How Much Is Business Data Worth?

Why there is no price list for data

Unlike commodities, datasets are rarely interchangeable. The same transaction history might be worth a great deal to one buyer and nothing to another, depending on what they are trying to build. Price is agreed in negotiation and reflects the intended use, the rights granted and the alternatives available to the buyer.

That is why MyDataPrice does not produce price estimates from a questionnaire. A credible figure can only emerge from real buyer interest.

The factors that drive value

• Historical depth: longer, continuous histories allow trends and seasonality to be studied.
• Coverage: breadth across products, regions, customers or time periods.
• Uniqueness: data that cannot be bought or scraped elsewhere is more valuable.
• Quality and structure: accurate, consistent, well-documented data needs less cleaning.
• Freshness and update frequency: ongoing feeds can support recurring licences.
• Commercial demand: whether buyers are actively looking for this kind of information.
• Licensing rights: clear rights increase value; uncertain rights can reduce it to zero.

What reduces value

• Personal or special-category data that cannot lawfully be shared
• Contractual restrictions from customers, suppliers or platforms
• Large gaps, inconsistent formats or undocumented fields
• Information that is already widely available from public or commercial sources

How data deals are typically priced

Common structures include a one-off fee for a historical archive, a recurring subscription for ongoing updates, usage-based fees, and revenue sharing where the buyer builds a product on top of the data. Exclusivity usually commands a higher fee than a non-exclusive licence.

An illustrative example

Consider two retailers. One has ten years of consistent daily prices and stock levels across a specialist product category. The other has three years of sales exports with changing formats. The first is likely to be more interesting to pricing-intelligence buyers, not because it is bigger, but because it is deeper, more consistent and harder to obtain elsewhere. (This example is illustrative, not based on a real transaction.)