment length. Then normalise against your own expected peak data volume and deal count. One lever exists because of the opacity: CapLinked publishes a price match guarantee against a competing written quote, so the one published price in the market can be used to discipline the private ones.
Sources
Get the unit before you get the number
Five providers, one published price, three different billing units and the peak usage convention that decides what a diligence spike really costs you.