Guide
Virtual data room pricing: one provider in five publishes
Updated
Virtual data room pricing is the least transparent corner of deal software, and the opacity is structural rather than accidental. Of five providers whose pricing pages we read on 15 August 2026, one publishes a rate. The other four quote privately, and they do not even quote in the same unit, which is what makes the quotes you collect impossible to line up.
Talk to a specialist Five providers, one published price, three different billing units and the peak usage convention that decides what a diligence spike really costs you.
The four units
A VDR quote is a rate times a unit, and the unit varies by provider. CapLinked charges a flat monthly rate, $399 for its Team plan with 5GB included. 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.
Historically this market also billed per page, which is why the phrase still appears in older comparisons, and why anybody quoting you should be asked directly whether page count enters the calculation.
Peak usage is the expensive convention
Ansarada publishes the mechanism even though it does not publish the rate, and the mechanism deserves attention: additional data is charged at peak usage for the billing period, for the remainder of your contracted term.
Read that carefully. Diligence is a spike. You load everything, the buyers work through it, and afterwards the room is mostly dormant. Under peak billing you pay the spike for the whole term, not the average. A room that touched 80GB for three weeks is an 80GB room until the contract ends.
That is not hidden and it is not unusual. It is simply the opposite of how buyers assume storage works, and it is worth modelling before you upload the full archive rather than a curated index.
What the free period is really for
Ansarada states the data room is completely free until the transaction is live, or 90 days after creation, whichever comes first. That is more useful than a 14 day trial for a sell-side process, because the expensive, slow part of a data room is building and indexing it, and that happens weeks before any buyer sees it.
CapLinked's 14 days is a product trial with 500MB of trial storage: enough to test the software, not enough to build a room. Both are reasonable, and they are answering different questions.
How to make private quotes comparable
Ask every provider for the same four numbers, and refuse a quote that omits them: the unit, the rate per unit, what is included before the rate applies, and the commitment length. Then normalise them yourself against your own expected peak data volume and deal count.
One lever exists that this market's opacity actually creates. CapLinked publishes a price match guarantee against a competing written quote. Where four of five providers quote privately and one publishes, the published one can be used to discipline the others, and the private ones can be used to discipline it.