Seven questions to ask a business formation data vendor

Buying formation data is easy. Buying formation data that your team actually works is harder, and most of the difference is decided before you sign anything.

Here are the questions worth asking any vendor, including us.

Where does the data come from?

There are only two honest answers: directly from state registries, or licensed from someone who does that. If a vendor is vague here, assume they’re reselling an aggregate feed with an unknown refresh cycle, which is where most stale data originates.

Ask which specific agency for a state you care about. Arizona‘s register sits with the Corporation Commission, not a Secretary of State. Maryland‘s is with the Department of Assessments and Taxation. Wisconsin‘s is with the Department of Financial Institutions. A vendor who says “the Secretary of State” for all fifty states hasn’t looked closely.

How fast, measured from what?

“Daily” can mean a file that arrives daily containing filings from last week. Ask for the lag between the state recording a filing and the record reaching you, and ask what happens when a registry goes down.

The reason to care is covered in the first two weeks after a company forms: the window where a new company has no incumbent supplier is measured in weeks, and a three-day lag eats a meaningful part of it.

What’s the contact match rate, and are blanks left blank?

Registries mostly don’t publish emails and phone numbers, so any contact detail has been appended. That’s fine and normal. What matters is whether the vendor will tell you the match rate, and whether they leave a field empty when they don’t have it.

Near-total contact coverage is a red flag, not a feature. It usually means pattern-guessed emails, which burn your sending domain.

What gets excluded?

This is the question almost nobody asks and it changes the value of the file more than any other. A feed that includes every filing includes a great many entities you cannot sell to — agent-formed shells, name reservations, out-of-state holding vehicles.

A vendor who excludes nothing will quote you a bigger number. See what that actually costs you, and why raw counts overstate the market.

Is the schema stable?

Ask whether column order is guaranteed and what notice you get before it changes. An import that breaks silently is worse than no import, and registries change their formats often enough that this comes up.

What does it cost to add a state, and to leave?

Per-state pricing lets you test one market before committing to a national contract. Annual contracts with bundled national coverage are the norm in this category, and they exist to make leaving expensive.

Ask what happens to data you’ve already received when you cancel — you should keep it — and whether adding a state mid-month is prorated. Ours is priced per state with a cap at the all-states price.

Can you see real records before paying?

A sample of ten curated rows tells you nothing. A live file for a state you know tells you everything, because you can check the addresses against businesses you recognise.

If you want to compare what different registries publish before choosing, this covers which states name members, and every state we cover has its own page from the coverage list.